Organizers and officials say there’s a need to make sure they don’t let competition and misalignment cloud the road to achieving those goals.

Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski said it can be easy to get bogged down in the research phase of what must be done in a community.

“In my professional life, I’ve seen where research, researchers and academics can get so engrained in study, the ethereal and the theoretical,” he said. “Research can lose sight of the practical day-to-day needs, so it’s my hope we can balance research and being data-driven with actual needs day-to-day.”

He said, just like a municipal government, it’s necessary to make sure that nonprofits aren’t jockeying against each other for resources.

“We have a pretty dang good understanding of what the needs are because of this past research,” he said. “We’ve got a really good understanding of who does what and who doesn’t do it. Where we struggle is misalignment where we have a limited amount of time, energy and resources and we’re not targeted enough on these things. … A lot of people will focus on government and where we’re spending our resources. We need to be looking at the nonprofit community and saying ‘Where are they spending their resources and where can we eliminate waste, redundancy, competition for limited resources?'”

Julie Johnson, president and CEO of United Way of Northern Utah, said sometimes there’s a need for a mindset shift.

“Typically in the nonprofit world, there’s this scarcity mindset of, ‘We’re competing for the same dollars,'” she said. “When you can move past that to that outward mindset thinking of, ‘We are all meeting these needs together.’ … That really helps to be able to direct the work that we’re doing and we’ll also have better outcomes.”

She used an example of a meeting she attended featuring multiple nonprofits.

“The facilitator was talking about the need for preschool,” she said. “There were several partners in the room that offered preschool, and the conversation got a little competitive, ‘You can’t go in that school. That’s the school we’ve always been in. We’ve always done that.'”

Johnson said the facilitator then took the time to map out how much of a need for preschool services there was within the Ogden School District-served community versus how many spots were available through the present organizations that offered preschool.

“He writes the numbers down, tallies it, and we’re still in the hole — we’re not serving every preschool child,” she said. “So he said, ‘Until we are serving every child with preschool, we’re not going have this competition conversation.’ It was an eyeopener for everyone around the table to say, ‘Oh, we are all wanting the same outcome and we’re not competing with each other, we need to be working together.'”

Johnson said throwing off the scarcity mindset helps move nonprofits towards achieving their goals.

“When you can bring a group together to get to that point, that really helps to be able to direct the work that we’re doing, and also have better outcomes,” she said. “When you leave that scarcity mindset and that tunnel vision of, ‘This is my work,’ then you’re also open to sharing that data and sharing the outcomes in a way that helps to identify, ‘Where are the gaps still? What are we still not doing and missing?”

She added that United Way of Northern Utah also does its share to help make sure many of the nearly 1,100 nonproftis active in Weber County are on the same page.

“We have a program called the Nonprofit Connection where we truly help to build the capacity and the capability of nonprofits so that they can better live out their missions recognizing there’s no one nonprofit that can do it all,” she said. “If we can increase the capacity and the ability for all of the nonprofits in our community to function at a higher level, then our community’s better off because of that.”