When GreenLight Fund Charlotte sought to identify its next strategic investment, the organization partnered with Next Stage to conduct a comprehensive, community voice-driven needs assessment to surface insights directly from residents.
By combining rigorous quantitative and qualitative methodologies with human-centered design tools, Next Stage helped GreenLight Charlotte ensure that its investment decisions would be grounded in community-identified needs. The engagement demonstrates the power of primary research and the unique role that community voice plays in effective philanthropic strategy.
Matching Greatest Need with Greatest Opportunity
GreenLight Fund is a national nonprofit network dedicated to matching local communities’ unmet needs with evidence-based social innovations. The organization, which expanded into Charlotte in 2017, employs a distinctive five-step, community-centered process designed to connect the barriers to prosperity that local individuals and families identify with proven organizations that have successfully addressed those challenges elsewhere in the country.
“It was a big deal when the GreenLight Fund first arrived in Charlotte,” Next Stage CEO Josh Jacobson said. “The metro’s rapid growth over the last couple of decades means needs have often outpaced organizational resources, and GreenLight Fund offers a structured methodology for filling in those gaps.”
Recognizing the Power of Primary Research
When GreenLight Fund Charlotte (GreenLight Charlotte) began planning for its next investment cycle in early 2025, the organization recognized an opportunity to leverage community voice to deepen its discovery process. While GreenLight Fund’s model has always been community-centered, the Charlotte site wanted to ensure its needs assessment was built on a foundation of robust primary data — information gathered directly from community members themselves — to capture current perspectives, uncover nuances, and ensure findings reflect the specific moment and community context.
For GreenLight Charlotte, primary data would provide the fresh, community-specific insights needed to support a truly responsive needs assessment. The organization turned to Next Stage to design and execute this critical research process.
Building a Community Voice-Driven Research Design
Next Stage’s approach created multiple pathways for community participation. Recognizing that different residents engage through different channels, the firm designed a multimethod research strategy centered on two complementary approaches: a community pulse survey and in-depth focus groups. This combination allowed Next Stage to gather both breadth (through quantitative survey data) and depth (through qualitative conversation and storytelling).
This intentional design — offering people different ways to engage based on their preferences and circumstances — ensured that the research would reflect a broad spectrum of community voice.
Moving From Data to Insight
The research process culminated in July 2025 with the release of the Community Research Report. This comprehensive document presented a combination of quantitative and qualitative findings, thoughtful analysis, and a set of recommendations for further exploration.
The report represented more than a summary of survey responses and focus group themes. Next Stage synthesized the data to identify patterns, surface tensions, and illuminate connections between different community needs. The analysis highlighted what community members identified as barriers as well as the underlying dynamics that create and perpetuate those barriers.
Importantly, Next Stage’s recommendations pointed toward actionable next steps. Rather than prescribing specific solutions, the research-informed recommendations outlined areas for deeper investigation and potential investment, maintaining GreenLight Charlotte’s commitment to matching community-identified needs with evidence-based interventions.
“This was a great opportunity for us to bring our approach to community voice forward to support the well-structured GreenLight Charlotte discovery process,” Josh said. “While we traditionally lead planning efforts that build upon assessment findings, GreenLight Charlotte has a strong model of taking these findings and utilizing their national database to source solutions.”
Leveraging Unique Data as a Convening Tool
With the Community Research Report complete, Next Stage and GreenLight Charlotte recognized that the data gathered could serve as a powerful convening tool. The insights from Charlotte residents represented a shared foundation for community conversation — a common understanding of challenges and opportunities that could bring diverse stakeholders together.
In July 2025, GreenLight Charlotte hosted a luncheon bringing together a cross-section of community leaders, including representatives from service providers and institutional funders. Next Stage designed and facilitated this convening with three core purposes in mind.
- Continuing Data Gathering Through Feedback. The session provided an opportunity for community leaders to reflect on the Community Research Report’s findings. Participants were asked to share reactions to the analysis and recommendations, ensuring the final report reflected diverse perspectives.
- Deepening Understanding of Local Conditions. Next Stage facilitated hands-on exercises designed to surface additional information. Using human-centered design tools, including dotmocracy — a participatory method where participants use dot stickers to indicate priorities or preferences — the firm helped attendees react to data, identify patterns, and generate new insights.
- Cultivating Aligned Investment. The luncheon also served as a cultivation opportunity for GreenLight Charlotte. By bringing institutional funders and service providers together around shared data and community voice, the convening helped build alignment and investment readiness for GreenLight’s next phase of impact.
What distinguished Next Stage’s approach throughout the engagement was the commitment to co-design — working alongside community leaders and stakeholders to interpret data and develop recommendations. This collaborative process ensured that GreenLight Charlotte’s investment decisions would authentically reflect what the community collectively understood about its own needs and opportunities.
Designing a Replicable Model for Community-Informed Philanthropy
GreenLight Charlotte’s partnership with Next Stage represents a replicable model for how philanthropic organizations can approach needs assessment. By engaging a third-party firm with expertise in community-informed research, GreenLight Charlotte was able to conduct comprehensive primary research without overextending internal resources.
As GreenLight Charlotte moves forward with selecting its next investment, it does so with a foundation of community voice-driven data, positioning the organization to make investments that truly serve the priorities and experiences of Charlotte residents.
For more information about Next Stage’s research and analysis services and how they can support your organization, contact us today.
