The Alliance’s RDS program has been in existence for more than a decade. Begun in 1998 with a planning grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the RDI program (or “Resource Development Initiative,” as it was called at the time) was organized by a volunteer committee of agency CEOs and fundraising staff plus professionals from the development field who recognized and understood the need for nonprofit child- and family-serving agencies to become more sophisticated in their fund development efforts.

Driven by a vision of building the development capacities of member agencies, this group of leaders constructed a core group of services in 1999 that continues to this day. One early success of the committee was the development of the Fund Development Training Series, a comprehensive manual of seven training modules designed for either self-study or workshop presentation. The series remains at the heart of the RDS program.

Guided by Robert Jones, Ph.D., president of Children’s Aid and Family Services and the Chair of RDS since 1999, the RDS Committee remains passionately committed to promoting the message that philanthropy—the soul of fundraising—is quite simply and elegantly defined as “personal and financial acts of kindness that touch another life.”

With that as its mantra, RDS continues its mission to advance the capacities of members to foster philanthropy by focusing on the dissemination and sharing of knowledge. Its knowledge-based work is evidenced through the delivery of teleseminars and webinars on a variety of fundraising topics, hosting of the annual Resource Development Services Conference, identification and publication of grant opportunities, personal mentoring of member agency management and staff, publication of a column on resource development in the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine, and, in partnership with the Severson Center, the collection and promotion of both published and membership-generated materials on resource development.

Still coordinated by a volunteer committee of agency CEOs and development professionals who are actively involved in the planning and delivery of its services, RDS also monitors the Alliance’s Development Listserv and oversees the content published on its website.

This website contains much of the knowledge generated by RDS over the years and provides links to other information available off the site. We trust you’ll find the content here valuable to your work, and we hope you’ll come back frequently to explore and access new information that we post about resource development opportunities and challenges facing all of us in the nonprofit human services sector.

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