Towne Group Management Case Study: The Horizon Foundation

Since 2004, Towne Group Management has spearheaded many projects for the Horizon Foundation (www.thehorizonfoundation.org).  In one early instance, known as the Safety Net Leadership Initiative, our team worked with the foundation’s senior staff to establish a replicable template that non-profit organizations could use in predicting their resiliency in the event of budget reductions. Subsequently Towne Group Management led a multi-agency survey of volunteer programs, an effort that supported Howard County’s Community Emergency Response Network (CERN). A key focus of our research in this project centered on assessing the degree of local volunteer support for individual members of the network--specifically the county’s Health Department, its Department of Citizen Services, its Police and Fire and Rescue Services, the local chapter of the American Red Cross, the Volunteer Center that serves the county, and the Columbia Association (the local homeowners’ organization).

As part of this initiative, Towne Group Management assessed the current organizational health of the county’s volunteer programs, and recommended approaches for strengthen individual programs as appropriate. We shared our findings at several meetings of the Community Response Network and later presented our conclusions and recommendations at a regional conference on Pandemic Preparedness.

Among other notable efforts for the foundation was a telephone and print survey of Howard County physicians. Our objective was to discover helpful information about patient volumes and relative capacities of individual physician practices, as well as the range of insurance coverages they accepted. Our findings supported the foundation’s initiative to assemble a comprehensive county-wide picture of the availability of medical services and access to them.