Rocked by the deaths of its founders and namesakes, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation set out to rebuild its brand and infrastructure — and a renewed, more empowered organization emerged.
“We created a way to engage our various constituencies by asking them how they felt about [Reeve’s death], asking them to create sort of their own memorial comments and memorial spaces on our Web site and to continue to support the foundation,” Wilderotter says.
This outpouring of love, affection and support for the work that Reeve set out to accomplish fueled the staff and the board it had begun putting in place, building faith that the foundation was going to continue on. But it also was a time of some real organizational soul-searching, resulting in, among other things, a realization that it had perhaps relied too heavily on Reeve all those years.
Going Forward
“We created a way to engage our various constituencies by asking them how they felt about [Reeve’s death], asking them to create sort of their own memorial comments and memorial spaces on our Web site and to continue to support the foundation,” Wilderotter says.
This outpouring of love, affection and support for the work that Reeve set out to accomplish fueled the staff and the board it had begun putting in place, building faith that the foundation was going to continue on. But it also was a time of some real organizational soul-searching, resulting in, among other things, a realization that it had perhaps relied too heavily on Reeve all those years.