City Year Strikes the Right Balance Between Bold & Believable as it Launches New Strategy to Reverse the Urban Dropout Crisis
How am I feeling? “Fired up,” in the words of the City Year corps members. I just returned from the opening session at City Year’s National Leadership Summit, where it unveiled its 10-year strategy to build the nation’s urban graduation pipeline.
The statistics are abysmal when it comes to the urban dropout crisis. Every 26 seconds, a student gives up on attending high school in our country. Approximately 1.2 million students are dropping out every year, and half of these dropouts come from 12 percent of our schools. The cost of these dropouts to the nation over the next decade is estimated at $3 trillion. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan shared, this is the “civil rights issue of our generation.” Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Your Survival is on the Line. Now What?
Last week’s keynote speech on “Investing In Leaders Who Stop at Nothing in Pursuit of Greater Social Impact”, by Leap Of Reason author Mario Morino at the City Club in Cleveland, should have been a wake-up call to nonprofit and philanthropic leaders. If they take to heart Morino’s warning that “your survival is on the line”, they must ask themselves the following questions:
- What steps are you taking to build an organizational culture centered on performance and what metrics will you use?
- What investments are you making to diversify revenues in preparation for the inevitability of drastic cuts in government funding and increased competition for philanthropic grants?
- How have you prioritized talent and leadership and how is this reflected in way you budget finances and your time?
- Is your hard work leading to incremental progress or transformational change?
These are exactly the key questions we grapple with at Community Wealth Ventures. Learn more about our work at http://www.communitywealth.com/
Morino’s speech can be found at http://www.vppartners.org/sites/default/files/cityclubspeech_web_0424.pdf
“Our survival is on the line.” – Mario Morino’s Cleveland Keynote
Whether it was sold out weeks in advance due to civic pride and respect for a successful son of Cleveland, or because nonprofits are desperate to find ways to do their work more powerfully, the City Club in Cleveland was packed on Friday for Mario Morino’s speech titled “RELENTLESS: Investing in Leaders Who Stop at Nothing in Pursuit of Greater Social Impact”. It can be read at http://www.vppartners.org/sites/default/files/cityclubspeech_web_0424.pdf
Summarizing the main points from his book, Leap of Reason, Morino challenged the nonprofit community “to take a hard look in the mirror” and focus on performance. He cited the need for nonprofits to respond to continued and even deeper constraints in funding, the need for building high performing institutions and a performance culture, and the need to leverage a network of community support for nonprofit leaders.
“The whole system sets up nonprofits for struggle and starvation, not for solving social challenges” Mario asserted. As a result their work is “incremental, month-to-month, hand-to-mouth.” Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Why Are There So Many Mediocre Nonprofits?
There are some excellent nonprofits out there. People who are using innovative, groundbreaking strategies to create long-lasting social change. Organizations that are market-directed and make data-driven strategic decisions. CWV has worked with some of these organizations that are creating transformational change, including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Miriam’s Kitchen, Share Our Strength, and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. They, and others in the sector, are demonstrating that there really are proven solutions to social problems like hunger, homelessness, and illiteracy.
So then why are there still so many mediocre nonprofits out there? Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
The Role of Data: Using Information to Enlighten Decisions and Create Culture
New York City in the late 1980’s was a city plagued by crime and engulfed in a culture of rampant corruption. The subway was considered incredibly dangerous, and petty crime had a strangle-hold on the streets. To put it bluntly, it was a not safe place. But over the course of several years and under new direction from the police chief and mayor, the city began to see a positive change. Looking back, people are struck by the reduction of crime that occurred during the 1990’s and what caused it. This dramatic improvement captured our attention as well, and so, in an interview with former New York City Police Chief, Bill Bratton, we asked his opinion on why and how this social transformation happened.
Changing the Conversation
As Amy Celep noted in an earlier post, “changing the conversation” can be a powerful tool toward creating the change we want to see in the world.
I was reminded of the validity of Amy’s claim during a recent lunch meeting with Jim Down, a wonderful strategic thinker who led Mercer Management Consulting until retiring at age 50. Since then he has played a critical role in the nonprofit sector, advising organizations ranging from OxFam to the Centers for Disease Control. Jim is on the board of OxFam and I asked him what he thought their most impressive accomplishment was so far. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Dear Social Sector: Did you hear the President call us to action?
In the words spoken and unspoken during President Obama’s State of the Union address, I heard three strong calls to action for the social sector.
1. Put our differences aside in pursuit of the mission.
In his speech, President Obama pointed to the military’s ability to put aside differences and focus on the mission. On many military missions, it’s life or death for those involved. For much of our work in the social sector it’s life or death, too. While there are some bright spots of organizations coming together in pursuit of a common agenda, we still have a long way to go.
The call to action for all of us, social sector or not, is to do the hard, personal work that brings our individual, unconscious biases and fears into consciousness so we can move beyond them and join with others to accomplish our missions. As I explored in my post earlier this week, those who have successfully created big, transformative social change have been skilled at finding common ground among unlikely partners. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Seeing and Seeking Common Ground in the New Year
As I reflect upon my recent trip to Turkey, where I celebrated the New Year with family, I'm reminded that, at the most basic level, we are all the same. In so many ways, Turkey is a country marked by stark contrasts. The most visible manifestation of this is the dress of the women: everywhere you go you can find Muslim women fully covered from head to toe sitting side-by-side with Turkish women wearing miniskirts. Yet, as you interact with these women, you find they fundamentally want the same things for themselves and their families: health, happiness, safety, and love. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Five Failures Causing Nonprofit Staff to Flee
“Four out of five employees of charitable organizations are eager to leave their jobs and are actively seeking new positions.”
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which conducted the survey revealing this troubling statistic, attributes this job dissatisfaction to strains caused by the economic downturn.
While those pressures are real and surely play a role, our experience working with hundreds of nonprofits since founding Community Wealth Ventures is that much of what can be debilitating about working for a nonprofit comes from self-inflicted organizational wounds, summarized by these Five Failures:
- Failure to diversify revenues.
- Failure to be accountable to specific goals that can be measured by stakeholders.
- Failure to pay talent what it is worth.
- Failure to invest in management training and staff development.
- Failure to look beyond short term gains in favor of investments that may not pay off until the long-term.
New Year’s Resolutions: Our hopes for the social sector in 2012
Coming off of a restful and happy holiday season, the CWV team has spent the last few days contemplating what lies ahead in 2012. Inspired by the resolutions of other nonprofit leaders, such as those in a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy article, we decided to put together our own New Year’s resolutions for the social sector in 2012. Overall these resolutions represent our hopes for a social sector that is more outcomes-oriented, collaborative, innovative and opportunistic.
2012 Resolutions for the Social Sector:
- Funders make decisions based on outcomes over relationships.
- Nonprofits increasingly consolidate and partner with each other to achieve greater community outcomes.
- Organizations value community-wide impact more than their individual outputs.
- Leaders set time aside to stop to think about their long-term goals, and consider how their daily actions contribute to those goals.
- Nonprofits take more control of their financial future and think boldly about new revenue streams such as earned income.
- The social sector achieves greater integration with the public and private sector, which leads to better sharing of capital, skills, and understanding of community needs.
We are excited about the possibilities for 2012 and our team is eager to do its part to make these resolutions a reality.
What are your resolutions for the social sector this year?
Community Wealth Ventures (CWV) is a management consulting firm that emboldens and equips leadership teams to innovate, grow and sustain organizations that build a better world.
CWV offers strategy and implementation services to nonprofit organizations and philanthropic foundations, partnering with them to design and implement innovative approaches to growth and sustainability. CWV supports nonprofit sustainability through a variety of strategies, with core expertise in
social franchising and social enterprise. CWV’s collaborative approach to consulting focuses on equipping leadership teams with the skills they need to execute the strategy.
CWV is a wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary of Share Our Strength, one of the Nation's leading anti-hunger and anti-poverty organizations.