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...
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...
Finding Courage in Nonprofit Leadership: Center for Families and Children
Every single day the CWV staff is inspired by the courage of our clients. The CWV team strives to help nonprofit and foundation leaders make decisions that are logical, strategic and based in data, but building solutions to solve social problems is not an exact science. Consequently, the most successful social sector leaders are able to take confident steps forward within a forest of ambiguity. And that takes courage.
Earlier this month I explored the courage of Cuyahoga Valley National Park Association (CVNPA). Today, I want to share the story of the Center for Families and Children, a large provider of quality family services throughout the Cleveland area with a budget of about $34M. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Finding Courage in Nonprofit Leadership: CVNPA
Much of the work we do in the social sector takes immense courage. We have to make critical decisions in an environment of ambiguity, overcoming our natural fear of the unknown. The weight of making the wrong decision – failing those who need our support the most, being wrong about our theory of change, choosing program A over program B when there is no data to support the choice – can be paralyzing for leaders of nonprofits and foundations.
Earlier this year, I explored the courage of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in sticking to bold ambitions. And, recently, the stories of two past clients stuck out to me reinforcing this idea of courage playing an important role in the DNA of successful social sector leaders.
The Conversations that will Transform Our World
Over the past few weeks I have had a number of powerful conversations with CEOs of former client organizations, all of whom have echoed the same sentiment: our environment has been forever changed as a result of the economic downturn. This changed world has huge implications for our clients and their ability to garner resources, to engage critical stakeholders, and to create the change they want to see in the world.
The CEO of one nonprofit told me, for example, how increasingly hard it has been over the last couple of years to get the same mindshare from her board members. Her hypothesis is that they are all overwhelmed and being asked to do more with less in their own jobs.
So what does this mean? Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
How do you create solutions that can match the scale of social problems?
Billy’s recent blog series on Share Our Strength’s exponential growth highlights 11 key ingredients that can be applied to any organization looking to solve a social problem.
Like Share Our Strength, many social sector organizations have effective solutions to the problems that challenge communities. What they don’t always have are the strategies and resources needed to scale and sustain these solutions to address the problems at the magnitude at which they exist.
For more than a decade, we have been partnering with change agents to think differently about how to scale and sustain solutions to the most pressing problems. Collectively, we have learned a tremendous amount.
And we are now embarking on a journey to take our inquiry a step further. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Going the Last Mile Takes Courage!
Thanks to the many of you who submitted examples of efforts that have eradicated a social problem or gotten close in response to our recent blog post, Eradicating a Social Problem – Who’s Actually Done It?
As we, at Community Wealth Ventures, have begun to study these transformational efforts, we are finding more and more compelling examples to support what Bill Shore articulated in his post about the exponential growth of Share Our Strength, Sharing Our Growth: Go Big or Go Home. That is the following:
- To achieve transformation, you have to set transformational goals. If you set incremental goals, your achievements will be incremental.
- Setting transformational goals, which often implies that you will travel the last mile on the journey to solve a problem, takes courage!
Here is one of those very compelling examples. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Eradicating A Social Problem – Who’s Actually Done It?
WE NEED EXAMPLES! And we need your help in finding them. Do you know of any efforts that have successfully eradicated a social problem? (Or got close?)
As many of you know, Share Our Strength, our parent organization, is on a quest to end. childhood hunger in the United States. by 2015. That is right. Their goal is not to alleviate or reduce it but eradicate it once and for all. A number of other efforts have set similar goals: Malaria No More plans to end. malaria deaths in Africa. by 2015. Denver’s Road Home will end. homelessness in Denver. by 2015.
Seeing a number of initiatives set these compelling, ambitious goals has led us, at Community Wealth Ventures, to try to understand what it takes to achieve this kind of transformation. What is required to truly eradicate a social problem—or at least come close—in a community, a country, or our world? Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Alignment: Tough Questions that Drive Impact
Alignment (noun): The proper adjustment of the components for coordinated functioning.
In his recent post, Bill Shore urges nonprofit leaders to not overlook the importance of ensuring that everyone in the organization understands the organization’s strategy in the same way. Getting your staff on the same page is one critical piece of the larger “alignment puzzle.” But there are a whole host of other dimensions to consider.
Our research and work with clients have unearthed a number of questions organizations can ask themselves to test their alignment both inside the organization and with key external stakeholders. Here are three of the most important:
- Does your spending match your priorities? Are you putting your money where your mouth is? If you say building partnerships to combat homelessness is your number one priority, then a detailed analysis of the organization’s spending should clearly show that the majority of resources have been allocated to staff, systems, etc. to build critical partnerships. The results of this analysis can be powerful and eye-opening.
- Does your funding support your core strategy? Do you and your funders have a common understanding of your organization's core purpose? Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
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.