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...
Sustaining Evaluation Starts With Culture and Leadership
In our last post, we reflected on the importance of evaluation to ensuring an organization’s overall sustainability. Our question was: what can organizations do to build and sustain their evaluation capacity?
This question has been the focus of our recent work with the Connecticut Association for Housing Services (CAHS) and CASA de Maryland (CASA), two organizations that had come to recognize that evaluation capacity was about more than collecting some good data.
As Mario Morino, author of Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity, recently noted at an Urban Institute symposium, “[managing to outcomes] is about… the people and strong leadership who have the culture and desire to collect and use information as the basis for continually improving what you are doing.” Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sustain Your Evaluation Capacity, Sustain Your Impact
This is the first in a three part series of posts that will explore the key ingredients for sustaining an organization’s evaluation capacity.
As a part of our work studying transformational initiatives, we recently had an opportunity to speak with Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), about his organization’s efforts to break the cycle of poverty in Harlem.
We were eager to learn how HCZ has managed to adapt, grow, and ultimately sustain its programs over the long term. There have undoubtedly been many keys to HCZ’s success, but Geoffrey was quick to stress one factor: Using data to drive impact is critical to achieving HCZ’s short-term and long-term goals. 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...
Why We’ll be Thinking of our Clients this Thanksgiving
Later this week, as I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I will do so with a new perspective on the things I have for which I'm grateful. That’s because I recently had the opportunity to work with the inspiring folks at Miriam’s Kitchen.
Miriam’s Kitchen has been serving homeless men and women in Washington D.C. since 1983, but recently recast its work by putting forth a bold new vision for the organization: ending chronic homelessness in Washington, D.C. This type of compelling articulation of how the world will look different is one of the common elements we have uncovered in our research on social transformation. 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.
5 Factors of Sustainability: This isn’t your grandmother’s sustainability framework.
Across the board, nonprofit organizations are on a quest for sustainability. Despite the growing interest in the topic, confusion often exists as to what sustainability for a nonprofit organization entails. For many people sustainability means one thing and one thing only: financial health.
And we can understand why, especially in this economy.
But at CWV we believe that an organization’s financial health is just one piece of its sustainability quotient. One of five, actually. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
How do you set that big, bold, but achievable goal for your organization?
In 2006, Ray Chambers, currently UN Special Envoy for Malaria, founded the nonprofit organization Malaria No More with the hope of ending a disease that had scourged the planet since the times of King Tut. Given the advent of several promising technologies as well as the unsynchronized state of the anti-malaria movement at the time, Ray saw a tremendous opportunity to make massive progress in combating the disease once and for all.
But his question was, exactly what kind of progress could be made, and what end result could an emerging nonprofit drive toward? Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
How one campaign turned $300k into a social movement and saved thousands of lives
With a team of three people and about $300k/year, Dr. Jay Winsten and the Harvard Alcohol Project dramatically reduced the number of alcohol-related fatalities across the United States. We recently spoke with Dr. Winsten as part of our continuing exploration of solutions that were built to match the scale of social problems.
The Harvard Alcohol Project team led a campaign, from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, which introduced America to a new social norm: “designated drivers.” Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
All politics may be local. All social impact is personal.
As Amy noted in her recent blog post, the Community Wealth Ventures team has begun to study transformational efforts in the social sector. Over the next few months, we will be interviewing leaders who have not only had the courage to set bold goals to end social problems, but have made substantive strides in achieving those goals.
We recently spoke with Christine Benero, CEO of Mile High United Way, who gave us a glimpse into Denver’s Road Home (DRH), a city-wide plan to end homelessness in Denver. We learned from Christine that rallying the masses was and continues to be a critical component of their success in ending homelessness. 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.