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...
11 Key Ingredients for Exponential Growth & Transformational Social Change
Share Our Strength has been on an incredible journey of growth over the past few years. From 2008 to 2011, we’ve gone from being a $13-million organization to a $34-million organization. In the past year or so, we’ve more than doubled our staff size from 65 to 140.
But we have not grown for the joy of feeling bigger and more powerful. We have grown because we were determined to confront a social problem on the scale that it exists. We pledged to end childhood hunger in America by 2015. And we could not keep our pledge without growing.
This is the last in a series of posts that have attempted to tease out key ingredients from this exponential growth. Each of these posts has examined one of 11 key ingredients, each of which builds on the others and none of which would have brought successful growth in isolation.
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...
Sharing Our Growth: The Initial Leap of Imagination
This is the second in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
Why did we decide to change?
Because good is not good enough.
For a long time everyone was satisfied with the seeming success of Share Our Strength. We distributed hundreds of grants a year, asked little for little in return and were very popular as a result.
But those of us leading the organization were not satisfied. We knew what we were doing was good, but also sensed it wasn’t good enough.
We were suffering from a failure of imagination.
And imagination is a vital instrument of leadership. For centuries writers, philosophers, visionaries, businessmen, and changemakers have acknowledged the importance of imagination. As far back as the 1500s, Frenchman Michel De Montaigne wrote on the “force of imagination,” declaring “fortis imagination generat casum” (“a powerful imagination generates the event”). Imagination makes it possible to envision and create a world which does not yet exist but is within our grasp: Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sharing Our Growth: A Look Back at Getting Unstuck
From 2004 to 2008, Share Our Strength was stuck. Our revenues hovered around $13 million annually. We were a classic case of the nonprofit whose growth had reached a plateau.
Like many nonprofits we face the task of solving the toughest problems of all: those that affect people so vulnerable and voiceless that there are no markets – no economic markets or political markets – available or dedicated to solving them. Nonprofits exist to bridge that gap – to step in as a response to market failures. When those markets fail, we are first responders.
Even leaving the hardships of the recent economic downturn aside, there is a challenging natural trajectory for many organizations – whether traditional or social entrepreneur – characterized, after a few years of initial growth, by reaching a plateau from which it is hard to break free.
Share Our Strength was stuck in just such a spot in the early part of last decade.
Then we sharpened our strategy and made investments in capacity – including a few we could not afford – and we are now enjoying accelerated growth. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
How Could Government Funding Cuts Build a Stronger Social Sector?
In his recent post calling for nonprofits to “get off the sidelines and into the game,” Share Our Strength’s Billy Shore issues a rallying cry. He suggests that the nonprofit and philanthropic community use the imminent federal budget cuts as a call to action for our sector to find greater financial sustainability. He argues that “the lives of too many Americans are so dependent on the health of the nonprofit sector that we can no longer allow budgets and the policies they represent to be something that just happen to us.”
Being in this position can be wholly disempowering for organizations, their staff and the people in the community who rely on their critical services. Unfortunately, many organizations are standing in similar positions today; they are paralyzed as they await the looming budget cuts.
But organizations are not powerless. While no magic faucet of emergency funding exists, Community Wealth Ventures has seen dozens of clients achieve newfound resilience and empowerment by adding social enterprise to their funding mix. Of course, social enterprise is not right for every organization but it can be a powerful strategy for some. With a social enterprise strategy, for example, nonprofit leaders get to make decisions about the future of their organizations and how they can best create social good, rather than having to focus solely on keeping their largest donors happy.
I’m reminded of the experiences of one of our recent Community Wealth Collaborative participants: Easter Seals Work Resource Center (WRC). Easter Seals WRC runs a number of innovative social programs and social enterprises that: Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Social Enterprise: A Portrait of the Field
The Social Enterprise Alliance recently partnered with Community Wealth Ventures and Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship to assess the state of social enterprise in the nonprofit sector in the United States and Canada. The survey effort, which was funded by REDF, was designed to advance the field by identifying trends and best practices among nonprofit organizations engaged in social enterprise activities.
For the purposes of the survey, “social enterprise” was defined according to the definition developed by the Social Enterprise Alliance:
“An organization or venture (within an organization) that advances a social mission through market-based strategies. These strategies include receiving earned income in direct exchange for a product, service or privilege.”
The Franchise Solution to Social Enterprise Branding
A growing number of nonprofit organizations are looking to brand development as a means to improve their ability to “cut through the clutter” of messages and options available in the marketplace. More and more, nonprofits are recognizing the importance of brand stewardship in advancing mission1. This trend bodes well for the sector, as leading strategic thinkers like Good to Great’s Jim Collins have observed that a strong brand is a driving force behind building a great social sector organization2.
Investing in a strong brand can help an organization achieve success far beyond what its size, resources, or experience would indicate, making it one of the best investments an organization can make toward its long-term success. A strong brand commands visibility and awareness, preventing an organization from being swallowed up in the sea of competition. During these tough economic times when foundation endowments are shrinking and funding is tightening at the same time that nonprofit services are needed more than ever, the ability to leverage a strong brand can help improve an organization's ability to survive. A growing number of nonprofit leaders are taking this challenge of branding a social enterprise and turning it into an opportunity by adopting a business model that has been used in the private sector for more than a century: franchising.
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.