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...
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?
Before Fundraising, Focus on the Case for Evaluation
This is the third in a three part series of posts exploring the key ingredients for sustaining an organization’s evaluation capacity.
We underscored in our last post the centrality of culture and leadership in building an organization’s evaluation capacity. But sustaining evaluation capacity also depends on an organization’s ability to sell the value of their evaluation efforts to its stakeholders.
Effective evaluation depends on the engagement of numerous key stakeholders: you need staff to collect and use data; you need funders to support the costs of evaluation; and you may depend on community partners to collect and share their data that affects your outcomes. Unfortunately, a strong evaluation system alone does not automatically translate into greater support from these stakeholders. In particular, in our assessment of the funding environment for evaluation, we have learned that funders differ significantly in their views of what evaluation means, the degree to which it is valuable, and what it should cost. 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...
Learnings from a Community of Social Problem Eradicators
The Gates Foundation recently hosted a forum in Seattle with 300 scientists from around the world to release the latest information about its campaign to eradicate malaria. The lessons this community is learning and documenting during their fight to end malaria have profound takeaways for others who are waging similarly ambitious efforts to solve social problems at the scale they exist. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
10 Provocative Thoughts from the Independent Sector Conference (Part II)
Last week, I shared the first 5 of 10 provocative thoughts that stuck with me after this year’s Independent Sector conference. Thoughts #6 - #10 below touch on strategic planning, innovation, networks and failure:
6. “Strategic planning is dead.” That is not to say that “strategy” and/or “planning” are dead. In fact, both are absolutely necessary tools for deftly transforming limited resources (e.g., money, time, bodies) into improved social outcomes. But the good ol’ days of hammering out a trusty 5-Year Strategic Plan are quickly evaporating. Today, the pace of change is maddening. And it’s only accelerating. Day-by-day, our capacity to see into the future is declining. Organizations that plan, step-by-step, how they can best reach their goals in five years and then follow that plan, step-by-step, without looking around for five years, are going to be left in the dust. Nimbleness, foresight, adaptability, opportunism, learning, combined with strategic thinking and action planning are the traits that organizations must develop, not static strategic “planperweights.”
~ thoughtprops to: Ai-jen Poo (The National Domestic Workers Alliance)
A foundation trustee, a young nonprofit ED, and a lobbyist walk into a hotel…: 10 Provocative Thoughts from IS (Part I)
Our country is shaken. Our sector is anxious. Disparity is growing. Apathy is the norm. And we’re grasping for a new social compact.
It’s a tough time to be working in the nonprofit and philanthropic community. It’s also a thrilling time. More than ever, we need to think creatively, build innovative solutions to social problems, and grow, grow, grow what’s working. This tension between fear and fervor catapulted throughout the walls of this year’s Independent Sector conference, making for an exhilarating, poignant and provoking gathering of our nation’s top social sector thinkers and doers.
The following ideas stuck most vividly in my head. I’ve included 5 below and will include 5 more in another post next week:
1. Don’t collaborate for the sake of collaboration. Don’t collaborate just because the New York Times wrote an article about “Collective Impact.” Collaborate when the act of collaboration is a necessary ingredient in the creation of the intended results. All too often funders and grantees alike try to fit their work into the buzzword framework of the day. But frameworks by themselves do not create or guarantee positive social change. Collaboration is costly – it nearly always takes more time, energy, and money than originally planned. If the cost is $1+$1=$2.50, the social impact better be at least 1+1=2.75. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
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...
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.