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...
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 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...
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...
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.
Five questions every nonprofit should be asking in light of the debt ceiling deal
Although no one could foresee the specific resolution of the debt ceiling crisis, it was unfortunately a foregone conclusion that any resolution would include hundreds of billions of dollars of budget cuts to programs that serve the most vulnerable in our society. History offers numerous examples of what to expect next. The nonprofit sector – community organizations, schools, food banks, health care providers, economic development programs – will all be expected to do more with less.
It’s bad enough that the nonprofit sector has been AWOL in the national debate about spending priorities, permitting ideologues backed by special interests to hold sway, rather than the community activists with hands-on experience and knowledge of the human impact such cuts would have. But what’s even worse is the failure of most nonprofits to aggressively invest in building their own capacity so that they might have even a chance of meeting the challenges of the future. The urgency of immediate human need always makes investments that won’t pay off until the long-term seem like a luxury. But in fact such investments are a greater necessity than ever before. 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...
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.