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?
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...
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...
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.
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.