Changing the Conversation
As Amy Celep noted in an earlier post, “changing the conversation” can be a powerful tool toward creating the change we want to see in the world.
I was reminded of the validity of Amy’s claim during a recent lunch meeting with Jim Down, a wonderful strategic thinker who led Mercer Management Consulting until retiring at age 50. Since then he has played a critical role in the nonprofit sector, advising organizations ranging from OxFam to the Centers for Disease Control. Jim is on the board of OxFam and I asked him what he thought their most impressive accomplishment was so far. 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...
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...
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...
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...
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.