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...
Why ALL nonprofits should be talking about jobs. Today.
Later today, President Obama will address a joint session of Congress to talk about jobs.
Getting Americans back to work is a central ingredient to the long-term success of virtually every social program, including many supported by our clients. Record levels of poverty and unemployment make it extraordinarily difficult to reduce economic inequity and win battles to end hunger, ensure equal educational opportunities, and create a more just society.
Those of us working toward those goals will come up short unless we take a larger and longer term view that includes economic growth and job creation as a priority.
Until now the political will in Congress has been insufficient to achieve progress on jobs. It will remain so unless more of us speak out and specifically underscore the connection between our missions and the need for bold measures to address the jobs crisis. We must encourage ourselves and others in our sector to look beyond our specific silos, focus on the bigger picture, and raise our voices.
Nonprofit and advocacy organizations focused on human services need to reach out this week – to all of their stakeholders – and explain how and why concerted, bipartisan action on jobs is directly related to the mission of their organization.
What does job creation have to do with, for example, the anti-hunger programs championed by Share Our Strength? 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...
Sharing Our Growth: Learn to Play Offense and Put Financial Instability Behind You.
This is the ninth in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
Financial instability and/or peril is distracting, demoralizing and debilitating. If all of your energy is absorbed on the issue of how to make your payroll and your budget, you will not have enough left over to devote to strategy, growth, and mission. Every unanticipated expenditure will become a crisis.
There were periods at Share Our Strength where we had so little margin for error that we spent countless hours debating $3000 decisions that felt like they were make-or-break, and that may well have been. But the opportunity costs of spending our time that way were both high and corrosive. For many organizations this is so ingrained as the norm that it is almost accepted without question.
But there is another way. I think of it as the difference between playing offense and defense in football.
Capacity Only Equals Impact if there’s a Why and a How
Most parents would be horrified if their child’s school bus showed up in the morning missing a headlight, its brakes, and a few seats. Or if it arrived with a driver desperately talking on three different cell phones trying to convince station owners to pump the bus with enough gas to get to school. I certainly wouldn’t let my kid hop on that bus.
Unfortunately, many nonprofits serving the most vulnerable populations in America find themselves in a state similar to this school bus: with the responsibility to fulfill an important need, but without the resources to properly do so. As Billy mentioned in his most recent Sharing Our Growth post, “nearly all of the incentives in the nonprofit sector run against long-term investments in capacity.” Which leads to hollowed-out enterprises, diminished capacity, and fragmented social impact.
I don’t want to belabor the point that funders all too often underfund and misunderstand the capacity needs of nonprofits. The Nonprofit Overhead Cost Project and Bridgespan’s work around The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle have valiantly exposed the costs to social impact of this continued underinvestment. As a community, we can and should continue to raise general awareness among the funding community that, as Billy puts it, “Capacity Equals Impact.”
But finger wagging will only get us so far. If we truly believe capacity drives impact, then the nonprofit community must step up and prove it. Our organizations exist to create social impact. Funders want to invest in social impact. So, as organizational leaders, our duty in turning this picture around is to diligently articulate why and how capacity equals social impact. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
What Can Listening Tell Us About Successful Cross-Sectoral Partnerships?
Across the country, families seeking affordable housing, women seeking shelter from domestic violence and recent immigrants seeking legal support have all encountered the same stark reality: the demand for health and human service programs significantly outweighs the supply.
Public funding for such programs has dropped in communities throughout America. There simply isn’t enough public support to meet the growing demand for these services.
Yet in the face of such grim realities, we continue to see passionate people and organizations developing innovative solutions to these funding constraints.
Recently, George Mason University (GMU) and Community Wealth Ventures engaged in a “Listening Project” with the Fairfax County Virginia Human Services departments, intended to bring together nonprofits, corporations and County staff. We sought to uncover how Fairfax County might best continue to meet human service needs through increased nonprofit capacity in a time of decreasing government funding support. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Does Big = Sustainable?
The Academy for Educational Development (AED) is selling its programs and assets and closing its doors.
This announcement, made last week, was a bit surprising to many of us who sit outside the organizational walls. After all, it’s a 50-year-old, $440 million institution with 250 programs worldwide and staff in more than 60 countries.
For years, major foundations and governmental agencies have bet on AED’s effectiveness by issuing large, multi-year grants and contracts to the organization. And as recently as 2009, it received $76 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for child nutrition work in Africa and Asia. 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.