http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en katiejh@stanford.edu Copyright 2008 2008-08-24T15:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/fast_food_and_the_family_farm/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/fast_food_and_the_family_farm/ Almost 30 years ago, my family bought a small farm along the Mississippi River in northwestern Illinois near the historic town of Galena. The farm has a couple of pastures where the neighbors’ black-and-white Holsteins graze, a hayfield that provides winter feed for the horses, a vegetable garden, fruit trees, and several beehives. It quickly became a cherished place to escape from the busy lives my siblings and I led three hours away in Chicago, as a young lawyer (me), doctor, and theater producer. Our neighbors had scraped out a living in this rough, rocky landscape for generations as dairy farmers. But today, most of them either are out of farming altogether or pursue it only as a hobby. They are among the well-documented casualties of our switch to large-scale agriculture—and there are other consequences of that change. In Illinois and elsewhere, we now produce vast amounts of corn and soybeans that become animal feed or ingredients in processed foods. As a result, the food we eat no longer comes from across the street or state, but from the other side of the country or world. It has typically traveled 1,500 miles or more before it appears on our dinner… Environment, Government 2008-08-24T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/weve_arrived_now_what/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/weve_arrived_now_what/ When I interviewed for my current position at Schwab Charitable in 1999, the nonprofit was still a start-up and just launching a “donor-advised fund” giving program. Though I had been active in the charitable sector for 15 years, I was not yet familiar with donor-advised funds. Although the Cleveland Foundation pioneered the donor-advised fund concept in 1914 and New York Community Trust formalized a donoradvised fund program in 1931, it was the launch of several national donoradvised funds by financial services companies in the 1990s that made them accessible and affordable to tens of thousands of Americans. Judging by their explosive growth, donoradvised funds have clearly met a need. In 2006, the nation’s 99 largest funds had more than $19.2 billion in assets and donated more than $3.5 billion annually to charity. Briefly, donor-advised funds are charitable giving accounts offered by a sponsoring charity that are designed as a more accessible, simpler, and less expensive alternative to private foundations. Donors contribute taxdeductible assets to their accounts, advise the sponsoring charity on how it should invest the assets so that they grow before they are granted, and recommend grants from their accounts to charitable organizations of their choice over time. The… Philanthropy & Responsible Investing 2008-08-24T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_lot_of_hot_air/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_lot_of_hot_air/ To its residents who still have a sense of smell, Mexico City is redolent with the perfumes of exhaust and ozone. The metropolis’s air pollution levels routinely rocket past the World Health Organization’s maximum limits, leaving people sick in their wake. Vehicles are the most generous contributors to the city’s acrid cloak, chortling forth 99 percent of the carbon monoxide, 81 percent of the nitrogen oxides, and 46 percent of the volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere, according to a Mexican federal report. And so in 1989, the Mexico City government rolled out a new program to get its denizens out of their cars and onto public transportation. The program, called Hoy No Circula, forces most drivers to give up their cars one weekday every week according to the last number of their license plate. For example, people with license plates ending in “5” cannot drive on Fridays. Regardless of what number their license plates end in, many residents seem to manage to drive on all days ending in “y,” finds Lucas W. Davis, an economist at the University of Michigan. In the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Davis shows that air pollution levels have not… Environment, Government 2008-08-18T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/smoke_and_mirrors/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/smoke_and_mirrors/ Since the World Health Organization clamped down on tobacco advertising, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are among the few remaining outlets that tobacco companies have to promote themselves publicly. British American Tobacco Malaysia (BATM), for example, has won the favor of the Malaysian government and people by helping tobacco growers, making donations to cultural institutions, funding scholarships, developing youth smoking prevention programs, and reporting on its activities. A recent scholarly review of BATM’s CSR efforts concludes, however, that “a socially responsible tobacco corporation is an oxymoron and must be identified as such.” “We wanted to hold up a mirror and show that BATM’s activities cannot be reconciled with the fact that tobacco is the world’s leading cause of preventable illness and premature death,” says Simon Barraclough, a professor in the School of Public Health at Australia’s La Trobe University and the article’s lead author. The review, which appears in the April 2008 issue of Social Science & Medicine, identifies several paradoxes in BATM’s CSR initiatives. For example, although the company plants trees to be carbon neutral, it does not track the environmental impact of cigarette smoke or discarded packets and butts. BATM sponsors a youth antismoking program, but its message… Corporate Social Responsiblity 2008-08-11T14:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/tackling_hiv/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/tackling_hiv/ “My uncle abused me sexually,” a female soccer coach tells a group of adolescent boys and girls in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a city with one of the highest HIV rates in the country. “I never told anybody because I was scared and didn’t understand what was happening. … I have been living with HIV for 10 years now.” Thus begins another series of Grassroot Soccer workshops, which tap into soccer’s phenomenal popularity in sub- Saharan Africa to educate kids about HIV. After telling their personal stories about how HIV has affected them, Grassroot Soccer coaches lead their students through 20 hours of educational and trust-building activities. The whole program takes place around a soccer ball. “We’re having fun dealing with a very sad thing,” says Tommy Clark, the organization’s co-founder. A retired professional soccer player, he is also a pediatrician and former research fellow in HIV prevention at the University of California, San Francisco. “The popularity of soccer in Africa is like football, basketball, baseball, and video games [in America] rolled into one,” explains Clark. But not any soccer star can teach the program. Clark finds that kids in the organization’s flagship programs in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and South… Health Care, Nonprofit Management 2008-08-05T14:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/from_the_ground_up/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/from_the_ground_up/ The Western Ghats, a mountain range running 1,000 miles down the western coast of India, is one of the world’s natural treasures. With rain forests, dry forests, swamps, and rivers, the range is home to 1,600 flowering plants found nowhere else on the planet, as well as to scores of endangered animals, including tigers and elephants. No less important, millions of people live in the Ghats, and many of their livelihoods are intertwined with the region’s natural bounty. But in 1993, when botanist Kamal Bawa received a World Wildlife Fund grant to help the Soligas, an indigenous tribe living in the Ghats and dependent on forest products, he found a region devastated by deforestation and misuse. In the developed world, fragile ecosystems often enjoy ample research describing them, organizations attempting to preserve them, and policies protecting them. But all Bawa saw in the Ghats was a patchwork of government protections that amounted to little more than a conservation Band-Aid. Most of the existing research was irrelevant to the Ghats’ problems or didn’t link to government policies. NGOs tried to help, but they invariably overlooked the social and economic aspects of conservation. Meanwhile, the Ghats faced pressures from mining, dam building,… Environment, Social Entrepreneurship 2008-07-28T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/books_to_grow_on/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/books_to_grow_on/ On a trek through Nepal in 1998, John Wood was dismayed to discover a school library bereft of books. And so Wood— who was then Microsoft’s director of business development for China—gave up his lucrative job to found the nonprofit Books for Nepal. By 2000, the organization had opened 26 libraries in Nepal and built two schools. Less than eight years later, the organization—now known as Room to Read—celebrated the opening of its 5,000th library. In the meantime, Room to Read grew far beyond Nepal’s borders: first to Vietnam, and then to Cambodia, India, Laos, and Sri Lanka. More recently, Room to Read began working on the African continent, launching South African programs in 2007 and beginning work in Zambia this year. How did Room to Read grow so fast? The media have largely focused on Wood as the catalytic figure in the organization’s success story. Of equal importance, however, is Room to Read’s solid and replicable operational choices. The organization relies on committed local employees, rather than on expensive expatriates. It partners with other education- focused NGOs. It adopts a social entrepreneurial mindset that encourages risk taking through pilot projects. And rather than simply rolling… Education, Nonprofit Management 2008-07-21T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/microloan_sharks/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/microloan_sharks/ Banco Compartamos, the largest microfinance institution in Mexico, is the acknowledged poster child for commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs). From its inception in 1990 until 2000, Compartamos operated as a not-for-profit nongovernmental organization (NGO), receiving $4.3 million from international development agencies and private Mexican donors. In 2000, the organization was reaching 60,000 borrowers— mainly poor women in rural areas. To tap commercial funds for even faster growth, the NGO and other investors converted it to a for-profit business. By the end of 2006, the corporation was serving some 616,000 borrowers—a tenfold increase. The corporation went public in 2007. For its initial public offering (IPO), Compartamos’ owners sold about 30 percent of their shares to new investors, raising a total of $450 million for the original investors—not bad for an initial total investment of $6 million. Following the IPO, the corporation was valued at more than $1.5 billion. That comes out to an internal rate of return to investors of roughly 100 percent a year, compounded over eight years, reports the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP).1 Many observers hailed the Compartamos IPO as an unalloyed success. “The financial markets have shown the true value created by high-performance, double bottom line–oriented… Economic Development, Social Entrepreneurship 2008-07-13T14:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/shes_crafty/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/shes_crafty/ From 1933 to 1947, Dr. Jayanti Mitrasen Mahimtura was among the legions of Indians who joined in her country’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. She took time off from medical school, did jail time twice for acts of civil disobedience, and wore only khadi, the hand-spun cloth that Mahatma Gandhi used as a symbol of India’s self-sufficiency. Today, Mahimtura’s granddaughter, Priya Haji, is a rising star in the fair trade movement. Haji’s company, World of Good, connects artisans—mostly women—in poor countries with trendy consumers in the West. The company first ferrets out handmade items from far-flung villages across Asia, Africa, and South America. It then cleverly displays the wares in affluent urban stores throughout the United States. Though Haji, the CEO, declines to release sales figures, she says gross revenues have doubled every year since 2004, when she started the company with two classmates from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Boutiques selling ethnic crafts like earrings, scarves, and bowls are ubiquitous in gentrifying neighborhoods. But Haji thinks bigger: Her company works with 150 organizations in 34 countries to source enough wares to stock mainstream retailers such as Whole Foods, Wegmans,… Economic Development, Nonprofit Management, Social Entrepreneurship 2008-07-06T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_equity_capital_gap/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_equity_capital_gap/ Imagine for a moment that our 21st-century economy were transported back to the 15th century. Businesses, by and large, would be tiny by today’s standards. Most revenue would be in the form of unwieldy barter rather than standardized currency, and profits would be thin or nonexistent, making it difficult to invest in new technologies or fund growth. Guild elders, the king, and other oligarchs, not consumers or the market, would have sway over the entrepreneur and the success of his business. And equity capital, used today to fund the growth of risky start-ups, promising midsize businesses, and large multinationals, would be unavailable. Does this scenario seem difficult to imagine in today’s world? Not if you’re an entrepreneur or manager working in the 21st-century nonprofit sector, where some of society’s most daunting challenges are routinely taken on with commercial tools and techniques that could have figured prominently in the 1394 poem Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. Although the social, political, and economic environments have changed enormously in the intervening centuries, and entrepreneurial ideas, techniques, and resourcefulness are now common among nonprofits, antiquated commercial habits still dominate the nonprofit sector and undermine its progress. First among these hindrances is this: Nonprofit enterprises suffer… Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy & Responsible Investing 2008-06-29T14:00:01-08:00