”Looking at the public affairs listings in the Encyclopedia of Associations from 1965 to 1997, Walker and colleagues concluded that advocacy organizations without members—think tanks, foundations, and public law groups, for example—have not displaced those with members.

The Children’s Defense Fund, Earthjustice, and the Southern Poverty Law Center launched in the 1970s, but so did memberbased advocacy groups such as the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “The proportion of nonmembership organizations relative to membership organizations has been relatively stable,” Walker says.

Walker says the two kinds of organizations support rather than compete with each other. The more membership organizations there are in a field, the more nonmembership ones are founded. Member-driven and professional advocacy groups serve the complementary functions of demonstrating popular support and providing expert knowledge. Some professional advocacy groups, like the Industrial Areas Foundation, exist to support broad-based organizing.

But even if membership associations are going strong, “membership” is not what it used to be. Groups like Common Cause, Amnesty International, and NARAL don’t necessarily involve their members in broad-based organizational life the way the classic fellowship associations once did. “Traditional American membership associations, such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the American Legion, and the Fraternal Order of Eagles, had local chapters with face-to-face meetings, they collected dues, they checked off whether each person paid their dues monthly,” says Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard University. “And that’s not the same as sending out a mailing list to several hundred thousand people shrieking that the environment is being endangered and asking you to send in a contribution.”

Civic engagement is more than writing a check. Without the structure of the fellowship associations, “we lose bridges between educated and well-to-do people and their fellow citizens, and we lose all kinds of ways for people to learn to be active citizens—what it means to pay dues, how to keep records, how to run meetings, what it means to send a delegate to a higher level,” says Skocpol. Walker acknowledges that the meaning of membership is changing. “The old federated groups clearly brought together people from lots of different social class backgrounds,” he says. “They aren’t the polarized, single-issue membership groups that are playing such a large role today.”

Edward T. Walker, John D. McCarthy, and Frank Baumgartner, “Replacing Members with Managers? Mutualism Among Membership and Nonmembership Advocacy Organizations in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology, 116, 2011.

Why are Circles so widely embraced? Because their very structure creates the conditions for personal and group growth and empowerment. As an archetype the Circle represents an ancient form of meeting that encourages respectful conversation. It stands in contrast to the Triangle, an alternative archetype of social interaction that reflects hierarchy and reminds people of their place within a power structure.

In a well-functioning Circle, members experience a strong sense of belonging, a compelling commitment to shared goals, a high level of accountability to themselves and to the group, a robust climate of joint problem solving and learning among peers, an intense feeling of involvement, and high trust relationships. Everyone sees herself as an equal part of the whole. The nonhierarchical nature that is the foundation of Circle interaction encourages every member to be a facilitator and a leader by sharing her knowledge and skills.

Consider the dramatic changes that a group of 20 women have undergone through their participation in the Saranayalaya Group in Pasumathur Village, Tamil Nadu, India. The current leader of the group, Krishnaveni, remembers an earlier time when many of the group members were hesitant to become involved in community action programs because by tradition women were generally not supposed to come out of their homes without the permission of their husbands or parents. Now, after participating in a Circle, all 20 women are enthusiastically engaged in community projects. They have successfully lobbied for a number of projects to improve the village’s infrastructure, including installing a bore well that supplies drinking water, paving roads in and around the village, installing trash cans on every street, cleaning public drains, separating drainage and drinking water, and constructing concrete platforms under village taps to prevent water stagnation. And by networking with similar groups in their area, they have organized a day when more than 250 villagers in the district receive eye checkups and medical treatment.

Circles such as the Saranayalaya Group are an attractive social technology because they offer a potential solution to what political economist David Ellerman has called the fundamental conundrum of assistance, namely the problem of how helpers can help doers in a way that doesn’t override or undercut the ability of the doers helping themselves. All too often, attempts to socially engineer development at an individual or a collective level fail because the methods used override doers’ or recipients’ will and motivation. Helpers supply an answer, a service, or a program and do everything possible to motivate doers to follow the prescribed process. By externalizing both the motivation and the knowledge, however, helpers end up engaging in Triangle-like group interaction that overrides, rather than develops, doers’ individual and collective abilities.

In contrast, interventions that are built on the archetype of the Circle harness the power of intrinsic motivation and the power of a group to develop knowledge and skills, to solve problems, and to take action. Although Circles offer many benefits to both individuals and groups, employing them effectively is not easy. Leveraging the potential of Circles requires a clear understanding of what they are and how they work. This knowledge can help those interested in implementing Circle technologies avoid the most common pitfalls that lead to failure.

What Are Circles?

There are many types of Circles, and in such a pervasive phenomenon, there is a great deal of variation in how they are structured and operated. Nonetheless, four characteristics describe the purest forms of Circle interactions and distinguish them from Triangle-like interactions: egalitarian participation, shared leadership, group-determined purposes and processes, and voluntary membership.

Egalitarian Participation. The horizontal and collegial interaction of a Circle stands in contrast to the vertical and authority-driven interaction of a Triangle. In a Circle, people literally form a circle when they interact. Standing or sitting in a circle encourages conversational, peer-oriented, and respectful group dialogue in which members engage as equals. Often, Circles employ additional practices that further foster and reinforce these egalitarian norms, such as formalized systems for taking turns talking, reminders to listen without judgment, and methods for handling interpersonal conflict. Such practices help members to feel safe and to contribute, and they create mutual expectations for broad-based participation.

Shared Leadership. In contrast to Triangle interactions that vest leadership in one person by virtue of her authority, unique skills, or social power, Circles treat leadership as a set of functions that can be divided and shared. Moreover, Circles assume that these functions and the skills to execute them can be nurtured in any member. How leadership is developed, decentralized, and shared varies, depending on the particular Circle methodology being employed. Some Circle manuals present formalized practices to explicitly divide and rotate leadership into distinct roles, whereas others encourage leadership roles to emerge and rotate in a more informal fashion. (See “Guides to Creating Circles," below.)

Group-Determined Purposes and Processes. The egalitarian principles that underpin Circles mean that all members are viewed as having the capability to contribute in meaningful ways. In the most extreme case, Circle members collectively articulate and develop shared goals or purposes, determine how the group operates, and set the ground rules for group interaction, including how problems and conflict are handled. In other Circles, particularly those employed in microfinance, the group’s purposes and process rules might be suggested by a third party, such as an NGO facilitator or bank employee. Even in those contexts, however, members are encouraged to own and modify these purposes and processes, for example, deciding how much money to save, what the repayment rules are, what constitutes delinquency, who gets loans, what the interest rates are, and the expectations for member interaction.

Voluntary Membership. Participants join Circles based on their interests and desires rather than being obligated, required, or forced to join by an authority figure. In Tacoma, Wash., women responded to fliers posted in the community and self-selected into one of seven WE-CAN Circles offered through an alliance of several nonprofit organizations. When forming quality circles, employers typically ask for volunteers. In other types of Circles, such as self-help groups and village savings and loan associations, participants are often invited to join by an NGO representative, family member, friend, or neighbor.

The Benefits of Circles

Circles help individuals and groups to develop and exercise autonomy, helping them to solve their own problems and take action. But autonomy can be a loaded term, especially when we look across cultures. Autonomy is often seen as a Western concept that highlights independence and individualism, and thus it has often been assumed to be irrelevant in more collectivist cultures. But as Cigdem Kagitcibasi, professor of psychology at Koc University in Istanbul, argues, such a view confounds autonomy with separateness or individuality.

Autonomy is better thought of as agency, the degree to which an individual is able to engage in intentional and noncoerced action toward a desired outcome. The opposite of autonomy is heteronomy, where action is ruled or controlled from the outside and not willingly undertaken. Autonomy and heteronomy should not be confused with relatedness, the degree to which an individual sees herself as a separate entity or, alternatively, as part of an undifferentiated whole, where the boundaries of separate selves are fused with others. Separating autonomy from relatedness allows for the possibility of autonomy in more collectivist cultures. Mila Tuli and Nandita Chaudhary, both at the University of Delhi, India, use the term “elective interdependence” to describe the intersection of agency and interdependence, and their work highlights the relevance and distinctive characteristics of autonomy as it occurs in more collectivist cultures.

Many Circles target the individual and her development. For example, in more individualistic, Western cultures, book clubs and study circles enable adults to take control of their own learning and education. Other kinds of Circles, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Simplicity Circles, help individuals learn new ways of thinking, interacting, and making decisions by themselves. WE-CAN Circles focus on enhancing women’s self-leadership, helping each to identify and overcome the barriers to her educational and personal goals.

In more collectivist cultures, Circles are used to empower women, but how women express and enact their autonomy may vary from their Western counterparts. For example, in the United Nations Development Programme’s 2002 study of the impact of the South Asia Poverty Alleviation Program’s interventions on women’s empowerment in the southern states of India, women reported that through their experience in the self-help group they were able to exercise greater choice and control in a variety of areas of their lives—engaging in nontraditional employment-related tasks, visiting new places, traveling without male support, and having a greater say in reproductive choices such as the timing and spacing of children, use of contraceptives, and abortion decisions.

In addition to enhancing the autonomy of individuals, Circles also work to enhance the autonomy of groups. They encourage a group to identify and solve its own problems and in so doing, enable a group to produce better ideas, products, or programs. For example, many businesses leverage the intelligence of groups by employing quality circles, a kind of self-managed team whose focus is to work together to improve productivity and quality. Those interested in empowering disadvantaged groups and creating social change commonly employ Circles as a tool for community mobilization. NGOs and community organizers encourage the development of study circles as a means of helping groups develop novel solutions that address community-wide problems related to racism, the educational system, and health. Research on individual self-help groups like the Saranayalaya Group document how these Circles have overcome the constraints facing women to take action on social issues in their communities, for example starting a school, helping a community member in need, providing health care education, or closing down a local liquor outlet.

The Psychological and Group Dynamics of Circles

What happens inside a Circle that helps individual women such as Krishnaveni to change, or helps an entire group of women such as the Saranayalaya Group to take action in their community? Social psychological research on adult learning and group dynamics reveals two main mechanisms that lead to enhanced well being, development, and autonomy of both individuals and groups. First, Circles create the conditions where intrinsic motivation flourishes and offer individuals the support necessary for change, and second, they generate a group’s collective capacity for action.

Two University of Rochester cognitive psychologists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, have long argued that all individuals have the potential to become more self-determined and that intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation is a key ingredient to this process. Individuals are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to learn and change when they experience an environment that feeds three basic and universal human needs: relatedness (being connected to and experience caring for others), autonomy (voluntary, motivated action toward a desired outcome with a sense of efficacy), and competence (being effective in dealing with her environment). Circle processes help to meet each of these needs and in so doing foster both the motivation and ability to learn and change.

That is why the basic design of the Circle is so important. Having people stand (or sit) next to one another and treat each other as equals feeds universal needs for relatedness and connectedness to others. Moreover, a Circle’s emphasis on conversational, respectful, peer-oriented dialogue enhances strong and trusting relationships among members. Building strong social connections and intimacy helps to sustain a person’s engagement in the Circle, providing support for continued growth and development. In particular, the highly relational nature of Circle interaction explains why they are so effective with women.

Feminist adult education research shows that connectedness and relationship are central to women’s learning. Methods that expand consciousness, encourage capacity for voice, and enhance self-esteem facilitate a woman’s personal transformation to change her life. According to Elizabeth J. Tisdell, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, women learn best when their own learning is connected to the learning of others—that is, when they get the chance to understand other women’s perspectives and build on one another’s ideas rather than only being told what to do. When asked about her WE-CAN Circle experience at the Tacoma Urban League, Tina (one of the women in the WE-CAN Circle) stated she most appreciated “the support [I] felt, the ability to share with others who were willing to actually listen and not tell me what I should do or who would overwhelm me with their own problems. Everyone shared and everyone listened.” Women, in particular, value and respond to learning contexts that not only offer opportunities for connected learning but also foster personal and meaningful relationships.

The relational dynamics of Circles transcend both gender and culture. In Egypt, Sekem, a complex organization composed of biodynamic farms, food trading companies, a medical center, and schools, regularly employs Circles where male and female employees discuss what happened the previous day or week and what the plans are for the current day or the next week. By transforming the economic, social, and cultural reality of people living in nearby communities, Sekem’s ultimate goal is to change Egyptian society to be more sustainable, equal, and just. Sekem uses Circles as a subtle but powerful socialization tool for fostering new norms and beliefs around punctuality, planning, and equality.

Ibrahim Abouleish, Sekem’s founder, explains the relational dynamics generated by employees standing side by side and holding hands, regardless of gender or position, and how that leads to greater respect for others, self-efficacy, and a sense of personal responsibility. “The Circle is a very social form,” says Abouleish. “We form a circle and people can see each other. But the equality and the equal opportunity is something we have been missing for a long time in this culture. Not everyone here is having comparatively equal opportunities—girls and boys, women and men. Also there are all levels of workers standing together in a circle so that they can experience that they are equal. Equality is very, very important for everybody in order to feel their dignity as human beings. I see people in Egypt—they go to their offices and to their companies without having experienced that dignity.”

Circle interventions not only create a strong sense of connection, they also foster autonomy and independent action, a second factor that leads to the intrinsic motivation necessary for lasting personal growth and change. Membership in a Circle is voluntary. Although a tacit, social obligation to participate may emerge as a result of the relational dynamics, no one forces, tells, or provides external incentives for an individual to join a Circle, to talk in the Circle, or to commit to a new action or behavior. Psychologists have long known that voluntary decisions and commitments are a much stronger means of changing behavior than are those that are imposed from the outside. In addition, it’s a lot easier to learn from one’s peers than from being told by an “expert” what to do, how to think, or what the solution is. By design, Circles employ autonomy in a way that allows members to learn how to take action in forms that are culturally relevant and meaningful to them.

Circle practices also foster intrinsic motivation to learn and change, by feeding the universal need for competence. In Circles, the members share a purpose, and together they work to achieve that purpose. For example, microfinance self-help groups almost always incorporate training to help women master rudimentary business skills and knowledge, including learning how to sign one’s name, how to evaluate business ideas, and the concepts of savings, interest, and loans. As they discuss their work together, members discuss problems and, over time, they begin to experience success in their efforts.

Geeta Prajapati’s experience in her self-help group in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, illustrates these dynamics: “Before I joined the samooh, I had no idea about banks and paperwork. I was scared to go there. But I have learnt through the samooh. Now when I go to the bank, the manager tells me to sit down and asks what work I have. I have taught the other women how to handle the work. I went with them for the first few times and showed them what to do. Now they handle it themselves without problem.”

In addition to generating the intrinsic motivation that leads to individual well being, growth, and change, Circle dynamics empower groups to take action. The strong interpersonal ties and the encouragement of self-determination foster a group’s belief that it has the collective power to produce desired results. Circle practices enhance a group’s capacity to act. Social movement theory argues that a group’s capacity to act depends in large part on the group having shared interests, a strong social infrastructure, and effective processes for mobilizing and using needed resources. (A fourth factor, a supportive political and economic environment, is environmental in nature and not directly influenced by Circle interventions.) Through the dialogue of a Circle, members identify and discuss their common interests. As they work together to articulate issues and develop their intentions, the group develops social capital. Such strong, trusting ties between members enable the sharing and deployment of resources, knowledge, and effort needed to take action on social issues in the community. Developing and strengthening social capital, in particular by increasing the trust in horizontal networks that extend beyond the constraints of family, gender-based, and other institutionalized patronage ties is an important component of enhancing the collective power of disadvantaged groups.

Leveraging the Power of Circles

Circles offer a seductive promise. Who wouldn’t want to employ a method that helps others to help themselves? As with any other highly attractive practice, however, Circles run the risk of falling prey to exaggerated expectations that fuel their unthinking adoption. Indiscriminate and incorrect application of Circle practices can lead only to disappointment. To avoid these problems, Circle design should be contingent on the nature of the desired objectives and the people involved. One should also be aware of the typical dysfunctional patterns that can destroy a Circle’s effectiveness and be realistic about the resources needed to establish and sustain a Circle.

One of the most important issues to consider when designing a Circle is the composition of the Circle’s membership. Although an individual’s decision to participate is voluntary, the invitation to participate is determined by the person or entity sponsoring the Circle. In combination with the cultural context, the composition of a group shapes how members are likely to interact and therefore influences the implementation of additional design elements needed to create healthy Circle interaction. In general, Circle behaviors are harder to create in cultural contexts characterized by hierarchy and authoritarianism, which are manifested by the presence of unequal gender relationships, rigid caste distinctions, and well-defined socioeconomic status orderings. These sorts of dynamics are why many NGOs place great emphasis on forming women-only, single-caste, or equal income self-help groups in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Even when some of these factors are considered, groups still run the risk of being “captured” by elite interests, where a member, often the group leader, is able to dominate the group.

The cultural and institutional context and the desired objectives are also important considerations in designing a Circle. Some Circle practices maximize the degree of egalitarian participation, shared leadership, and group-determined purposes and processes, whereas others mix in more Triangle-like design elements. For example, participation in Sekem Circles is voluntary, but the purposes and the processes are determined by management, and the most senior person present runs each Circle’s discussion. Incorporation of Triangle-like design elements is appropriate given the goals of the Sekem Circles and their more subtle use as a socialization tool to encourage greater personal responsibility, punctuality, and respect for others in the workplace.

One also needs to pay attention to the process and group dynamics that emerge during the Circle’s formation and development. Triangle dynamics are pervasive in human interactions, so the roles that Circle organizers and facilitators play need to be carefully monitored. Circle facilitators need to be acutely aware of how easily Triangle behaviors can slip in. The helper-doer relationship is rooted in Triangle logic. It implies that helpers have more knowledge and skills than the doers or are superior in some way. Because they are helpers, facilitators run the very real risk of becoming a needed expert or source of information. In such a situation, the knowledge and skills needed to run and sustain the Circle are externalized, and Circle members never develop the competence and skills to solve problems themselves.

Ford Foundation program officer Ajit Kanitkar’s research on self-help groups in India provides a good example of the tendency for facilitators to become experts and the importance of training to overcome those tendencies. In an experimental effort to increase the speed and frequency of self-help group formation, the NGO Pradan selected eight “promoters,” local members of the community who had one to two years of experience in successful self-help groups. The promoters, who were believed to be conversant in group dynamics and have good communication and organizing skills, were given one day of training. The promoters, however, had difficulty letting go of Triangle-like behaviors, which had negative consequences for the Circles. For example, the promoters would correct an accounting mistake themselves rather than explaining the mistake to the group’s accountant and getting her to make the correction. Pradan ended up canceling the program, concluding that additional training and monitoring would be needed.

The detailed training manuals and handbooks that accompany Circle practice represent attempts to codify the skills and information necessary for ensuring that facilitators and internal leaders don’t become the sole expert. They also attempt to help groups develop ways to discuss internal group dynamics so that problems can be openly discussed, even in the face of resistance by some members. Susan Johnson and Namrata Sharma’s longitudinal research on the challenges faced by microfinance groups in Kenya reveals the power of participatory training materials that can be used by facilitators and even group members themselves.

In one mixed-gender group, the male chairman dominated meetings and the treasurer had misappropriated group funds. Initially, members reported being unhappy with the leaders, saying there was a misunderstanding between them, but they were clearly uncomfortable talking about the issues. Over time, more people began attending the meetings, and at the meetings members were questioning other office bearers on the status of accounts in the group. By the end of the study, the members were explicitly using one of the provided training tools for assessing leadership qualities, and they had their first election. After being taken to the local chief, the treasurer was made to sign a contract to repay the money he misappropriated. Group attendance and participation had dramatically increased, and the group had moved beyond borrowing from the NGO to develop new practices, such as mobilizing their own funds and lend them out and instituting a policy of pledging assets before giving out a loan. The participatory training materials clearly helped the group to evolve into a better functioning Circle, one that has a greater chance of thriving over time.

As these examples show, Circles are not a quick and easy way to create personal and social change. The inherent problems in helping others to help themselves and the degree to which many human interactions are guided by the Triangle make Circles difficult to engineer. The hallmark of a true Circle is that it is self-sustaining. Instilling Circle practices that truly generate—not override, deplete, or destroy—autonomy requires a great deal of sensitivity, support, and skill. Competent facilitators and participatory training manuals can help a group to embrace the egalitarian norms and behaviors of Circle interaction. But as the examples above illustrate, the explicit and tacit knowledge and behaviors required for effective Circle functioning do not necessarily come quickly. Creating effective Circle interventions takes time and dedication, particularly with populations that have few resources of their own to sustain them. Although challenging to design and implement, Circles remain a promising social intervention for creating personal and social change.

Tracy A. Thompson is an associate professor at the University of Washington Tacoma’s Milgard School of Business. She was previously a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Consider the views of Kim Oakes, director of sharing and communities of practice at the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a national network of 99 charter schools serving 27,000 students via 1,900 teachers. Oakes told Bridgespan’s research team: “We know that about 80 percent of our teachers create materials from scratch. … It became increasingly important to connect our teachers, so that they could build upon one another’s ideas rather than work in isolation.”

Or consider World Vision, an international Christian development organization with an annual budget of more than $2 billion operating in 93 countries. World Vision was facing the consequences of rapid growth. In the words of Eleanor Monbiot, its senior director for knowledge management: “We were growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. We had moved from everybody knowing each other vaguely, to a breaking point. … The No. 1 need was to know what people were up to, where the best practices lay.”

KIPP, World Vision, and a host of other nonprofits, large and small, are tackling the challenge of making their organizations as smart as the individuals who constitute them. In short, they are engaging in the hard work of organizational learning: The intentional practice of collecting information, reflecting on it, and sharing the findings, to improve the performance of an organization.

Authors ranging from the late business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. to MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer Peter Senge have emphasized the value of knowledge and learning inside organizations. But, to use another well-worn phrase, this is easier said than done. In the fall of 2010, a Bridgespan Group team surveyed 116 nonprofits about how they learn—and how they translate the knowledge gained into practice, to increase their impact and fulfill their missions. We then explored these topics through interviews with more than half a dozen organizations, which were recommended by their peers for their innovative approaches to learning.

The results of the survey indicate that nonprofit leaders care deeply about capturing and sharing knowledge across their programs and fields. But they also identify three significant impediments to organizational learning: a lack of clear and measurable goals about using knowledge to improve performance; insufficient incentives for individuals or teams to participate in organizational learning activities; and uncertainty about the most effective processes for capturing and sharing learning. These issues also surface in forprofit organizations, according to outside studies, where knowledge hoarding between business units can result from competition for resources.¹ In the nonprofit sector, however, 97 percent of survey respondents said their leaders value knowledge sharing as a means to achieve their missions. Still, many of them struggle to do it well.

In this article, we look at the components of organizational learning; explore the challenges surrounding its goals, incentives, and processes; and provide examples of organizations working to address barriers to sharing knowledge. In an age driven by technology and information, organizational learning has not just become part of the successful 21st-century nonprofit; increasingly, it is a key ingredient.

CREATING IMPACT THROUGH LEARNING

Developing organizational knowledge and integrating that knowledge into everyday practice can be a powerful tool for multiplying an organization’s impact, especially as it grows. But a nonprofit doesn’t have to be a multisite, multimillion-dollar agency, or even have a dedicated knowledge management function, to benefit from clear goals, incentives, and well-developed processes for organizational learning. If you train your staff, circulate meeting minutes, share programmatic best practices across sites, measure the impact of your programs, discuss metrics with your board of directors to inform decisions, or present your results at professional conferences, you are practicing knowledge management. Indeed, one of the tricky aspects of this topic is that learning-related activities are varied and can sit in many different parts of an organization. In some organizations the locus of activity is in staff training; for others it may be in impact assessment or performance management. Wherever learning sits, the key is that it be closely connected to the organization’s mission and impact.

This connection is also the biggest challenge. Although 98 percent of nonprofit organizations reported in our survey that they collected a lot of information, a third of them said that they were unable to reflect on it and integrate it in a meaningful way into program activities. Our research tells us that to be intentional about organizational learning, organizations need to focus on doing four things well.² (See "Four Elements of Organizational Learning," below.)

First, leaders must champion organizational learning. They need to demonstrate their commitment by setting a vision and goals for learning connected to furthering the mission. And they must act as role models by participating in learning activities. Second, leaders need to foster a culture of continuous improvement that values organizational learning. The culture reinforces learning by providing incentives for learning behaviors and by measuring and communicating results of learning. Third, the organization needs to define a learning structure that specifies the people who are accountable for capturing, distilling, applying, and sharing knowledge. The structure also should include networks and coordinating tactics that help information flow among the people who need it, when they need it.

Last, the organization must design intuitive knowledge processes that are aligned to how people work. These processes specify how staff members define a learning agenda, and how they capture, distill, and apply knowledge. These processes also include the technology systems for exchanging knowledge, but they need to keep people-to-people interactions at the heart of them.³

GAPS IN THE LEARNING CYCLE

More than 90 percent of the nonprofit leaders we surveyed reported that they care deeply about learning and actively strive to model knowledge capture and sharing within their organizations. And the majority appeared to be devoting significant resources to this work. The challenge, these leaders report, is defining clear goals for organizational learning, creating adequate incentives to invest the time it takes to capture and share knowledge, and designing intuitive processes that capture and disseminate knowledge.

The Goals Gap

The good news is that leaders say that they care a great deal about learning. But a third of the nonprofit leaders we surveyed report that their senior managers have not defined clear and compelling learning goals. And nearly six in 10 said they don’t track metrics for learning at the organization level. Without clear goals and metrics, it becomes that much harder to effectively deploy knowledge resources, measure progress, and influence behavior across the organization. So how might nonprofit organizations set clearer goals for learning—goals that clearly advance mission?

World Vision considers its mission accomplished when children have access to education and health care, participate in their communities, and experience God’s love in their lives. Following a period of fast growth, its leaders believed that rapidly sharing information on effective practices (and failures) from one field of operation to the next would be a key to changing children’s lives. They translated the broader strategic goals of the organization into a subset of knowledge goals, including the goal of deploying best operating practices across all relief and field operations. And they broke this down into specific activities and tasks necessary to expedite know-how around the world for practices such as training community health workers in AIDS prevention and patient care, increasing yields for subsistence farmers, and boring wells in arid regions.

To devolve ownership of these goals across the networks, the organization focused on strengthening communities of practice (CoPs), virtual gatherings of far-flung World Vision experts in areas such as education, health, agriculture, and water, whose shared experiences could drive institutional learning and change. As of March 2011, World Vision had 23 CoPs with a combined membership of more than 10,000, all using a SharePoint Platform nested within the organization’s global intranet. Each CoP is staffed with a senior leader, who listens to needs across fields and sets a responsive knowledge-sharing agenda, abetted by a dedicated administrator who manages and stimulates ongoing collaboration and discussion around key issues.

CoP members engage in different ways and groupings: Some plug in to listen and learn; others actively develop, review, and collaborate on global documents, including strategies and standards for their respective areas. Ongoing discussions take place around best practices, advice and support for applying them, and research proposals to find better answers. The CoP itself is the one place where members and broader management can find all the knowledge assets for a given sector, analyze them, and use them to manage change. Most CoPs also have regular WebEx meetings, where members can discuss issues in depth, as well as an annual meeting where a subset of members come face-to-face to share and strategize.

According to Monbiot, “We’ve had (CoPs) for years but they’ve been pretty informal. We’re trying to operationalize these and to ensure that all staff are involved.” Now that each of these communities has a formal leader—with a staffing allocation and administrative support—they are making strides. The health care CoP has been particularly successful, attracting 900 members in a matter of months, who now act as champions of effective primary health care practices throughout the system. Monbiot believes that clear leadership and goals are a factor in the group’s size and that most World Vision partner organizations have health specialists on staff hungry to share specific technical expertise.

Arizona’s Children Association (AzCA), a near century-old child welfare and behavioral health agency that links organization learning goals to its merger strategy, is another example of an organization that has achieved remarkable results because of its improved organizational learning process. Twelve years ago it decided to move beyond residential treatment for children, adding home-based supports and earlier interventions for families and children to its services. The organization pursued this expansion through mergers and acquisitions, growing its annual budget from $4.5 million to $40 million over 10 years. Throughout the process, AzCA not only acquired staff and programs—it acquired knowledge. As Fred Chaffee, president and CEO, told us: “We gain a nucleus of expertise because we got an agency and brought it in. … Then growth occurred because we have a statewide system and a knowledge base.”

The results of carefully managing the learning and sharing of a knowledge base can be powerful. One AzCA acquisition was the New Directions Institute for Infant and Brain Development, which teaches the science of brain development and specific strategies caregivers can use to enhance children’s learning. AzCA integrated that knowledge into its other services through a series of 13 workshops that New Directions co-founder Jill Stamm and her staff have given to AzCA professionals—about 450 employees—to ensure that they understood the growing emphasis on prevention. To reinforce these ideas, the workshops mirrored community outreach to caregivers and were filled with messages from the neuroscience community that apply directly to very young children and their families. Why teach youth workers about young children? Says Stamm: “Say, for example, a family has an out-of-control 10-year-old. Chances are they have a 2-year-old crawling around, too. We wanted all our staff working with youth to help ensure that the 2-year-old gets a better start and does not spin out of control.” The key is to understand root causes of behavior.

As a result of these workshops, says Stamm, AzCA professionals across Arizona began to incorporate prevention into their jobs. Some of the caseworkers in Prescott and Flagstaff changed their home visitation agendas to include discussions of children’s brain development. Now the regional AzCA offices always include the New Directions curriculum in their new-employee training, and New Directions is training caseworkers in four other states. Chaffee reports that the careful integration of personnel, budgets, and programs, as well as of knowledge from new organizations, has allowed AzCA to more than double the number of clients served and has reduced costs per beneficiary by 11 percent to as much as 40 percent. It’s also allowed AzCA to fundraise for merger efforts, because prevention can demonstrate payback in the cost and quality of a program.

Smaller organizations, too, testify to the impact of clear learning goals tied to mission. Adoption Resources of Wisconsin (ARW) is a $2.2 million statewide organization with 17 staff dedicated to finding a good, permanent home for every child in Wisconsin. It carries out its mission by offering information, training, and support to families and professionals and through ongoing advocacy work. The goal of its learning efforts is to determine which information and training is getting results for kids who need homes. For ARW, this means learning how many people are seeking information from them, what they’re looking for, and whether the information is meeting the needs of adoptive parents or their intermediaries. According to CEO Colleen Ellingson, “We have a massive database, where we log how we’ve serviced anyone over the existence of our organization. We have 60,000 unique visitors per year. Every month we’re looking at data on website usage. What are [current or prospective parents] looking at? What aren’t they looking at?” Program managers study these usage patterns to identify trends and respond to them, continuously improving their services.

Getting the technology right took time. ARW started with several, small, customized data systems in the mid-1980s. Five years ago, it migrated to the Defran data system to track greater volumes of data. Throughout, Ellingson has promoted technology investments as a way to learn more, reduce cost, monitor progress, and develop initiatives.

For staff at World Vision, AzCA, and ARW, the goals of knowledge capture and sharing are championed at the top and connect directly to the impact they hope to create—respectively helping the poorest of the poor toward self-sufficiency, helping youth break out of destructive patterns, and giving kids homes to call their own.

The Incentives Gap

Strategic clarity around the “why” of organizational learning can bridge the first gap in the learning cycle. But creating a culture that motivates each person in an organization to capture and share knowledge actively requires a rewards system beyond the clarity of a compelling goal—and this is where about half of the nonprofits we surveyed experienced a problem. Leaders report that they fail to clarify incentives for individuals, for teams, or for their organization as a whole. Yet incentives at multiple levels are often exactly what it takes to transform a goal into a priority that rises above competing demands.

About half of the nonprofits we surveyed do not evaluate or reward some of the behaviors that support learning. Specifically, four out of 10 nonprofit leaders said they don’t incorporate knowledge capture and sharing into how staff members are evaluated. In our interviews, we heard that measuring and encouraging learning behavior was the area where nonprofits struggled most.

A straightforward incentive strategy builds organizational learning responsibilities directly into the job. The Council on Foundations (COF), a national nonprofit membership association whose members’ collective assets exceed $300 billion, has no dedicated knowledge staff. Instead, knowledge is becoming an explicit part of the job descriptions for their member-facing staff, which make up about half of the organization. COF uses a customer relationship management (CRM) database to track interactions with members. It also uses CRM tracking to inform performance reviews, measure and evaluate staff on how well they capture and pass on learning to colleagues, enable richer services to members, and collaborate across departments to pass on best practices.

FSG, a 70-person nonprofit consulting firm, believes incentives start with whom you hire. The firm uses knowledge sharing as a criterion for recruiting, and evaluates it as part of performance reviews. Hallie Preskill, FSG’s executive director of strategic learning and evaluation, says: “We look for a certain kind of person—smart, humble, and curious. Wanting to share what they learn is part of their DNA.” She notes another motivator: productivity. “People recognize that sharing knowledge saves time and increases productivity,” says Preskill. “When a content area surfaces that we need to understand better, we’ll put a note on the intranet and people respond. Within an hour, you will hear from six colleagues with tangible ideas.”

At the same time, FSG’s human resources system rates performance and recommends pay increases based in part on the extent to which an employee contributes to the firm’s development of intellectual capital. In 2010, FSG hired its first director of knowledge management, who is developing a firm-wide knowledge management system so that people can access, store, and share information comprehensively and in real time. Says Preskill: “It is about people and technology.”

Not all incentives and rewards have to be explicit. KIPP, for example, sees a link between organizational learning, increased staff effectiveness, and intrinsic rewards for effective staff. According to Oakes, the rewards for participating in organizational learning activities are of three types: achieving better student outcomes by leveraging the collective wisdom of KIPP teachers; enabling personal satisfaction by providing a means for teachers to expand their impact beyond their classroom and school; and helping teachers find kindred spirits among fellow teachers, which builds community and can help retain effective teachers. Says Oakes: “We want teachers to build on each others’ work. Giving them a [learning] tool so they don’t have to recreate the wheel is the key. But giving them access to other educators, who think like them and are dedicated like them, helps them really participate in the broader organization and mission.”

The chance to deeply influence an organization or field can provide another intrinsic reward for staff to share what they know. The employees of In My Shoes, a small, peer-mentoring organization for youth aging out of foster care, find motivation there. As a newly acquired unit of AzCA, In My Shoes is using knowledge sharing to further twin goals: tuning the ears of child welfare professionals to the child’s voice in foster care decisions and smoothing the road to independence for fostered youth. At a recent training of 85 child welfare professionals, In My Shoes founder Christa Drake spoke about how a move into foster care can result in loss of independence, connections with family, and community. It’s frightening, she says, and yet, in the ebb and flow of the system, it is the adults’ voices that are listened to. Through storytelling, testimonials, and role-playing, In My Shoes is getting its message across and reaping policy changes. Arizona child protective services now requires every new social worker to receive training that includes perspectives of foster care youth. And Arizona community colleges have begun designating and training counselors to work with youth coming out of the foster care system, addressing personal needs that go far beyond course recommendations. For Drake, these are huge rewards.

The Process Gap

Once clear learning goals are established that align tightly to the mission, and individuals and teams feel motivated to reach for them, at least one key question remains for many nonprofit staffers: How? Through what processes do we capture knowledge, share it, and use it to increase our impact? The most important first step in closing the how gap is to make these processes intuitive. Identify who needs the knowledge, where the best opportunities lie for learning, and what systems fit best with the way people already work.

For many organizations, the No. 1 goal of organizational learning is to identify, codify, and disseminate best practices to ensure that they are used across the organization. But KIPP goes about things differently. “Knowledge sharing for KIPP is particularly powerful because we don’t have a master curriculum,” says Oakes. “Even within the regions, school leaders and teachers have discretion over how they’re going to run their classroom. We’re not going to tell you, ‘Here is what to do in 3rd-grade math.’ But we know there are fantastic things happening across the board; there are teachers who are getting results through creating an academically rigorous curriculum, but still bringing joy into their classrooms each day. … This past year, we identified 15 of KIPP’s most effective teachers and videotaped them and made their content available online. We’re highlighting the practices of these teachers, but we’re not saying this is the only way to do it.”

The online system, called KIPP Share, which was developed by the Cambridge, Mass., start-up Better Lesson, includes documents and multimedia and was designed to walk the line between highlighting effective practices and out-and-out recommending them. Besides displaying videos that demonstrate the practices of great KIPP teachers, KIPP Share helps new teachers find helpful classroom materials that experienced teachers have already created. And it remedies a major gap in knowledge flows that KIPP had faced: When teachers moved to non-KIPP schools, their precious materials left with them.

But virtual systems tend to become truly useful through painful user feedback, and Oakes was candid about the system’s flaws before developing KIPP Share with Better Lesson. “We found that we had tens of thousands of documents, but it was hard to make the most of them. Also, we learned that teachers want to understand the context of the document. Let’s say I searched for the US Constitution. On the old system, you’d get a laundry list of documents that had something to do with the Constitution. Great, but who is the teacher who created it, how does this document play into broader context? Now you get a list that tells you how the document fits into the curriculum of the teacher who created the material. It isn’t just about resources, but also about who created them.”

Oakes notes the importance of designing systems and processes that align with an organization’s culture. For KIPP, it was important to design a system that respected autonomy in what and how to teach. “We are learning a lot along the way and realize there is no one perfect solution to sharing,” acknowledges Oakes. “We are learning how important it is to continue to support in-person gatherings where teachers can exchange ideas, create relationships, and build community.” KIPP is in the process of creating measures of success for the new system. Ultimately, KIPP is looking to make an impact on students.

Clearly, this kind of national network or multisite entity creates rich opportunities for organizational learning—both virtual and face-to-face. Within such systems, effective tactics can range from the idea-specific to the broad or field-based. The Nature Conservancy, for example, makes extensive use of peer reviews for proposals on significant initiatives—such as mitigating coastal effects of climate change. One peer review tactic involves a board of peer reviewers, who sit in a circle and, one by one, name the proposal’s strengths— until they start to repeat themselves. Then they go around again, this time naming the proposal’s weaknesses. This way, the author of the proposal gets a dose of highly concentrated learning, directly from peer experts, before he or she begins to implement a strategy, which can help avoid missteps.

GETTING BETTER AT ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

In the early days of the Internet, it was said that the World Wide Web was the globe’s greatest library—only that all the books were on the floor. Many nonprofit leaders and staff no doubt have had similar feelings about their organizations: The organization’s hard-won knowledge is just lying there on the floor—or worse, checked out with the departure of a key employee.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Ensuring that knowledge flows throughout an organization, informing the quality of service to clients whose lives depend on it, takes hard work. But the steps required of leaders are pretty clear. (See "Creating a Knowledge-Sharing Process," above.) They need to set learning goals that resonate because they advance the organization’s mission; they need to reinforce a culture that rewards knowledge capture and sharing; and they need to engage staff in creating intuitive processes for making it all happen.

Technology advances may provide the tools for sharing knowledge more broadly and effectively, but as examples like KIPP, World Vision, and the Nature Conservancy show, adoption rates rise when the people-to-people element of shared learning is kept robust. This element provides context and enables advice and collaboration and, well, makes learning satisfying. Indeed, technology becomes a true multiplier of organizational learning when put in service of deeper person-to-person connections and exchanges.

Authors' note: The authors thank the Alliance for Children and Families, the Boston Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, and World Vision for inviting their constituents to join the survey. They also thank their research team—Peter Ross, Tessa Bysong, Aaron Pick, Jennifer Sauve, and Kelly Greenwood—and advisors Bradley Seeman, Ann Goggins Gregory, and Nan Stone.

Katie Smith Milway is a partner at the Bridgespan Group and head of the firm’s Knowledge Unit. She was founding global publisher at Bain & Company and is author of numerous books for adults and children, including The Human Farm and The Good Garden, both tales of transformational learning.

Amy Saxton is a former Bridgespan Group manager in San Francisco. In March she was named CEO of Summer Search, a national youth development nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. Saxton previously worked with the Broad Foundation and began her career as a consultant at the Monitor Company.

I remember arriving at Dhaka airport, clutching a notepad and holding a pen, with the immense desire to understand how Grameen had managed to empower millions of poor women through the simple technique of providing small, affordable loans. What was this fairy dust that allowed millions the ability to turn their dreams into reality? There were many things I learned during my 10-week sojourn in Bangladesh. They are perhaps best reflected in the story of Khairunissa Begum, a woman in her 50s whom I met in a remote village in the Bay of Bengal. It took me 24 hours on a launch from Dhaka to reach her small village in Patuakhali. I was stuck both by the area’s majestic natural beauty and by the simple lifestyles of the people.

Khairunissa had taken a loan of $100 from the Grameen Bank and invested it in her business. From that first loan transaction and the confidence it imparted, over time she built up a mini-financial empire in her community by owning a mithai (sweet-meat) store, a poultry farm, and a thriving public telephone call office. In other words, Khairunissa had become the business tycoon of her area. Khairunissa’s story is typical of many microfinance clients who start life in the throes of poverty facing an ocean of indignity, where the only things they own are the clothes on their back. In her case, she started her life owning only one sari, which she would wash from one side first and then wrap the wet end around herself before washing the other side, as she did not have the resources to buy another. Through the help of microloans, she now owns dozens of colorful saris, along with assets like a home and livestock, which she never could have imagined possessing a decade ago.

I was bitten by the microfinance bug after spending time at Grameen. But I was not entirely confident that I could transfer the learning to Pakistan. Yunus was adamant that Pakistan needed a similar enterprise, and he was willing to give me a loan of $10,000 to start a project along Grameen’s lines. But where was I to start and how? The first thing I had to do was to overcome my own insecurities; the fear of failure tormented me. But Yunus said, “Roshaneh, if you fail, tell the world it was Dr. Yunus’s fault!” I was lucky to have mentors like him who understood what it meant to set up a new entity from scratch.

The first step involved an extensive dialogue with women across urban and rural Pakistan, where my colleagues Sadia Khan and Mahbina Waheed and I set out to understand the constraints and challenges facing female business managers. I heard time and again from self-employed women that they had the skills, knowledge, and aspirations to grow their businesses, but they lacked access to capital to expand to the next level. During this research expedition, I was sitting with a young woman in a remote community in Okara, Punjab, who wove extraordinarily beautiful baskets and dreamed of selling her wares in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city. I realized that I had to help her with a financial solution, and that a specialized microfinance program targeting women from low-income communities was the need of the hour.

From 1995 to 1998, I launched a small action research program for microlending in three communities around Lahore. This was a period of myth-breaking for me and for many people—economists, civil activists, academics—who questioned the wisdom of what I was planning to do. I was extremely lucky that my own family, who are broad-minded intellectuals and have excelled in the diverse fields of law, art, and civil society, was sold on the idea of my development experiment and supported me from its inception. The first myth that I had to break in my mind was the visibility of women’s role in the local economy. I had grown up with the belief, corroborated by Muslim feminist literature, that low-income communities are divided into male and female spaces. Thus I assumed that the moment I arrived in a village, I would not see women transacting business in marketplaces and that most female businesses would be home-based.

So on my first day of work as a Kashf loan officer in a village 25 kilometers outside of Lahore, I was pleasantly shocked to meet a female entrepreneur. When I went up to her to ask her whether she was sitting at her husband’s store while he was away on an errand, she was both offended and amused by my question. At that moment I realized that I had imbibed millennia of patriarchal attitudes by making this assumption, and that I needed to change how I saw my own society. When I went into the store, she had customers. She asked me to sit down while she sold her male clients cigarettes and other items. Then she told me about a dozen other women like herself who were buying and selling, negotiating and contracting business, within and outside this community, and intermingling in the world of men.

Pakistan has been associated closely with the war on terror and highlighted as a country that continues to be a nursery for radical extremism. There is some truth to this picture. And yet, if we use this brush to paint a portrait of the country, our view will be too simplistic, for Pakistan is a complex country facing major economic, social, and political issues. Unlike other parts of South Asia, Pakistan was a latecomer to the field of microfinance, and it was only after the Kashf Foundation’s inception in 1996 that the concept of low-income microfinance emerged. Like other parts of the region, however, the microfinance sector in Pakistan grew rapidly, at an average rate of 40 percent per annum until 2007 and with a market penetration rate of 10 percent. In other words, despite the rapid growth of the microfinance industry, today it meets the needs of only 10 percent of the overall households that require such access.

A recent study by the UK Department for International Development, titled Access-to-Finance, has shown that more than 86 percent of households that require microfinance and other financial services in Pakistan are deprived of them. Also, overall microfinance operations in Pakistan are focused on retailing loans through a group lending approach, and there is little work being done on microsavings. Since 2002, however, eight microfinance banks have been established to offer savings accounts. Yet only 2.9 million people have access to these savings services, or around 12 percent of those who need them.

Currently, Kashf is providing loans from $150 to $500 to 300,000 families through a network of 150 branches. Originally, we followed a group lending approach, like Grameen Bank, but two years ago we moved to a business appraisal lending model, where we focus on building the entrepreneurial capacity of women and their families. The past few years have been difficult for the country, however, both economically and socially. Some politicians, seeking cheap public favor, have instituted loan write-offs, weakening consumer credit discipline and our ability to expand our programs. In turn, we have modified our methodology by focusing on a more customized lending approach.

Our new approach involves an extensive appraisal with our clients of the businesses they intend to invest in, as well as advice and training in areas such as debt management, financial budgeting, and savings. This focus on client education ensures that a strong and responsible relationship can be established between the customer and the microfinance institution, and that financial decisions result in economic opportunities for the client and her family. We have introduced an extensive client relations program, which includes a complaint resolution process and telephone hotline. Furthermore, over the past 17 years, we have realized that there was a missing link in our work: Savings is equally important for the economic empowerment of women and their families. As a result, we established the Kashf Microfinance Bank, a licensed entity that offers savings products to our clients along with credit and insurance.

Many people ask me whether the work of Kashf can make a difference in a country where 85 percent of households live on $2 or less a day. This question reminds me of the story of a boy who found himself on the seashore surrounded by thousands of dying fish. The boy started to pick up one fish at a time and throw them back into the sea. A man watching him from afar came up to him and asked why he was wasting his time. The boy said that if he could save even one fish, he would have fulfilled his purpose in life. I agree that microfinance is not a silver bullet, but it certainly changes lives. I recently met Kiyenat (which means universe in Urdu), the daughter of one of my clients. She was dressed in a clean blue uniform with blue ribbons in her pigtails, and when I asked her about her school day, she quickly took out her English workbook and proudly shared her lesson with me. That is the change that microfinance can make. It can change the opportunities for the future generations.

Roshaneh Zafar is founder and managing director of the Kashf Foundation in Pakistan. Previously, she worked for the World Bank in Islamabad.

Corning is adamant that the unfair distribution of power and wealth among and within societies is at the basis of existing and impending crises: climate change, nuclear proliferation, peak oil, water and food shortages, financial meltdown, social unrest. But Corning’s book is not a treatise on the global crises resulting from turbo-capitalism. The Fair Society, instead, is a rigorous attempt to reconcile the science of human nature with the pursuit of a fair socioeconomic system. The questions raised in his book—Is justice a social obligation or the interest of the stronger? Are we inherently just or selfish? Are capitalism and socialism fair? What are the central features of a Fair Society?—have been the central preoccupations of philosophers such as Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Kant, and Marx.

The importance of these questions cannot be overstated. For the last 30 years, socioeconomic policies at the national and global level have been dominated by free market fundamentalism, an ideology based on the assumption that people’s primary motivation is the pursuit of profit. In most established democracies, this doctrine has guided the macroeconomic agenda of both conservative and liberal administrations, or what Gore Vidal called “the two right wings” of the “Property Party.” It also has directed the global economic policies of international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, with disastrous social and economic effects for the developing world.

Working from the presumption that all people are inherently selfish, the proponents of free market fundamentalism have argued that their doctrine is the only public philosophy that works. It is a pity that countless studies, some of them quoted in Corning’s book, show exactly the opposite. To be sure, the science of human nature is far from conclusive. Existing evidence largely indicates that people are at times selfish, competitive, and unjust and at other times altruistic, cooperative, and fair. More important, cross-cultural research shows that our sense of fairness and unfairness is largely shaped by the social and environmental circumstances in which we live.

In the last chapters of the book, Corning proposed a “biosocial contract” to develop a fair society in the United States and around the world, which he describes as a “collective survival enterprise” able to satisfy the “primary needs”: thermoregulation, waste elimination, nutrition, water, mobility, sleep, respiration, physical safety, physical health, mental health, communications, social relationships, reproduction, and nurturance of off spring. A fair society, the author argues, can be created through policies aimed at promoting full employment, ensuring a living wage, strengthening welfare services, reforming the private sector, and developing a more equitable tax system. Corning argues that this biosocial contract can overcome the limitations and unfair qualities of both capitalism and socialism. Capitalism, he believes, is too unequal to allow poor people to meet their basic biological necessities, and socialism is too indifferent to meritocracy and innovation.

Corning’s proposal, I am afraid, is likely to be dismissed by both free market evangelists and the so-called moderate liberals. The former will judge it as an attack on their narrow conception of freedom; the latter will disregard it as a pie-in-the-sky idea. Corning’s proposal is necessary and on target, but at least two observations can be made. First, it is too reductionist to depict most human actions as motivated by what Corning calls the “underlying survival challenge.” There is more to life than satisfying our primary needs. Our existence has some deeper, more creative meaning than mere survival and reproduction.

Second, although Corning’s idea for a fair society is depicted as something new, the author admits that it is largely based on “a society that more closely resembles what already exists in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden.” Although northern European countries can be considered models of social capitalism, they are far more social than capitalist. It is curious that Corning does not address this fact. Is it too controversial to be acknowledged?

Still, it is refreshing to hear a public intellectual like Corning call for the pursuit of a fair society. Many will surely be skeptical about this proposal, or simply view it as sheer utopia. But the real utopia is the belief that the current social system can proceed unchanged.

Roberto De Vogli is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research focuses on how globalization, economic inequalities, and psychosocial factors affect health and health inequalities in developed and developing countries.

Much has changed in 175 years. And yet a quick glance at the latest thinking about not-for-profit management and philanthropy reveals some profound differences between the ways American and European practitioners look at today’s major societal challenges.

I went to Stanford University last fall to attend “Leading During Times of Change,” a nonprofit management conference organized by this magazine and the Association of Fundraising Professionals. I was with a group of peers from the Dutch charity sector, leaders in the fields of child welfare, health care, and philanthropic management. We enjoyed an excellent seminar complemented with instructive field visits to nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What probably struck me most during our visit is the almost unquestioned belief Americans have in the value of an entrepreneurial approach to just about everything—and with it, a deep-seated suspicion of anything that smells of government. Hospitals are better off if they are run like health care businesses, with clients rather than patients. Unemployment is best tackled by social entrepreneurs, who help people set up their own (small) businesses. Philanthropy is largely redefined as social innovation. And market failures are often seen as the root cause of societal problems. An entire worldview transpires through these assumptions, a worldview I only partly share.

ACT AS A CATALYST

I believe that the three main actors in society must all pay their dues. Businesses create economic value, provide jobs, and lay the basis for material prosperity. Governments set the stage, create and maintain a level playing field, pass laws, make sure there is an independent judiciary, keep us away from war and crime, collect taxes, protect the weak and vulnerable, and generally look after the public good. Civil society provides the checks and balances that are needed to hold government accountable and businesses transparent. It is that most valued place in democratic society where citizens rally together to pursue a common goal on a voluntary basis beyond the nucleus of their family or the context of their employer or political party.

In my preferred blueprint, civil society organizations are privately funded, to prevent collusion or mission creep; governments leave the provision of commercial services to entrepreneurs; and businessmen mind their business rather than tell us how to live or who should lead. Seen from this perspective, a thriving civil society is a good indicator of the health and wealth of any democracy. For nonprofit leaders, it is important to figure out where you stand in this tangled trio, to determine what type of mission you will try to accomplish and which management principles you will adopt before you frame an issue.

I lead the Dutch chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, an organization that aims to protect the world’s remaining and highly threatened diversity of animal and plant species (what E.O. Wilson calls “biodiversity”). We are not in business. Sure, our returns are measurable, but more in terms of stakeholder value rather than shareholder value. In our marketing and back office, we try to apply good business practices, with distinct value propositions, demonstrable cost leadership, tight budgets, and proper planning. But writing a business plan to save the planet’s biodiversity is not the silver bullet for mission impact. We see our funding and our actions predominantly as catalytic. We try to make as many people aware of the value of biodiversity as we can. We develop solutions with stakeholders from all sectors, and we strive for impact at scale through the adoption of new practices by businesses and the adaptation or introduction of supporting regulation by governments. At the end of the day we are a catalytic actor in society, harnessing public opinion, urging government to adequately protect the public good, and demanding that businesses accept their responsibility to decouple growth from environmental impact.

I would therefore avoid framing the root cause of global biodiversity destruction as market failure. Rather, what we have is a societal failure, the complexity of which demands a coordinated approach by business, government, and civil society alike. Often, it is the latter that acts as the most powerful force for change. And as change agents, we’d do well to seek inspiration beyond the language of business and entrepreneurship.

STICK TO YOUR MÉTIER

What if the language preference for business concepts just reflects a cultural curiosity of American life? I don’t think it is that harmless. Suggesting that sufficient entrepreneurial tools and practices will solve most of society’s ailments is a category mistake. It comes with the tacit assumption that society is better off when social entrepreneurs replace the many functions of government. This is a classic fallacy of development aid. When NGOs start delivering the services many poor governments can’t deliver, they involuntarily aggravate the problem rather than build a solution. Governments spiral into a starvation cycle. If citizens cannot hold government accountable for basic services, for the proper spending of the collective revenue for the public good, then on what grounds would they favor one government over the other in the polls? And what reasons would citizens have to pursue a government career?

It seems to me that some of these characteristics are not alien to, say, the state of California. The world’s eighth largest economy and home to some of the planet’s wealthiest individuals is barely capable of running a balanced state budget, while providing a minimum of basic and affordable services to its citizens, from health care to public schooling. There is tragic irony in this, as some of the world’s most generous foundations, finest NGOs, and best universities are part of the same societal fabric. And I think there is a correlation. When we place so much emphasis on the values of entrepreneurship to the extent that we start defining the poor quality of basic services as market failures, we may begin to think that the conception of a business plan is the mother of all solutions.

To American observers, Europeans may look like strange, egalitarian creatures. I proudly graduated from a public university in the Netherlands more than 20 years ago. Private colleges are still rare. The upside of this is that all Dutch universities, except one, rank among the world’s 200 finest places of learning. The flip side is that none of them is in the top 10. This is a matter of choice, of societal design, if you wish. Access to good quality and affordable higher education for the greatest number of talented young men and women—or intense competition to select the brightest with the biggest wallets. The latter is a good business proposition. The former, I think, is a superior societal alternative.

CEMENT TIES ACROSS SOCIETY

What would a fusion of both value systems look like? I am an admirer of the obsession with scale that is often reflected in the pages of this review. Yet the expectation of what American civil society, or social entrepreneurship, can do to solve today’s complex societal challenges seems to me a little over the top. With this can-do mentality, however, comes an infectious level of ambition and drive. Also, on the fundraising side, I never have met more impressive professionals than in the U.S. philanthropy sector. At the World Wildlife Fund, we manage to rally the support of every sixth Dutch citizen. Nowhere in the 100-odd countries we work in can we count on a bigger level of per capita support. Yet in our efforts to raise funds from “high net worth individuals,” as marketers call rich folks, we have only scratched the surface compared with our American peers.

In an ideal world, I fancy leaders at the helm of thriving NGOs who draw with equal ease from a business toolkit and from longterm, policy-setting practices in the public sector; who develop distinct skill sets for properly managing their organizations in the crossfire of well-resourced, profit-seeking organizations and the generally less affluent guardians of the public good we vote in and out of office; who can credibly speak on behalf of the constituency they represent; and who can inspire millions from all segments of society to safeguard the commons that is often left unprotected by politicians and businessmen.

In my fusion world of Euro-American civil society, we smartly mobilize every penny to support our greater cause. We are open about our failures, but we demonstrate impact at the highest possible scale. We borrow from businesses and business schools, but we do not blindly emulate their tools or practices. And we don’t replace government where and when it fails, but rather seek to cement productive ties among government, businesses, and citizen organizations. We also acknowledge that the holy grail of societal bliss lies not with us alone, but when all societal actors stick to their core while reaching out to cooperate for the greater benefit of all.

Johan Van de Gronden is CEO of the Dutch chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, known in Europe as the World Wide Fund for Nature. Before joining WWF he held senior management positions in the Netherlands foreign service, at the United Nations Development Programme, and in the private sector.

“Online game players have been seen as nerds or socially less skilled, lonely people,” says Kobayashi. This seemed strange to him, since gamers who have never met face-to-face manage all the communication, cooperation, and teamwork it takes to form clans and coordinate a castle siege. So in 2003 Kobayashi launched a series of surveys of Japanese players of Lineage, a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Game participants come together online as knights, wizards, elves, and princes to battle ferocious monsters and, incidentally, to chat about whatever is on their minds: family problems, sexual issues, discrimination, or the latest drama at work.

Because these groups coalesce around a single interest— the game—they tend to be more socially and demographically diverse than real-life communities. Kobayashi surveyed perceived differences in gender, age, occupation, residential area, way of thinking, lifestyle in offline world, and opinions about world events. Whereas membership in community groups tends to be bonding because of physical proximity and shared values, such reallife groups also carry the risk of becoming exclusionary. On the other hand, social capital in online gaming communities, Kobayashi found, is bridging: It puts players in touch with a broad range of people; the game can thus increase their everyday social tolerance.

“Playing online games could bring positive social consequences,” says Cuihua Shen, assistant professor in the Emerging Media and Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas, who was not involved in the research. “You have the opportunity to interact with people who are very different from yourself, people who you would never talk to in real life.”

If you learn to put up with interpersonal differences to battle monsters, that tolerance can carry over offline. Players become more accepting of others’ values and lifestyles, “which is essential in democratic society,” says Kobayashi.

Of course, online gamers aren’t playing to improve themselves or society. But could MMORPGS be designed to save the world? The World Bank Institute developed one, called Evoke, to empower players (especially in Africa) to solve global problems, such as hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, and climate change. [See “Game-Changers of the World, Unite,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2010.] According to game designer Jane McGonigal, slaying those real dragons would take about 21 billion hours a week of online gameplay.

Tetsuro Kobayashi, “Bridging Social Capital in Online Communities: Heterogeneity and Social Tolerance of Online Game Players in Japan,” Human Communication Research, 36, 2010.

A whole series of injustices arise from this power imbalance: a world where alcoholism and cigarette addiction are driven by the few to drive their corporate profits and fuel their greed; a world where fear and xenophobic nationalism are dressed up as patriotism, to keep people acquiescent and the powerful in power. Sometimes this power imbalance arises from the amoral logic of systems—markets that take no heed of the collateral damage of unemployment; food supply systems that are blind to malnutrition and obesity; cultural traditions that evolve into cruel hierarchies of class and caste and the diminishment of one race, gender, or caste to the point where it becomes second nature to the oppressed and abandoned to believe that their oppression and abandonment are the natural order of things.

And against this abuse, the common woman and man have one superweapon: the power of self-organized, self-supporting groups who throughout history have had the courage to stand up against the abuse of power.

Join the Club by journalist Tina Rosenberg could have been written at just about any point in history. It could have been written after the Chartists in the 1830s or the Peasants’ Revolt in the 14th century, after the ousting of Willem Kieft as director general of the early Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam or the 1912 Bread and Roses strikes of women in the mills of Massachusetts, or after the 1960s civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Writing now, in the 21st century, Rosenberg reaffirms that the power of people to organize and to seek self-help remains a phenomenal force, regardless of technological advances.

In Join the Club, Rosenberg shows how peer support can change the lives of the individuals involved, can change a whole economy, can bring down dictators, and can strike back against a thousand years of caste oppression.

Her thesis is a simple one. People are fundamentally social animals. In isolation a person can never “be all that you can.” When we are able to harness the power of being part of a group, supporting and being supported by those around us, we can achieve extraordinary things. The message is one of hope. This is refreshing, given that most books on peer pressure focus on the negative: on gang warfare and adolescent drug use or the political blindness of gated communities.

Join the Club is largely descriptive. Part of chapter 2 delves into the science of why people are societal animals, summarizing new research in neurology and genetics. Such science is fertile new ground for enabling readers to better understand the evolutionary advantages of peer support or for making the case that what distinguishes Homo sapiens from apes is not brain size or calculating power but their cognizance of and place in social groups.

Yet Rosenberg does not build on this argument, scientifically or philosophically, nor does she make any new sociological conclusions. Rather, she makes the case for peer pressure though a series of case studies, most of which have appeared in other guises and often more analytically presented. She looks at how peer pressure enables successful antismoking campaigns, the empowerment of outcast women in India through microfinance, the revival of megachurches, the success of calculus clubs in universities, and, my favorite, the power of the campaign slogan “He’s Finished!” in the Otpor student movement of Serbia. In her concluding chapter, she muses on whether peer pressure can be harnessed to counter the allure of violent terrorism.

Each chapter is enjoyable to read as a stand-alone description, but one is left wondering why Rosenberg picked the subjects she did. Ultimately, Join the Club fails to build a compelling case. It is description without critique or analysis. It will sit on the same shelf as James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, or, going back three decades, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in the way it reasserts that true power comes from within and from the support of our peers—not from wealth, technological supremacy, or fear. But I suspect it will be far less thumbed through than those texts.

Yet the basic message of the book is still true: Governments should always be a little afraid of their people.

Peter Walker is the Irwin H. Rosenberg Professor of Nutrition and Human Security at Tufts University and is director of the university’s Feinstein International Center, which develops operational and policy responses to protect the lives of people living in crisis-affected and marginalized communities. He was the founder of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ World Disasters Report, and he helped develop the Code of Conduct for disaster workers and the Sphere humanitarian standards.

One voluntary association that has remained vibrant, however, is the religious congregation. More Americans belong to religious congregations than any other type of organization. Therefore, Putnam and his colleague David Campbell focus on the religious lives of Americans, particularly as expressed in congregations. They are interested in how religion divides and unites Americans, and in the tolerance that is fostered through inter-religious engagement, providing a “grace” that contains great hope for society.

Putnam and Campbell use a nationally representative survey and site visits with a dozen congregations to try to get at both the statistical breadth of American religiosity and the varied ways it happens “on the ground.” They present the now-standard narrative of postwar American religion—that the social and cultural changes of the 1960s, and reactions to them, led to a split in American religious and political life. Religious conservatives and liberals have polarized, even within denominational groups. And those who are highly involved with their religious community—by attending worship services often, for example—have become more conservative. So a division between highly involved conservatives, on the one hand, and liberals and the nonreligious, on the other, has left a shrinking “moderate middle.”

But Putnam and Campbell also show that interpersonal religious tolerance and religious diversity have grown. How does polarization coexist with such diversity? The polarized clusters are apparently not accompanied by religious segregation. Rather, the fluidity of American religion that helped foster these divisions also encourages switching and connecting across them. Most people know someone of a different faith through extended family. The authors call this the “Aunt Susan Principle,” and claim it is “the most important reason that Americans can combine religious devotion and diversity.” A corollary, the “My Friend Al Principle,” reflects interfaith ties in non-family social networks, or through shared interests. The authors find that such bridging produces a slight, but general, religious tolerance and softens the potentially destructive aspects of religious divisions.

The role that organizations, specifically congregations, play in this story is not simple. The fluidity of religious involvement, and its intrinsic voluntarism, means that congregations have increasingly become places for the like-minded. Such homophily pushes clerical leadership to pander to the views of congregants, as the latter can “vote with their feet” if the place makes them uncomfortable. It is one reason that the authors find little overt politicking in churches—there may be subtle attitudinal shaping, but directive teaching or actual political mobilization risks alienating some members.

And yet Putnam and Campbell show that things are changing. Many churches have adapted to the advent of women’s equality, and although still overwhelmingly racially segregated, they are becoming less so. Clergy aware of the need to keep members have found that direct politics doesn’t help, so they encourage a type of practical tolerance and develop ways to interpret and present their faith. And when different types of people find themselves in the same congregation, the contact there fosters the good neighborliness and respect for diversity that the authors admire in American religion.

That said, there are fewer organizational lessons in the book than I expected. For a study predicated on the importance of associational belonging and network connections among groups, it gives overwhelming attention to individual-level data. The congregation vignettes are interesting and illustrative; they make the book a more engaging read. But this isn’t an organizational analysis of American religion, or one full of insights from organizational insiders. It is pretty standard—though very well done—survey-based social science about attitudes and behaviors.

American Grace is an optimistic book, and there is good reason for that. Compared with many places, Americans manage religious diversity pretty well and seem to be getting better at it. But it is important not to underestimate how religion divides Americans and is still intertwined with inequality and social conflict. Religion has adapted to, rather than led, most social justice-oriented change. And the book’s thesis is that social contact and familiarity help produce religious tolerance, not any particular theological doctrine. (Indeed, the most highly religious 10 percent are less tolerant.)

A common wisecrack about American religion is that it is “a mile wide but an inch deep.” That may also apply to American religious tolerance. Tolerance for diversity is not “pluralism”; as the controversy over an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan demonstrated, it often doesn’t take much to rile up animosities. Historically, acceptance of religiously marginal groups has depended on their adaptation to American Protestant middle-class culture. That largely remains the case.

Religion is not going away in our national culture, so it is reassuring to read a highly researched, clearly thought-out argument about why religious adherence and diversity continue to serve American society positively. This will be important to keep in mind on those days when news events reflect humankind’s darker side.

Rhys H. Williams is professor and chair of the department of sociology at Loyola University Chicago, where he also directs the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion.

“Happy” could mean you think your life is going well overall, as the word has connoted in previous studies. It could mean you smile and laugh a lot in a given day. Or it could just mean you’re not suffering much. The researchers used the Gallup World Poll, representing 96 percent of the planet’s adult population, to look at well-being from multiple angles. More than 136,000 people in 132 countries completed the questionnaire from 2005 to 2006.

It turns out that the kind of happiness money can buy worldwide is a high evaluation of oneself. The more wealth and luxury conveniences, such as televisions and computers, you have, the better you view your life. That rich people think they are happier even if they don’t enjoy themselves more is “not a surprise,” says Carol Graham, a happiness researcher and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The survey framed the self-evaluation question in a global context, asking people to rate their lives on a scale of “worst” to “best possible.” “And somebody in Togo knows the best possible life is not in Togo,” says Graham.

At the lower end of the income scale, money can contribute to feeling less bad: If it gets food in your stomach and a roof over your head, having more will decrease your anger, sadness, worry, and depression. After meeting basic needs, though, money loses the power to soothe—the United States is the richest nation and also populated by the most worriers.

As for actually enjoying oneself? Money is almost no help. The researchers found that social and psychological needs—being treated with respect, having friends, learning new things, doing what you do best, and being able to choose how you spend your time—trump everything else, no matter where you live. “The thing that surprised me most was how consistent some of these patterns were across different parts of the world,” Harter says.

Graham’s own research reveals similar trends. People in Afghanistan are happier than the world average; and “after having enough food to eat, the most important thing to Latin Americans’ happiness is having a friend or family member they can fall back on in times of need,” Graham says. Although it’s true that people in developing countries have the social and psychological means to be as chipper as New Zealanders (who scored first in positive feelings), happiness may not be an appropriate goal for development. “People make do with what they’ve got,” Graham says. “They adapt to prosperity and they also adapt to adversity. … People in Kenya are as satisfied with their health as people in the United States, even though objective standards are moons apart.”

Ed Diener, Weiting Ng, James Harter, et al., “Wealth and Happiness Across the World: Material Prosperity Predicts Life Evaluation, Whereas Psychosocial Prosperity Predicts Positive Feeling,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 2010.

“Villages were deciding what kind of local public good they wanted to build,” says Olken. “They had a block grant and they could decide how they wanted to use the money, whether it should be to build a road, or a well, or an irrigation system,” or something else. In one of the first randomized field experiments of its kind, Olken designated the political process itself. He picked out 49 villages representing more than 100,000 people participating in the Indonesian Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), which is funded through a World Bank loan to finance small-scale infrastructure activities. Some of the villages continued to choose their preferred proposal at a meeting attended by a small group of village leaders—the usual KDP way. In the remaining villages, Olken set up direct election-based plebiscites in which every eligible citizen could vote.

“The key finding is that the plebiscite process resulted in dramatically higher levels of satisfaction and legitimacy of the program and of the proposal,” says Olken. Having had the opportunity to vote, the people in the study were more satisfied with the development program and judged the winning proposal fairer. They were more likely to agree that the project was “in accordance with the people’s aspirations,” that they would use the project, and that it would benefit them personally.

Interestingly, this was true despite the fact that villages chose exactly the same proposals through both political processes. They decided to build roads and bridges about 60 percent of the time and water and sanitation projects about 12 percent of the projects about 12 percent of the time, regardless of whether the decision was made at a village meeting or by a direct election with 20 times as many people participating.

That direct plebiscite did not change the ultimate decision is surprising. Still, it makes the increase in satisfaction all the more striking. “It’s some of the clearest evidence we have that the process can matter even if the outcomes don’t change,” says Olken. It shows that “direct participation can be a legitimizing force,” and when soliciting local input for community-driven development programs, “the details matter a lot. There’s a real difference between direct participation and indirect participation.” time, regardless of whether the decision was made at a village meeting or by a direct election with 20 times as many people participating.

Benjamin A. Olken, “Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia,” American Political Science Review, 104, 2010.

West Virginia’s spirited response is among a growing collection of anti-hate stories shared on a Web site called Not in Our Town. “The story of resistance to intolerance is ever new,” says Patrice O’Neill, a documentary filmmaker whose work has sparked this grassroots movement against hate.

The Not in Our Town Web site launched in April, but O’Neill and colleagues at the Working Group, a nonprofit media company in Oakland, Calif., have a long history of producing anti-hate messages. In 1995, PBS aired their first Not in Our Town documentary about the citizens of Billings, Mont., rallying to resist white supremacists. As a follow-up to the broadcast, filmmakers offered to host town hall meetings with interested communities, using the Billings story as a starting point for conversation. “We expected to organize 10 [town meetings]. There were more than 100 across the country,” O’Neill recalls. “People recognized that we need to have discussions about how we treat each other.”

For most filmmakers, that would have been a satisfying conclusion to a project. But this story wouldn’t go away. O’Neill soon found herself fielding calls from Bloomington, Ill., where citizens were organizing a local campaign in support of African- American churches. “They had created a whole series of events around the documentary,” O’Neill recalls, “and so we went there with our cameras.” Similar events played out in Kokomo, Ind., and Columbus, Ohio. “People were ready to take the Not in Our Town story and make it their own. There were incredibly innovative actions taking place on the ground, and it was important for us to document those actions and retell those stories.”

Mark Potok, who directs the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, considers O’Neill’s work “terribly important. No town wants to say, ‘We have a problem with hate,’” he adds. But by gathering examples of citizens who do speak up when confronted with intolerance, the Not in Our Town Web site “has made this into a national idea. Communities can see how to use these events to create discussions that would never occur otherwise,” he adds. The Billings story stands out, he adds, “as one of the most brilliant, homegrown responses to hate this country has ever seen.”

As a grassroots movement, Not in Our Town has evolved in parallel with the Internet. At first, resources were simply shared on the PBS Web site. As the Internet became more interactive, the Working Group realized they needed to have their own Web site. They started creating the new site with help from the Bay Area Video Coalition. Several foundations contributed money to help pay for building the site. The next challenge, O’Neill says, will be teaching community members how to use digital tools to document and share their own stories.

Involvement in the Not in Our Town Web site “has changed me as a filmmaker,” O’Neill says, and has also shifted the focus of the Working Group toward advocacy. “There are lots of ways we could cover hate crimes. We focus on individuals and communities who are trying to create better, safer, more inclusive environments,” she says. By incorporating civic engagement into their work and expanding their reach through online tools, “there is a more robust life for our stories,” adds O’Neill. “People find their own, innovative ways to build on them.”

Although the program was discontinued in 1942 when the United States entered World War II, America had enjoyed her first taste of national service. President Clinton revived the form in 1993 when he established AmeriCorps. This program requires volunteers to commit 20 to 40 hours a week, typically in local programs that provide services such as building, tutoring, and cleanup of public areas. Some volunteers receive modest living stipends, and most are eligible for grants to help pay for college or student loans. President George W. Bush expanded AmeriCorps, and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, passed last year, promises to mushroom its size. Already AmeriCorps has provided volunteer opportunities for more than 500,000 citizens.

Given this legislation, write Peter Frumkin and Joann Jastrzab in Serving Country and Community, one might assume that “the slated expansion of national service is grounded in a deep and penetrating understanding of how service works and how it shapes the lives of young people.” But no such understanding exists, they say.

Indeed, despite racking up millions of volunteer hours and billions of dollars in expenses, the true value of AmeriCorps remains unexamined by both the federal government and the Corporation for National and Community Service, a public-private partnership charged with delivering national service in America. “It is still unclear,” the authors maintain, “who benefits from national service, under what conditions these programs work best, and how exactly they contribute to the strengthening of communities.” And so they wrote the book, hoping (quite rightly) to discover who exactly benefits from massive investments in national service.

Frumkin and Jastrzab begin their examination of national service’s value by identifying the visions people have of the purpose and impact of national service. After conducting a good number of interviews with leaders in the field, four distinct visions emerge: citizenship and civic engagement, personal growth, social capital, and public work. The authors define and explore each thoroughly, and name the main potential benefits in each category. They also research several national service programs, compare the data collected from those who served against similar groups who did not serve, and tick off which visions are fulfilled by each program.

The results of this study are, as the authors put it, “nuanced and at times unexpected. Positive effects are intertwined with negative effects, right alongside findings of no effects at all. Short-term and long-term effects at times coincide and at times conflict.” But in the end, national service seems to achieve all four visions in one way or another. And by the end of the book, the authors had provided one of the clearest and most concise examinations of volunteerism I have yet come across. Given the nation’s multiple programs, each with distinct yet overlapping objectives and politicians demanding various outcomes as proof of the program’s value, we need this book.

Yet I was left wondering if the authors hadn’t sidestepped the larger question facing national service: “Is it worth the expense?” Compared with the unpaid voluntary service of millions of Americans each year, who really benefi ts, and to what degree, from paid national service?

The authors answer this question only by setting aside the vast quantities of evidence they collected and reviewed and estimating “in a different way what the value of service might be on a national level.” They multiply a rather simplistic ratio of volunteer hours by the “conservative independent sector rate for the hourly value of volunteering" ($20). They then divide this number by the actual amount each program costs, concluding that “the benefits of national service outweigh its costs.” This summary argument is suspect at best, and at worst may actually argue against programs such as AmeriCorps. For many, national service programs offer “cheap” labor at too high a cost to the taxpayer. Unlike Roosevelt’s CCC, AmeriCorps is not combating the Great Depression, and it lacks the singular focus of environmentalism. It appears to be paying Americans to volunteer to work in communities—something that happens without government intervention or expense.

National service’s cost wouldn’t be a problem if it could achieve something above and beyond what traditional volunteering achieves. According to Frumkin and Jastrzab’s own research, however, this is not the case. Their conclusion that AmeriCorps’s greatest value is cheap labor seems to undermine the book’s original premise and may, in fact, arm AmeriCorps’s critics with the ultimate argument: National service costs too much and achieves too little when compared with the greater army of unpaid volunteers in America.

As the book concludes, the question remains: Who benefits from national service? I began reading Serving Country and Community as a strong advocate of AmeriCorps and other national service programs. Now I am not so sure.

Chris Jarvis is the cofounder of Realized Worth, a consulting firm that helps companies create corporate volunteering programs and social media strategies. He also writes “Realizing Your Worth,” a blog that focuses on corporate social responsibility and corporate volunteering. He has worked with nonprofits on their volunteer programs for the past 20 years.

Philanthropists, much like the general public, focus most of their attention and money on solving headlinegrabbing problems in education, health care, economic development, and the environment. Billions of philanthropic dollars, for example, are spent every year trying to alleviate global warming, yet relatively few dollars are directed toward improving the public decision-making process, an essential function in a democratic civil society and one that plays a critical role in determining the future of the environment.

Only a tiny fraction—at most a few percent—of philanthropic dollars go to support civil society’s institutional structures and to promote the values and norms of a flourishing civil society. This neglect represents a fundamental gap in philanthropy—one that can undermine philanthropy’s ability to pursue its other problem-solving goals. For without a healthy civil society and what comes along with it—such as an informed and engaged public—it is difficult if not impossible to solve the other pressing problems.

The reason that it is urgent for philanthropists and others to address this issue now is that there is an accelerating decline in the health of U.S. civil society. Evidence of this decline is all around us. The growing dominance of commercial forces in the news media, the erosion of the public’s trust in Congress, the declining membership in civic organizations, and the steady deterioration of civility in political discourse—all testify to the weakening bands that connect and support civil society.

If civil society is so important, why, one might ask, do philanthropists pay so little attention to its well-being? The reason is that most philanthropists use an instrumentalist approach to solving social problems, one based on applied science and business investing that can produce measurable and concrete results. Although some discrete and easy-to-measure problems—such as building affordable housing or providing job training—can be solved using this approach, many other problems cannot. And it is those types of intangible and hard-to-measure problems—such as increasing civic engagement or enhancing social trust—that characterize civil society.

FOUNDATIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Before delving further into why philanthropists have ignored civil society and what can be done to reverse course, it is important to first understand what civil society is. Although the idea of civil society has ancient roots, it first appeared in its contemporary form between the 16th and 18th centuries in Europe. This was the period of the growth of individualism and attention to individual rights, especially of the rights of belief and free expression, and of increasing demarcation between the realms of civil society and the state. Enlightenment thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and Adam Ferguson articulated elements of these early visions of civil society. Following this burst of interest, there was a long period of relative neglect of the concept. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in civil society.

Some contemporary observers have a narrow definition of civil society that equates it to the nonprofit sector or nongovernmental organizations. I draw upon a more expansive definition of civil society that includes these private associations, along with the institutions of the rule of law, philanthropy, a system of free expression, and the norms of individual rights, the common good, and tolerance.¹ My definition is similar to the succinct one offered by University of California at Los Angeles professor Helmut Anheier: “Civil society is the arena outside family, government, and market where people voluntarily associate to advance common interests based on civility.” ²

An important element of Anheier’s definition is its emphasis on civil society’s aim to “advance common interests.” Another way of stating this is to say that civil society (and philanthropy as a part of it) is a medium that coordinates individual efforts to provide public goods and diminish public bads. Indeed, practitioners of philanthropy view themselves as involved in the creation or preservation of public goods—such as public education, clean air and water, and cultural expression—and the reduction of public bads—such as global climate change, international violence, and poverty.

One of the reasons it is difficult for philanthropists and others to fulfill those noble goals is that there is a continual tension within civil society between individuals’ desire to pursue particular interests and the desire to pursue the common good. This tension poses two fundamental challenges: the problem of collective action and the problem of value pluralism. The first has to do with the difficulty of achieving collective ends, even when there is common agreement as to what those ends are, in the face of individuals’ self-interested behavior. An example of this is the “tragedy of the commons,” a term originally used to explain why groups of individuals, each using the same commonly held field to graze cows, often end up overgrazing the land. The term is now used to explain why resources held in common by humanity, such as the air and the oceans, are universally abused, causing global warming and ocean pollution.

The second problem, value pluralism, has to do with the achievement of common purposes in a world of competing and often incompatible understandings of what those purposes are. For example, some would characterize a good society as one in which any rational person can choose the time and manner of his death, and even have a physician aid him in the process. Others would see such a society as a violation of fundamental religious or ethical principles. Such fundamental value conflicts are famously described in philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s classic summation, “the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with one another.” ³

Resolving the tension among the competing interests, goals, and value systems of individuals in civil society, in a way that increases public goods and reduces public bads, is a complex task, much more complicated than the challenges one faces in business, where profit is a clear and single test of success, or in natural science, where variables can be limited and controlled.

COMMITMENT TO THE COMMON GOOD

There are two essential features of U.S. civil society that have experienced significant erosion in recent decades—the individual’s commitment to the common good and the civic function of the media. There is a great deal of convincing evidence showing that the decline of these two features has weakened civil society’s ability to perform its vital role of creating engaged and informed citizens.⁴

One of the foundations of American civil society is the commitment of individuals to the pursuit of the common good. From John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” invocation in 1630, to President Barack Obama’s stress on the importance of “the common good” in his inaugural address, concern for the well-being of the community and for future generations has been a sustained theme in American discourse. Admittedly, there has always been a tension in American society between the pursuit of individual interests and the pursuit of the common good, and the balance between these two norms has changed throughout U.S. history, but evidence points to a clear pattern of declining commitment to the ethos of the common good since the mid-20th century.

Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, has documented a dramatic drop in civic participation and social trust and a corresponding increase in the pursuit of individual ends and competition. Putnam and his colleagues developed a series of recommendations, described in the Better Together report of the Saguaro Seminar, to help generate new forms of social capital in the United States.⁵ Two of these recommendations are widely endorsed by scholars and public commentators across the political spectrum: strengthening civic education and enhancing civic engagement.

The Brookings Institution’s William Galston points to solid evidence that civic education leads to enhanced support for democratic values, tolerance, civic participation, and social trust: “The more knowledge we have of civic affairs, the less we have a sort of generalized mistrust and fear of public life. Ignorance is the father of fear, and knowledge is the mother of trust.”⁶ The important characteristic of effective civic education is an emphasis on ideals and principles that have direct relevance and consequences for the participants. Although a few foundations have sponsored research and education projects in this arena, notably the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, enormous opportunities exist for greater foundation support for civic education.

A second approach to strengthening the norm of the common good is promoting civic engagement, which encompasses a broad range of activities including political involvement, voting, advocacy, voluntarism, and active discussion of public affairs. Its enemies are apathy and open hostility to involvement in the public arena. Declining civic engagement is a many-faceted phenomenon that is difficult to identify with precision or to address in a way that yields quickly demonstrable results. Yet this decline poses a major threat to the functioning of civil society.

The elements of civic education, civic engagement, and social trust can move in either virtuous or vicious circles. In the positive mode, they create mutual reinforcement. In the negative mode, they generate a destructive cycle that undermines civil society.

A 2004 study of all forms of engagement across generations concludes that there is a dramatic pattern of decline in participation in public life, especially among the young, and warns that “the implications of this shift … are ominous.” The authors found that although the DotNet (ages 15 to 28) and Gen-X (ages 29 to 40) generations tend to show communal involvement at levels equivalent to those of older groups of Americans, their involvement in the political process is drastically lower. The authors conclude that “we may be witnessing a subtle but important shift in citizenship, away from a focus on government and elections as the mechanisms for determining the public good and toward alternative avenues such as the private sector and the nongovernmental public sector.”⁷

Some analysts see a possible countertrend in the rapidly rising participation in virtual communities, many of which involve discussion of and action on civic topics. MoveOn.org is a prime example of this form of civic involvement; the hugely popular practices of blogging and the civic use of social media are others.⁸ A number of researchers who have looked carefully at the relationship between electronically mediated communication and political participation, however, are less sanguine about the prospects for the future. They suggest that decreased face-to-face socializing leads to decreased political involvement.⁹

Active citizenship in a democracy requires people who are educated and engaged in civic affairs. Unfortunately, there are very few examples of foundations or philanthropists supporting activities that encourage these activities. The Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s long-standing support of civic deliberation and engagement is a rare example of philanthropy addressing this issue. Other foundations can support the expansion of civic engagement through programs that draw people into public decision-making processes such as deliberative polling, public forums, community organizing, volunteerism, and community service; and indirectly, through support of civic education.

CIVIC FUNCTION OF THE MEDIA

A healthy system of free expression, expressed most concretely as an independent and unregulated media industry, is a vital element of civil society and one that has been intimately connected to its historical development. The media are both a formative influence on citizens’ attitudes about public affairs and the primary vehicle for the expression of their preferences.

The declining viability of major newspapers is a particularly stark example of the precarious state of the civic media and the need for philanthropic intervention. Newspapers not only serve as vital conduits for the dissemination of information about public issues, but also generate the journalism that builds a base of knowledge about public policy. Their continued decline poses a distinct threat to the health of civil society. As the commercial marketplace appears no longer able to sustain newspapers and government sponsorship is inappropriate for obvious reasons, philanthropy would seem the logical source of continued support. Although some proposals have emerged for exploring this option, no significant steps have yet been taken.

Philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was one of the first to describe how privatization erodes the public sphere in Western democracies, inhibiting the ability of citizens to communicate with each other about issues affecting common concerns. In the contemporary world of the media in which commercial profits have become an overwhelming influence, segments of the public “mindshare” are bought and sold, and those who control major political and economic resources seek to manage public opinion through polling and advertising. The result is a civic information process increasingly controlled by market forces.

Some of the arenas in need of greater philanthropic support are strengthening the practice of professional journalism, encouraging government to be more transparent by making more of the information it creates easily available, funding organizations that do deliberative polling, and exploring ways to use new communication technologies to disseminate information and foster public deliberation.

The potential and limits of the new media (the Internet, cell phones, iPads, and other means of electronic communication) for building and sustaining civil society are still unclear. If the aspirations of new media optimists begin to be realized, the prospects for the growth of civic communication through the Internet are substantial. A modest investment by foundations in the exploration of the relationship between civil society and the Internet—both the possibilities and the limitations—could create great leverage in the future development of mass communications with a civic purpose.

In 2009, the Hellman Family Foundation announced a $5 million grant to create a nonprofit news venture involving the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, The New York Times, and other partners to provide regional news coverage in San Francisco and feed stories to media partners. Although philanthropists have funded other nonprofit news ventures, such as ProPublica and Kaiser Health News, the total amount of foundation support for this important component of strengthening civil society remains modest.

Several foundations stand out for their financial support of the media: the Florence and John Schumann Foundation’s work on transparency of public decision-making processes, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s and Carnegie Foundation’s programs to improve journalism, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ long-standing support for objective polling on policy issues, the Benton Foundation’s media policy initiatives, and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation’s continuing support for documentary film production.

PHILANTHROPY'S BLIND SPOTS

Philanthropists would seem to have a golden opportunity to address these weakened areas of contemporary civil society. But two tendencies that became prominent in 20th-century American philanthropy have made it difficult to do so: a growing instrumentalism and a corresponding narrowing of vision that limits philanthropists’ ability to adjust to the reflexive nature of social problems. The unfortunate result of these two trends is that philanthropists increasingly approach problems as if they were trying to practice social engineering or maximize their return on their investment.

Instrumentalism. The instrumentalist tendency is rooted in an epistemological orientation that began to shape American philanthropy in the late 19th century. Intended to counter the messiness, inefficiency, and arbitrariness of traditional charity, the efforts of the great foundations that arose in that era—those created by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Margaret Olivia Sage—were generally guided by a set of assumptions that can be characterized broadly as the epistemology of applied science. Their large-scale initiatives ushered in the age of “scientific philanthropy,” blending science and philanthropy in a particular way that was based in part on successful advances of the newly emerging science of medicine.

Scientific philanthropy pursued the discovery of causal agents behind negative social patterns, agents with a role akin to that of germs in disease, and then sought to eradicate them by using the proper remedies, equivalent to medical antidotes. The fundamental assumption behind scientific philanthropy is that it should aspire to gain theoretical knowledge and apply it through technical intervention, rather than to gain practical hands-on knowledge acquired from experience and apply it using judgment rather than calculation.

James Scott brilliantly analyzes this problem in his book Seeing Like a State, where he describes the superiority of practical hands-on knowledge (he uses the Greek term métis) to understand and intervene in society. His use of métis applies as much to the practice of philanthropy as it does to the limits of scientifically guided state action: “[Métis] is the mode of reasoning most appropriate to complex material and social tasks where the uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our (experienced) intuition and feel our way.”¹⁰

Indeed, most of the social problems that philanthropy seeks to solve are defined by characteristics of randomness, innumerable variables, the absence of the conditions of controlled experimentation, and indeterminate time horizons, all of which run exactly counter to the scientific method, which relies on prediction, limited variables, repeatable experiments, and control. For example, government agencies and philanthropists have spent vast sums of money in recent decades to improve public education, relying heavily on rigorous metrics such as standardized testing scores and student retention rates. The results of this scientific approach, however, have been unimpressive. There are simply too many variables and too much randomness in those variables—cultural, political, economic, and environmental—for a scientific approach to work. The same can be said of fields such as youth development, community organizing, care of the aging, the arts, policy advocacy, and most other arenas in which philanthropy is active.

A second powerful influence that has shaped the development of instrumental philanthropy has political origins. From the beginning of the republic there has been a long-standing argument between the Jeffersonians and the Federalists over the role of private groups in setting social policy. The democratic impulse to exert public control over the influence of private power surfaced with fresh force in the progressive era. Beginning with an investigation of John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropy in the early 1900s, suspicion about antidemocratic and unaccountable expansion of the power of the wealthy was a recurrent theme in political life throughout the 20th century.

Recently, the effort to make philanthropists more accountable has moved in a different and more problematic direction. What started as a legitimate public interest in avoiding outright fraud or the misdirection of philanthropic resources toward private benefit has become an unrealistic expectation for philanthropy to yield social benefits (however these are to be measured) equal to or greater than the costs of the tax benefits received. That, in turn, has led to growing interest in an instrumentalist approach.

A third major influence that has shaped the rise of instrumental philanthropy is the movement to apply to philanthropy the same metrics and methods used by for-profit businesses. It is expressed in proponents’ attempts to connect specific outcomes (stated at best in monetary terms) to particular financial inputs, often formulated as social return on investment, and to provide assurance to donors that their investments are producing demonstrable and, ideally, quantifiable results. Although it is not unreasonable that donors should be provided with evidence that their donations have yielded beneficial results, an exaggerated emphasis on metrics is becoming a driving force in the field, creating unrealizable expectations and a distortion of organizational priorities. This “huge push toward measurability,” as described by Intel Corp. cofounder and philanthropist Gordon Moore, skews the work of nonprofits through its narrow strictures and highly directive requirements of outcomeoriented funding.¹¹

The cumulative effect of these forces—the epistemology of the scientific method, accountability interpreted as accounting for quantitative value delivered, and an overemphasis on social return on investment—has created a powerful force, moving philanthropy to focus on highly discrete instrumental objectives and solve narrow aspects of social problems that lend themselves to measurement. This model has wide appeal, especially among philanthropists who have been successful in the business world, but it is fundamentally flawed in its ability to provide public goods, and its conceptual structure is seriously limited in its capacity to address the vastly complex, multivalent, and interactive problems of human society, which do not easily conform to linear, demand-driven solutions.

The Problem of Reflexivity. Philanthropy also has to confront the deeper issue of reflexivity, a problem that goes to the very heart of what it means to understand human action and social change. Reflexivity refers to the interactive nature of social knowledge and action—the fact that the thought and action of one person in a social situation affects and is affected by the thought and action of a second person in that same situation. Financier and philanthropist George Soros has pointed out the severe limitations of the simplistic market model in understanding and predicting complex social interactions.¹²

Soros points to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-99 as an instance of reflexivity at work in the financial system. The economic meltdown resulting from the mutually reinforcing judgments and gamesmanship of global players undermined what might otherwise have been a self-correcting market reaction. In the social sphere, countless ambitious programs of policy change—such as Prohibition, the Carter administration’s energy program, and “abstinence only” programs—have foundered on the failure to take adequate account of the attitudes and responses of those on the receiving end of the policy initiatives.

The tendency of philanthropic foundations to ignore reflexivity and place ever greater emphasis on narrowly directed funding targets and quantitative assessments similarly propels philanthropy toward a conceptual model that fails to do justice to the complexity of social life. The scientific philanthropy of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Russell Sage foundations in the early 20th century marked the beginning of this trend, but it became an even greater influence in the last decades of the century. Recent examples are the innumerable foreign aid projects that have failed because of the disconnection between donors’ visions and recipients’ needs. Similarly, the huge investment by a number of foundations in standards-driven educational reform in recent years has had disappointing results, due in large part, as New York University professor Diane Ravitch has forcefully argued, to the failure of large-scale philanthropy to take adequate account of the views of teachers, parents, and students.¹³

In the for-profit business sector there is a single purpose and a simple test of success: Does it make money or not? There is no equivalent unitary test in the social sector. To impose one in order to justify dollars invested in solving social problems distorts the nature of civil society. Civil society’s goals often include a wide range of subjectively understood actions, behaviors, and values that are differentially judged by donors, providers, recipients, and the public. It is precisely because commercial transactions fail to produce or adequately account for the reflexivity of public goods that civil society has developed as an alternative way to address public needs.

The critical need to take reflexivity into account is illustrated by the following example in the arena of policy advocacy. For more than a decade the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation supported the work of Compassion & Choices, an organization whose aim is to allow terminally ill people to have the right to physician-assisted death. Last year, the nonprofit drew upon language on human dignity that had been inserted in the constitution of the state of Montana in the early 1970s (along with some later legislative language) to argue successfully a case before the Montana Supreme Court on behalf of the “right to die.” The court’s ruling will have national and international consequences. This long-delayed but hugely important outcome of earlier philanthropic contributions was the result of visionary support of people and ideas that evolved in interaction with many other players, not of investments targeted to produce specific impacts that might be calibrated against alternative investments in a given time period.

THE TASK AHEAD

Philanthropy faces a dilemma. The most pervasive problems society faces—the need for quality education, improved public health, environmental protection, intercultural understanding, and global security—are public goods problems that civil society and philanthropy should be most able to solve. Yet, because of its increasing tendency to pursue narrowly focused, self-directed programs that promise market-like results, modern philanthropy finds itself limited in its ability to address just those problems.

The ultimate vehicle for the attainment of public goods in a democracy is the democratic process itself. But modern liberal democracy rests on a platform of civil society, and civil society both contains the tension between the private and the public and represents the possibility of balancing those polar forces in the search for solutions to public goods problems. Civil society, aided by philanthropy, is the logical vehicle to pursue public goods because it represents both sides of the equation—the freedom and creativity of individual action and the conscience of public responsibility.

Philanthropic donors, both individuals and foundations, should view one of their primary responsibilities as strengthening the structures of civil society. The question remains whether such an aspirational goal is achievable in an era when so many social forces are moving in the opposite direction. The answer is unclear, but one thing is certain: With so much at stake, enormous consequences rest on philanthropy’s ability to take on this task.

Bruce Sievers is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He was the founding CEO of the California Council for the Humanities and the executive director of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Sievers is the author of the recently published book Civil Society, Philanthropy, and the Fate of the Commons.