http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en katiejh@stanford.edu Copyright 2008 2008-05-29T15:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/tackling_hiv/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/tackling_hiv/ “My uncle abused me sexually,” a female soccer coach tells a group of adolescent boys and girls in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a city with one of the highest HIV rates in the country. “I never told anybody because I was scared and didn’t understand what was happening. … I have been living with HIV for 10 years now.” Thus begins another series of Grassroot Soccer workshops, which tap into soccer’s phenomenal popularity in sub- Saharan Africa to educate kids about HIV. After telling their personal stories about how HIV has affected them, Grassroot Soccer coaches lead their students through 20 hours of educational and trust-building activities. The whole program takes place around a soccer ball. “We’re having fun dealing with a very sad thing,” says Tommy Clark, the organization’s co-founder. A retired professional soccer player, he is also a pediatrician and former research fellow in HIV prevention at the University of California, San Francisco. “The popularity of soccer in Africa is like football, basketball, baseball, and video games [in America] rolled into one,” explains Clark. But not any soccer star can teach the program. Clark finds that kids in the organization’s flagship programs in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and South… Health Care, Nonprofit Management 2008-08-05T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/books_to_grow_on/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/books_to_grow_on/ On a trek through Nepal in 1998, John Wood was dismayed to discover a school library bereft of books. And so Wood— who was then Microsoft’s director of business development for China—gave up his lucrative job to found the nonprofit Books for Nepal. By 2000, the organization had opened 26 libraries in Nepal and built two schools. Less than eight years later, the organization—now known as Room to Read—celebrated the opening of its 5,000th library. In the meantime, Room to Read grew far beyond Nepal’s borders: first to Vietnam, and then to Cambodia, India, Laos, and Sri Lanka. More recently, Room to Read began working on the African continent, launching South African programs in 2007 and beginning work in Zambia this year. How did Room to Read grow so fast? The media have largely focused on Wood as the catalytic figure in the organization’s success story. Of equal importance, however, is Room to Read’s solid and replicable operational choices. The organization relies on committed local employees, rather than on expensive expatriates. It partners with other education- focused NGOs. It adopts a social entrepreneurial mindset that encourages risk taking through pilot projects. And rather than simply rolling… Education, Nonprofit Management 2008-07-21T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/shes_crafty/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/shes_crafty/ From 1933 to 1947, Dr. Jayanti Mitrasen Mahimtura was among the legions of Indians who joined in her country’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. She took time off from medical school, did jail time twice for acts of civil disobedience, and wore only khadi, the hand-spun cloth that Mahatma Gandhi used as a symbol of India’s self-sufficiency. Today, Mahimtura’s granddaughter, Priya Haji, is a rising star in the fair trade movement. Haji’s company, World of Good, connects artisans—mostly women—in poor countries with trendy consumers in the West. The company first ferrets out handmade items from far-flung villages across Asia, Africa, and South America. It then cleverly displays the wares in affluent urban stores throughout the United States. Though Haji, the CEO, declines to release sales figures, she says gross revenues have doubled every year since 2004, when she started the company with two classmates from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Boutiques selling ethnic crafts like earrings, scarves, and bowls are ubiquitous in gentrifying neighborhoods. But Haji thinks bigger: Her company works with 150 organizations in 34 countries to source enough wares to stock mainstream retailers such as Whole Foods, Wegmans,… Economic Development, Nonprofit Management, Social Entrepreneurship 2008-07-06T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_equity_capital_gap/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_equity_capital_gap/ Imagine for a moment that our 21st-century economy were transported back to the 15th century. Businesses, by and large, would be tiny by today’s standards. Most revenue would be in the form of unwieldy barter rather than standardized currency, and profits would be thin or nonexistent, making it difficult to invest in new technologies or fund growth. Guild elders, the king, and other oligarchs, not consumers or the market, would have sway over the entrepreneur and the success of his business. And equity capital, used today to fund the growth of risky start-ups, promising midsize businesses, and large multinationals, would be unavailable. Does this scenario seem difficult to imagine in today’s world? Not if you’re an entrepreneur or manager working in the 21st-century nonprofit sector, where some of society’s most daunting challenges are routinely taken on with commercial tools and techniques that could have figured prominently in the 1394 poem Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. Although the social, political, and economic environments have changed enormously in the intervening centuries, and entrepreneurial ideas, techniques, and resourcefulness are now common among nonprofits, antiquated commercial habits still dominate the nonprofit sector and undermine its progress. First among these hindrances is this: Nonprofit enterprises suffer… Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy & Responsible Investing 2008-06-29T14:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/taking_stock_of_venture_philanthropy/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/taking_stock_of_venture_philanthropy/ In 2000, the San Mateo County library system piloted a program called Raising A Reader in 12 Northern California child care centers. The program taught low-income parents a daily routine of cuddling and reading to their young children. With its low-cost method for preparing children for kindergarten, Raising A Reader expanded to 175 communities across 33 states by 2008. Sixteen independent evaluations showed that the program fostered parent-child bonding and children’s cognitive development, and Fast Company awarded the organization its Social Capitalist Award three times. Behind Raising A Reader’s success and rapid expansion was the Center for Venture Philanthropy, a division of the Peninsula Community Foundation (now the Silicon Valley Community Foundation). One of the pioneers of venture philanthropy, the Center for Venture Philanthropy applied venture capital’s tools for incubating new businesses to social change organizations. The center has launched five social venture funds since its inception. For each fund, the community foundation taps into its vast network of local investors to raise money. Investors, in turn, work directly with the center staff and nonprofit clients to understand and address community and nonprofit issues. To fund and expand Raising A Reader, the center first worked with the organization’s leaders to… Nonprofit Management, Social Entrepreneurship, Philanthropy & Responsible Investing 2008-06-22T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/achieving_breakthrough_performance/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/achieving_breakthrough_performance/ Much has been written about what makes a great leader. Although we agree that successful managers must have the attributes of a great leader, by themselves these attributes are not enough. Many great leaders still do not build successful organizations. Much has also been written about what makes a great organization. But again, poor managers can cause great organizations to lose momentum. Our concern is different. We are interested in how successful managers can achieve breakthrough performance regardless of the quality of the organizations they manage. What we call breakthrough performance is the kind that positions nonprofits to create high levels of social impact and lasting change. Nonprofits that deliver great results over time are best positioned to survive, grow, and have an impact. Nonprofits that perform poorly, on the other hand, end up irrelevant or even as failures. And nonprofits that perform merely satisfactorily are vulnerable to shifts in the funding climate or the political environment. It may be easier to achieve breakthrough performance if managers find themselves in an organization that consistently outperforms its competition. But we want to help managers meet the challenges they face even when they find themselves in an average or underperforming organization. We… Nonprofit Management 2008-06-01T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_toughest_job_youll_never_get/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_toughest_job_youll_never_get/ Jacinda Abcarian, executive director of Oakland, Calif.-based Youth Radio, knows her organization from way back when. In the early 1990s, she was among the first high school students to undergo Youth Radio’s training program, which teaches media production skills and offers counseling services while supplying award-winning broadcasts to outlets such as National Public Radio. She then worked her way up through the organization’s ranks, from peer teacher, to reporter, to producer, to associate director, to managing director, and finally to executive director. “Little Jacinda the student is now the ED,” she laughs. Although Abcarian’s devotion to her organization is common in the nonprofit sector, her organization’s commitment to her may not be, suggest findings from a recent national study conducted by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Meyer Foundation, and Idealist.org. The researchers surveyed 5,754 respondents from nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies, 82 percent of whom had previously worked in nonprofits. Their findings, presented in a report titled Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out, shows that although some 32 percent of the survey’s respondents aspire to become nonprofit executive directors, only 4 percent are receiving explicit training for that position. And despite the fact that… Nonprofit Management 2008-05-29T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_problem_with_trust/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_problem_with_trust/ In the early 1990s, Janet Greenlee was working as a program director at a family service agency in Denver when the organization’s bookkeeper came to her with a dark confession: She was stealing from the nonprofit. The bookkeeper’s misdeeds started out small. Her car was in the shop, she was short on cash, and so she “borrowed” $10 for a cab. No one noticed. And so the bookkeeper decided to let the organization pay for the car’s repairs as well. Soon enough, she was regularly looting the till, rationalizing that the nonprofit didn’t pay her enough anyway. External auditors failed to find anything amiss. When the bookkeeper finally copped to her crimes, the organization’s executive director didn’t fire her. She was a well-liked, longtime employee, he said. Frustrated, Greenlee resigned. Some 15 years later, Greenlee is a professor at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, where she studies nonprofit accounting. In the December 2007 issue of the Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, she and her co-authors report research showing that the pilfering bookkeeper was a typical nonprofit fraudster: a female with no criminal record who makes less than $50,000 per year, steals less… Nonprofit Management 2008-05-11T06:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/marching_to_a_different_mission/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/marching_to_a_different_mission/ In January 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) – the forerunner of the March of Dimes. Its mission was “to lead, direct, and unify the fight” against paralytic poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio. To head the organization, Roosevelt had only one man in mind, his friend and former law partner Basil O’Connor. “I was never a public do-gooder and had no aspirations of that kind,” O’Connor later said. “But I started enjoying it.”1 O’Connor would not accept anything less than conquering polio. An autocratic leader, he built a formidable organization with a national headquarters and 3,100 county chapters. NFIP’s programs included grants for broad scientific research in viruses, cellular biology, and central nervous system disorders; professional education and training fellowships for physical therapists, physicians, and other health workers; public education about polio; and direct financial assistance for the care of polio patients. Instead of targeting big donors to support its multipronged approach, NFIP raised tens of millions of dollars from the small donations of tens of millions of Americans. The annual Poster Child, Mothers’ March, and March of Dimes fundraising campaigns rallied the nation against polio, a feared disease… Health Care, Nonprofit Management 2008-04-13T19:17:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_networked_nonprofit/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_networked_nonprofit/ Habitat for Humanity International is a classic nonprofit success story. The organization now includes 2,100 affiliates operating in 100 countries. It boasts a vast portfolio of corporate sponsors such as Lowe’s, Bank of America, and Cisco. And it has built 200,000 houses that shelter more than 1 million people. Yet according to the United Nations, some 100 million people worldwide remain homeless, and nearly 3 billion live in poverty. If Habitat for Humanity continues to build homes at its current rate, the organization will fall far short of its goal of eliminating homelessness and what it calls “poverty housing” – that is, the substandard, overcrowded, and even dangerous conditions in which many poor people live. But one country program, Habitat for Humanity Egypt (HFHE), is covering more ground in pursuit of its mission. Whereas a typical Habitat for Humanity country program produces around 200 houses each year, HFHE has on average built some 1,000 houses annually, for a total of more than 8,000 houses in just eight years. At the same time, HFHE has transformed the communities in which it works by collaborating with local organizations to address the… Nonprofit Management 2008-03-23T06:00:01-08:00