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News for July 2007
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 25 July 2007 |
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| The Nexilist's Notebook |
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By temperament and talent, Burt Webb is well suited to making the most of the chaotic edge that is today's state of information access and overload. Long before there were weblogs, Burt was collecting ideas that regularly crossed the boundaries of conventional categories and sharing them with anyone who would listen. Because I believe that it's conventional categories that got us into many contemporary messes, I have often been one of those listeners. Today, I have the genuine privilege of introducing you to Burt Webb, a man who I believe is working overtime to turn miscellany into holism.
Burt's Blog - The Nexilist's Notebook - is the latest addition to our network of authors, which already includes myself, Asher Bey, Gavin Clabaugh, and Phil Bereano. Phil (and I) and Burt have clashed on some very important issues in the past, which is one of the reasons that I am pleased to have him in this network. (I'm always fascinated by what you uncover when you tease apart disagreements.) I also think that Burt will add a strong element of linkblogging to the strong authorial lineup that we already have. I hope you'll take the time to read Burt's first few posts and comment or post to your own blog where appropriate. I know I will be doing that myself.
Posted: 7/25/07; 6:43:28 PM # |
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23 July 2007 |
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| Deeper Capacity Building For Greater Impact |
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Paul Connolly's recent briefing paper on the lessons of the Flint Funding Collaborative is entitled Deeper Capacity Building For Greater Impact (28 page PDF) and is a great addition to this field of philanthropic practice. Drawing from the critical study of real world lessons, the paper lays out this nine step process for pursuing a long term capacity building initiative: (1) Set Goals, (2) Establish the Duration, (3) Ascertain Your Resources, (4) Clarify Your Role, (5) Decide if You Will Work Alone , (6) Determine the Selection Process, (7) Choose the Assistance Types, (8) Decide How to Evaluate, and (9) Figure Out What Will Happen Afterwards.
Posted: 7/23/07; 10:54:59 PM # |
| How to Cost and Fund ICT |
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Marc Osten and Beth Kanter have recently completed a step by step guide on How to Cost and Fund ICT (76 page PDF). It's written for a Britsh audience, but that makes very little difference as far as its utility goes to voluntary organizations outside of Britain. In essence, the guide uses a series of worksheets to help lead an organization through some basic logic model development in order to connect impacts with an ICT initiative. Although I think it would still be easy to end up with a technology driven project, this goes a long way toward helping an organization tie their ICT to their program objectives. It's as good a self-guided process for a challenge of this scope as I have ever seen and I hope it gets very wide circulation.
Posted: 7/23/07; 10:40:56 PM # |
| Robin Hood Nest Egg Draws Scrutiny From Congress |
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The Robin Hood Foundation has gotten a lot of attention over the last few years, some of it well-deserved and some of it fawning. Now they are getting a new form of attention as congress takes a look at how they've been reinvesting their assets in hedge funds run by their board members and from which rather hefty fees are drawn. It's sadly consistent with the lies of our times that an organization that named itself after a mythical redistributor of wealth should be under scrutiny for self dealing.
Posted: 7/23/07; 9:57:30 PM # |
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16 July 2007 |
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| When College Ends, So Does Activism |
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I used to be very discouraged by how many of my college peers dropped their activist commitments when they left school, so much so that for a time I worked on a book that was to be depressingly titled Selling Out. In When College Ends, So Does Activism, Adam Donster looks at how that's a rational choice for most people. It's our economic and social structures, to be sure, but it's also a result of civil society's terrible underinvestment in cultivation of new leaders. (Elsewhere I have described how the right has something akin to cradle to grave job security for committed activists.) Fortunately, it's not too late to start taking this challenge seriously, but in the mean time, we are pouring people's passion down the drain.
Posted: 7/16/07; 8:47:59 PM # |
| Why Don't Affluent Baby Boomers Give More Money Away? |
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Anne Ellinger and Christopher Ellinger are the founders of something called The Bolder Giving Initiative, where they're answering this question: Why Don't Affluent Baby Boomers Give More Money Away? By combining peer stories and individual support, they are trying to bring my generation up to the standards of giving of the generations before us. Although they try to say otherwise, by focusing on those who give away more than 50% of their assets or incomes, they fall into a rhetorical trap that assigns the virtue of generosity to the rich. Nevertheless, I'm excited about both their mission and their model.
Posted: 7/16/07; 8:38:21 PM # |
| Do Nonprofits Dream of Electric Sheep? |
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I'm really not fond of the conventional notion that nonprofit organizations should act more like for-profit ones. Evidently, Gavin Clabaugh isn't either. Although I'm not sure he has his parallel structures within his title, in Do Nonprofits Dream of Electric Sheep?, he dissects that convention with his characteristic wit. He explores the sectors from a systems perspective, looking at the dynamics of incentives and economics and in his closing paragraph he says: "The for-profit world would be better off if it thought more like the non-profit; eschewing short-term gain in favor of long-term sustainability. Once you think beyond the next quarter, to the next quarter century, clearly the common good is also good for the bottom line."
Posted: 7/16/07; 8:28:49 PM # |
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10 July 2007 |
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| Attention |
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A lot of people are thinking very hard these days about the subject of attention. Usually, this is from the perspective of organizations competing for the attention of their stakeholders. In his Guru's Handbook article on Attention, Asher Bey looks at the topic from the perspective of the teacher: As someone with something to offer others, how are you husbanding your most precious resource? I think this lesson applies to teachers of all kinds, whether they are found in the classroom or in the public arena.
Posted: 7/10/07; 5:05:29 PM # |
| The Silver Plate |
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There has been a lot of hand waving going on for years now, in regard to the promises of online fundraising. In The Silver Plate, Gavin Clabaugh takes issue with the blanket promise being made by a lot of firms and consultants that money raised online is "growing the pie", rather than money that might have been given offline. I appreciate his critique. Online donors don't just materialize out of thin air, as much as we may want them too. And frankly, I think the best development programs are the ones that put themselves out of business, rather than waiting for someone else to do it for them. At the same time, I think the lower communication costs of online fundraising allows both better margins and substantially more effective cultivation. The latter, as I've written elsewhere, has the potential to be revolutionary, rather than just more efficient. Until then, all other things being equal, we are probably mostly moving people from one medium to another.
Posted: 7/10/07; 5:05:22 PM # |
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8 July 2007 |
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| Mindfulness, by Ellen J. Langer |
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In 1989, Harvard Psychology Professor Ellen Langer's book on Mindfulness was published and while I've read much on this topic all my life, it wasn't until this Spring that I finally read her book. The concept of mindfulness is reflected in a great deal of my consulting philosophy and while I have my own evidence for its effectiveness, this book has dramatically deepened both my professional appreciation and my awareness of the extensive research supporting it.
The first part of the book looks at the research on mindlessness (the opposite of mindfulness), its causes, and its costs. These are two of the most important themes relate to the role of context and the role of self-image in shaping our thoughts and behaviors. I've written elsewhere on how both people and organizations can have severely limiting self-images. The longer second part of the book looks at the research related to mindfulness itself, with particular emphasis on mindfulness and health and mindfulness at work. I particularly appreciated the insights about how often work can be mindless but how play, in contrast, is almost always mindful.
Civil society organizations, because they are so often about empowerment and working from the heart, are particularly well poised to take advantage of the many lessons in this book. Whether it's about preventing burnout by giving people more control over their work or supporting innovation and adaptation through nurturing an environment of creative uncertainty, this book is both inspirational and practical. I highly recommend it.
Posted: 7/8/07; 4:11:03 PM # |
| Speechless at Work |
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In the United States, it is entirely legal for an employer to fire you for expressing your political views, even if this expression doesn't involve the employer's resources in any manner. In Speechless at Work, Onnesha Roychoudhuri interviews Bruce Barry about this deeply troublesome influence of commerce over citizenship. I am curious: How do civil society organizations compare in their practices to private businesses?
Posted: 7/8/07; 3:29:14 PM # |
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6 July 2007 |
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| Union Leader Leo Gerard Looks At Clean Energy And Sees Good Jobs |
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A number of years ago (before the 1999 WTO meeting), I organized a regional alliance of environmental and labor organizations to respond to an international trade meeting in Seattle. I've been involved in numerous coalitions of that nature, on both trade and energy issues and I've mentioned such coalitions here from time to time. I've always felt that this was a critical divide for both movements to bridge in order to be effective. So, it was with some delight that I noticed the chills I was feeling as I read Sierra Magazine's profile of Leo Gerard, the head of the steelworkers' union in the US. It seems that the energy issue may bring us together after all.
Posted: 7/6/07; 2:57:32 PM # |
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5 July 2007 |
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| How to Write a Book in One Year: The Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop, Aug. 24 & 31, 2007 |
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Our Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop on How to Write a Book in One Year will be offered live on August 24th & 31st, from Noon to 1:30 pm (PDT). Among other things, this seminar is intended to help organize your writing and your life around each other, envision your book in a way that will support your motivation over time, and find your own work habits and tools for maintaining a pace of writing. I've been looking forward to teaching this seminar for several months now, because it always has the effect of getting me on track with my larger writing projects. If you've considered committing yourself to a book project, please think about joining me in this workshop.
Posted: 7/5/07; 4:53:29 PM # |
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2 July 2007 |
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| Funders Collaborative Companion Guide |
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I continue to be a great fan of the thoughtful work being done by GrantCraft. I recently had the chance to read their Funders Collaborative Companion Guide and I recommend it highly to funders and grantees alike. I particularly enjoyed their key insights related to sustaining and deepening collaborations once they've been formed, which include: seeing the big picture, creating trust and candor, accelerating the learning curve, promoting cooperation with corporate players, expanding the partnership, and coordinating funding.
Posted: 7/2/07; 2:42:25 PM # |
| 2007 Mothers' Index |
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I'm constantly on the lookout for cross cutting ideas, whether they are strategies, tactics, models, or issues. Given that 75 years of field experience has taught us that the quality of children's lives depends on the health, security and well-being of their mothers, I think there are a lot of organizations that might find the 2007 Mothers' Index to be valuable. What this index does, among other things, is assess the countries of the world according to various benchmarks that relate to motherhood, and rank them according to where it would be best and worst to be a mother. My birthplace (Sweden) is at the top. The very bottom ranks include Niger, Sierra Leone, and Yemen. The United States - probably because it has both first and third world economies in it - is somewhere in the middle.
Posted: 7/2/07; 2:36:35 PM # |
| How Fear of Failure Destroys Success |
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Adrian Savage - the author of Slow Leadership - has written a great little article on How Fear of Failure Destroys Success. He looks at cultures of perfection, clinging to the past, and why high achievers fail. I have found that it's very easy to get civil society leaders to agree with this notion, but very difficult to get anyone to act on it.
Posted: 7/2/07; 2:18:50 PM # |
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1 July 2007 |
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| The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 |
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David Wyld's widely lauded report on The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 (98 page PDF) is of much broader relevance than its title suggests. His insights into CEO and employee blogging outside of government are valuable and his ten tips for public sector bloggers are applicable to anyone in civil society who is ready to move toward more open and personal models of communication. Those ten tips are: (1) Define yourself and your purpose. (2) Do it yourself! (3) Make a time commitment. (4) Be regular. (5) Be generous. (6) Have a “hard hide.”
(7) Spell-check. (8) Don’t give too much information. (9) Consider multimedia. (10) Be a student of blogging.
Posted: 7/1/07; 8:03:07 PM # |
| Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contemporary Contributions to Progressive Strategy |
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Near the end of last year, Wolfgang Brauner and Charles Knight of the Commonwealth Institute finished a report entitled Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contemporary Contributions to Progressive Strategy (59 page PDF). I recommend this report to any leader in civil society who feels that they are in some way part of a larger movement for a just and peaceful society. Although this report leaves out a few very important modern strategies related to economic organizing and to global movements, it is a critical contribution in the area of approaches that might affect politics in the United States. Their approach includes looking at objectives, assessment, tactics, dynamics, resources, and evaluation for each of the strategies. The strategies they examine include many that I have discussed in these pages, such as: Green Party politics, "netroots" organizing, the Movement Action Plan, and the Apollo Alliance.
Posted: 7/1/07; 7:48:12 PM # |
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