The Scout’s Report: May 15th
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
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We’re always on the hunt for the deeper news about social change. Here’s what we’d recommend from the past month:
The power of philanthropy in enabling impact investment
You could be forgiven for thinking that impact investing and philanthropy are different domains. Complementary, to be sure, but separate. But according to our colleagues at Monitor Inclusive Markets, you would be wrong. There are many ways that philanthropy is essential to the growth and development of impact investing, as detailed in their new report, “From Blueprint to Scale.” For more on the recent dialogue about impact investing, see this excellent roundup.
Dissecting the failure of KONY 2012
If you’re wondering why your city wasn’t plastered with the image of Joseph Kony last week, this piece will take you through the twists and turns that led from the campaign’s explosively popular video to a near-complete fizzle of on-the-ground action. › Continue reading
From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Thursday, May 10th, 2012
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There is growing interest in the role of market-based solutions in addressing the problems of poverty, through inclusive businesses that tap into the potential of the global poor as customers and suppliers—the so-called ‘fortune at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).’ Encouraged by the growth of microfinance, many promising new models are emerging. This has elicited a rush to the new field of ‘impact investing’—producing social or environmental good as well as financial return—with hundreds of funds set up in just a few years and billions of dollars waiting to be invested.
But many investors report that they are struggling to find good opportunities in which to invest for impact. Why is that? Will impact investors really be able to take new models for inclusive business
all the way from idea to scale? › Continue reading
A handbook for weaving high-impact networks
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
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How do you get a group of people to work together when there isn’t an acknowledged leader?
It’s a challenge that crops up in many places, especially when the people represent multiple organizations that are attempting to at least learn together and potentially take some form of collective action. People walk in the door with a sense of shared purpose, but the group often stumbles when it comes to making decisions. Oftentimes those who are invested in achieving a particular outcome will walk away frustrated, frequently not sure why it felt so hard to just do something.
Consultant June Holley has placed herself in these and other peer-to-peer settings for years, and just recently released a comprehensive guide for anyone who wants to navigate them well: The Network Weaver Handbook. Her tip is to step back from your goals and spend time working on the relationships and understandings that are shared within the group. If you see yourself as a “network weaver” — as someone who sees and actively strengthens the group’s relationships — then you can catalyze action within the group that would never otherwise have been possible.
The art of network weaving has applications in any situation where the strength of relationships and shared understanding can be an important constraining or enabling factor. For example:
- funders who share interest in the same issue and may want to take action together
- advocates with common cause on an issue who are hoping to align their campaigning
- nonprofit leaders who face similar organizational challenges and want to learn from each other
- grassroots organizers who want to spur large groups to action
The Scout’s Report
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Thursday, April 12th, 2012
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We’re always on the hunt for the deeper news about social change. Here’s what we’d recommend from the past couple weeks:
Audubon escapes state-level silos to focus on birds’ own flyways
Never say that an established nonprofit can’t be nimble. “We are a grass-roots organization that will continue to work locally, but we are building the necessary connectedness to make a broad conservation impact.” The leaders of Audubon Society are excited to launch a new strategy, re-imagining the organization around the flyways that birds travel rather than the state lines they ignore, and we’re proud to have developed it with them.
Five deep drivers of social change at work in the world
Want to think differently about how to cut in on your chosen issue? In case you missed it, SSIR has been running a series on five of the fundamental levers for creating social change in the world today. It’s a useful tool for sparking some new thinking on any issue you think you’ve analyzed to death, and a great way to get started on one that you haven’t.
The Network Weaver Handbook
Wondering what it means to “weave” a network? Want to cultivate the networks you work in, but are wondering where to start? This 376-page tome crystallizes insights from years of hands-on experience by long-time network weaver June Holley. Packard Foundation’s OE team launches an open refresh of their strategy, with a site and a blog: http://t.co/TgBU7WSA
Five observations of the zeitgeist at Skoll World Forum
1. It’s OK to make an economic return from solving social problems.
2. Measurement is no longer optional.
3. We’re in an age of social entrepreneurship 2.0 [which means more entrepreneur than social].
4. It’s cool to be corporate [and socially responsible].
5. People want to move the needle.
Leading, and communicating, in today’s hyper-connected world
“The new reality is that leaders don’t lead alone. We are all part of a much broader problem-solving network.” Three ways to do that with how you communicate: Share at every stage of developing knowledge, not just when it’s “done.” Engage continuously in genuinely two-way dialogue, rather than broadcasting an answer. Finally, make communication everyone’s job, and trust them to do it right.
“The 99% spring is here”
Will the hyper-decentralized Occupy movement persist? This organizer argues that it will, with 900 upcoming trainings in 49 states.
Do you have innovation obsession disorder?
“We humans have always innovated. It’s what we do. It got us out of the caves.” The problem is not that we’re not innovative, but that we don’t do a good job of finding and spreading what’s promising. A good point to remember–and one that makes social innovation a project that includes a far broader group than the oft-celebrated entrepreneur.
Innovating our way to a more principled capitalism
In the spirit of the article above, the new Long-Term Capitalism Challenge is calling for stories and “hacks” to shift us towards a capitalism that is more principled, patient, and socially accountable–in other words, they’re looking for bright spots to put in the spotlight. Got any suggestions?
The Scout’s Report
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
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We’re always on the hunt for the deeper news about social change. Here’s what we’d recommend from the past week:
Will social impact bonds work in the U.S.?
Social impact bonds are still in their early days, with only one working prototype located in the UK. Will this nascent model of pay-for-success work in the U.S.? This report represents inputs from 125 thoughtleaders and potential SIB players to examine the model’s strengths and challenges.
Lessons on funding social media innovation
A year ago, the Jim Joseph Foundation wanted to see the potential of new media applied to Jewish life, and decided to provide an innovation fund instead of standard grants. The three lessons they learned are applicable to funding social media innovation in any issue area.
ChangeNation: spreading proven models in new terrain
Government leaders in Ireland wanted to find solutions to their social challenges without reinventing the wheel, so they invited social entrepreneurs from around the world to share their solutions and brainstorm how to apply them locally.
“The Impact Investor: People and Practices Delivering Exceptional Financial and Social Returns”
This new report argues that the field of impact investing can already show strong performance, but needs greater shared understanding of what best practices can spread that performance more broadly.
New book on impact assessment: “The Good Analyst”
Investing for Good has released their approach to social impact assessment in the impact investment space as a free e-book.
The journey of a social entrepreneur
A beautiful use of Prezi to illustrate the path walked by many social entrepreneurs and the help they need along the way.
“What It Takes To Innovate: Wrong-Thinking, Tinkering & Intuiting”
Five practices shared by many of history’s most famous innovators that we could all benefit from applying when we go in search of new ideas.
The zero-hour workweek
A provocative perspective on run a highly effective team: what if principles guided the length of workdays, instead of a number of hours?
What will the most effective foundations look like?
Written by Guest author on Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
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This post was originally published on the James Irvine Foundation blog by Joe Pon, Vice President for Programs.
Irvine’s Board of Directors recently took time at their annual retreat to pose the question: What will the most effective foundations of the future look like? On hand to enliven the discussion were three leading experts in the field:
Lucy Bernholz, a highly regarded philanthropy blogger and managing director of Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors, discussed forecasts about the social economy that were contained in her Blueprint 2012 report. The social economy, as Bernholz defines it, expands the traditional concept of the space between government and commerce where philanthropy and nonprofits reside to include all of the ways we use private resources to create, fund and distribute public goods. In short, it refers to all the ways that we direct private resources to public goods and Bernholz sees great potential for innovation and collaboration within the field.
Brad Smith, president of the Foundation Center, emphasized the growing importance of data collection, analysis and evaluation within the field of philanthropy. One practice › Continue reading
Unlocking the potential of peer learning
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Thursday, March 15th, 2012
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Many funders are interested in using peer learning to help nonprofit leaders advance their capabilities. The model has a natural appeal. Field-wide capacity is never going to be built one organization at a time. Plus, it makes intuitive sense for funders to take advantage of their visibility into many organizations and look for opportunities to bring leaders together around a common cause. It’s a form of network building.
Peer learning is certainly not new, and there is rich insight draw on from the study of communities of practice. Yet, we still have much to learn about how funders can tap the power of peer learning. When should you (and when shouldn’t you) consider starting a peer learning group? How do you set up a peer learning community that can prove valuable to a wide range of participants? What role(s) might a funder play in initiating and implementing a peer learning group? How can insight generated by the learning group be made more broadly available? › Continue reading
Network lessons from the Pink Ribbon Rebellion
Written by Guest author on Monday, February 6th, 2012
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This is a guest post by Seth Cohen, the Director of Network Initiatives for the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.
Watching the unfolding events related to the Susan B. Komen for the Cure’s decision (and subsequent reversal) to stop funding Planned Parenthood, one couldn’t help but realize that we were watching our own revolution of the masses.
Unlike Tahrir Square and the Occupy movement, however, this latest chapter in our era of mass mobilization never really moved from cyberspace to the streets. It didn’t have to. As the nation of pink ribbons turned into a sea of red faces, Komen realized the rebellion in its midst and decided to change course. › Continue reading
Interview: now is the time to bring institutions into impact investing
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Thursday, January 26th, 2012
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I had the opportunity on Tuesday to sit down with Ben Thornley of Pacific Community Ventures, who has published a series of forward-looking reports on impact investing as head of their InSight program. After a year of investigation, he is about to release a new report next month about the potential for bringing institutional investors into impact investing, who collectively manage $22 trillion in capital. He gave us a preview of what he learned in the report and shared his point of view on where the field as a whole is headed.
Working Wikily: What did you find most interesting in the research you’re about to release?
Ben Thornley: It turns out that institutional investors engage in a relatively diverse set of activities that would meet the definition of impact investing, but call them by different names—responsible investing, economically targeted investing, ESG integration, and others. For all the talk of how fiduciary duty constrains activity, we were surprised about how creative they’ve become at ensuring that they can meet their fiduciary obligations and still have an impact.
New metrics and a new mindset for measuring movements
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Thursday, January 12th, 2012
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When you’re trying to build a movement, how do you know if your effort is reaping results? Across all the types of enterprises in social change, movement organizers are often seen as the polar opposite of straightforward service providers such as soup kitchens. It might be hard to quantify the emotional benefit of getting a meal when you’re hungry, but it’s often enough for the people running the kitchen (or providing the funds) to know that those in need are being helped. The situation is far more complicated for the people organizing civic action, whether one as wide-ranging as Occupy Wall Street or as focused as the campaign against fracking. You can measure the number of people who show up at an event, but how can you measure the gradual shift in mindsets, greater levels of political awareness, and the strength of grassroots leadership? › Continue reading
CalFOR: using impact investing to build regional food systems
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Monday, December 19th, 2011
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Last week I joined a group of about 70 or 80 people for a day-long working session on the connections between two active hotspots of social innovation: impact investing and regional food systems. Called the California Financial Opportunities Roundtable (CalFOR), it was hosted by Glenda Humiston and her team at the California USDA’s Dept. of Rural Development. They want to know: How can we help match up impact investors with enterprises that are building regional food systems in California?
It was a day of doing, structured as an innovation session, but also proved instructive and inspiring in seeing the frontier of progress for the issue areas of both impact investing and regional food systems. Here are some highlights from the presentations and plenary conversation that I think would be of interest to any fellow watchers of those two fields: › Continue reading
Experiments with networks are leading the way in community change
Written by Blog Admin on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
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By Diana Scearce and Noah Flower. (Also published on CausePlanet.)
Social networks are hardly news. Everyone participates in networks in our families, schools, neighborhoods and workplaces. For activists from Mahatma Gandhi to current Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street leaders, understanding networks, linking together citizens and harnessing the power of network connectivity have been central to creating social impact.
The reason to use the language of networks today is because there are now countless venues where citizens can connect with one another, nurture networks and create change for themselves and their communities. Many of these efforts were novel experiments just five to ten years ago. The crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi was piloted in 2007 and is now critical to relief efforts in crisis situations. Facebook has grown from zero users in 2004 to 800 million, or nearly one out of every nine people in the world. This story of an increasingly networked citizenry is also about face-to-face relationships. › Continue reading
Webinar: “Leadership for Networks Designed to Change Systems”
Written by Noah Rimland Flower on Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
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WHEN: December 6th, 2011
WHERE: Hosted online by Leadership Learning Community – click here to register
For six years, the RE-AMP network—comprising 125 nonprofits and funders across eight states in the U.S.’s upper Midwest—has been focused on just one audacious goal: reducing regional global warming emissions 80 percent (from 2005 levels) by 2050. And it’s working. Much has been written about the power of collaborative networks and shared leadership to increase social impact. For nonprofits and funders that want to go deeper on the tactics of how to build an effective network—and what kind of unique leadership is needed within networks—it is useful to understand how RE-AMP has done it.
RE-AMP’s process was grounded in the tools of systems dynamics and multi-stakeholder facilitation. But RE-AMP combined these well-known “best practices” with network-centric “next practices”—including different leadership at different stages in the network’s evolution. During its two-month study of RE-AMP, Monitor Institute identified six key principles that RE-AMP members followed in building their network and described them for other social-sector leaders in a case study, available on the Monitor Institute website.
Join us to learn about those six principles—with a particular focus on network leadership—and for a conversation about how to build aligned action networks powerful enough to move the needle on major social challenges.
Speakers
Heather McLeod Grant – Author of the report and a senior consultant with Monitor Institute.
Rick Reed – Original funder of RE-AMP with the Garfield Foundation.
The top ten things we’ve learned about networks
Written by Gabriel Kasper on Monday, October 31st, 2011
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The amount of knowledge and experience in attendance at last week’s Grantmakers’ Gathering on Networks was inspiring. So when Diana Scearce asked me to try to synthesize the learning at the end of the conference, I was at a bit of a loss. It didn’t make any sense to just stand up in front of the group and parrot the great things that all of the participants had been saying over the two days.
So I tapped my inner Francis Ford Coppola and decided to break out the video camera to make a short (but obviously masterful) video about the “Top 10 Things We’ve Learned about Networks,” using conference participants—the “people formerly known as the audience”—as the stars.
(You can also watch it on YouTube.)
Close the triangle
Written by Guest author on Monday, October 24th, 2011
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By Scott Bechtler-Levin, Co-Founder and President of IdeaEncore Network, an online resource sharing platform that builds networks to disseminate and curate nonprofit tools/templates.
After spending a couple days with nearly 150 smart, network weavers at the GEO/ Monitor Institute “Growing Social Impact in a Networked World” conference, I am reminded of one of my favorite quotations:
“The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know…” (Socrates, according to Plato)
One of many ‘ah-has’ came early during the well facilitated conference. It was just an off-hand comment from June Holley that the basic building block of network weaving is the “closing of triangles.” › Continue reading
The power of curation
Written by Guest author on Monday, October 24th, 2011
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By Paula Goldman (@pdgoldman) is Director at Omidyar Network and an expert on making unorthodox ideas mainstream.
The wisdom of crowds, the insanity of crowds.
Mention the word “network” to most people and their reactions tend to sway between these two polar extremes. It’s either “crowdsourcing is the answer to everything” –or it’s a complaint that social networks like Facebook and Twitter are just “too full of chatter.”
If I have one takeaway from the GEO/Monitor Group conference on Networks earlier this week, it’s about how crucial the curator is in determining the difference between a successful network and one that simply makes lots of noise. › Continue reading
Evaluating networks and their effectiveness
Written by Guest author on Monday, October 24th, 2011
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By Tom Kelly, the Associate Director for Evaluation at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland.
Lists. I am a list maker. To do. To followup. To call. And at a conference like Growing Social Impact in a Networked World, I made several lists–in my notebook, on my iPad, emails to myself, and on those very cool hexagonal Post-its. I will work through all of them over the next week or so but the list that will keep growing is the one of insights and new ideas I gained from hearing fellow participants share their knowledge, experiences, and tools.
I was very fortunate to be a part of the early Network of Network Funders community of practice. And it was amazing to be at this meeting and see and connect with real examples of foundations struggling and succeeding with networks in ways that were just notions (yes, hunches) a few years ago. › Continue reading
The new and the unknown
Written by Guest author on Monday, October 24th, 2011
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By Kate Wing, a program officer in the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Marine Conversation Initiative.
We’ve all been in a meeting where someone new to the field sits down at the table and says, “Wow – why don’t you all do it this way? Haven’t you ever thought of this?” about a topic where yes, the rest of us in the room have been thinking about this for a long, long time. Maybe we have our own special name for it, our insider’s jargon, and the newcomer just hasn’t learned the code yet. Or maybe it’s an idea that’s been tried before and failed. The old timers may respond wearily that this ‘new’ idea isn’t really new at all, it’s just unknown to the freshman. Where, they wonder, are the really ‘new’ ideas – brilliantly original concepts or things that have never before existed and will change the world the second they come into being? That’s the kind of ‘new’ funders like to fund. › Continue reading
Relationship building as a measure of impact
Written by Guest author on Thursday, October 20th, 2011
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By John Esterle, the Executive Director of The Whitman Institute
One of the themes raised up as the GEO/Monitor Institute conference came to an end was the importance of trust and relationship building in networks. Indeed, that was my theme for the day given that I facilitated a couple of morning conversations on that topic and then in the afternoon heard Ify Mora from the Barr Foundation talk about how they use social network mapping to capture the relationships that have been built through their innovative Fellows Program.
So, as I leave the conference I’m wondering how storytelling might be combined with social network mapping to make the broader case within philanthropy that relationship building — and the spaces and processes that support it — matter. It’s an important challenge to meet because I think that unless relationship building is broadly recognized as a key measure of impact, it will continue to be under-resourced (to the detriment of achieving the larger goals and outcomes people are working toward). › Continue reading
Network leadership: a few ingredients in the secret sauce
Written by Guest author on Thursday, October 20th, 2011
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By Kathy Reich, program officer for organizational effectiveness and philanthropy at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation
For a while I’ve been puzzling over what makes a good network leader. The traditional models of organizational leadership clearly don’t apply, but then, which models do? The Grantmakers Gathering on Networks provided a few a-ha moments for me about network leadership:
- The first leader or leaders in a network are like first responders at the scene of a crash—they’re in charge of making things happen until the structures get set up to fully address the situation. No one tells them to take on this role—they do it because they see the need, or the crisis, or (best yet) the opportunity. (With apologies to the woman in Rafael Lopez’s network leadership discussion group, who offered this great analogy and whose name I didn’t catch!)
- From Leslye Louie of Encore Fellowships (http://www.encore.org/fellowships), network leaders “Seed, then cede.” They find other great leaders within the network, then step back and let them lead.
- › Continue reading
