Weigh in on the future of networks and engaged communities!
Written by Diana Scearce on Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
As mentioned in an earlier post, the Monitor Institute is doing research with and for the Knight Foundation on the “emerging potential of network practices for informing and engaging communities.” We have had fantastic conversations about the topic with many luminaries, including Clay Shirky, Bill Traynor, Mimi Ito, Howard Rheingold and several other deeply thoughtful leaders from the Knight Foundation and elsewhere.
Based on what we’ve been hearing, we’ve developed a short list of driving forces that could shape how networks and network practices will help inform and engage communities. We would like to hear your opinions on which of these drivers of change are most important and what you think is certain about this space over the next 5 years. Your input will help us frame a powerful set of scenarios – or stories of the future. (More on scenario thinking here.)
We’ll use the scenarios to stretch our thinking about the opportunities and threats that the future might hold and thereby arrive at a deeper understanding of the philanthropic investment case for networks for community engagement. We’ll be sharing what we learn from you and others along the way. Stay tuned.
The survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. Please respond by Tuesday, August 31st. Thank you in advance for your participation!
Learning and Adapting Better in Today’s Rapidly Changing Landscape
Written by Gabriel Kasper on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
This post is fourth in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
I focused last week on a couple of the ways that funders can begin to “act bigger” in today’s more networked and interconnected landscape for public problem solving. But I want to also give a quick preview of the other major way in which we believe funders will need to improve over the coming decade: “adapting better.”
Adapting better is critical because even if funders begin to act bigger, mistakes made at a grand and ambitious scale are still mistakes. Funders will need to get better at developing judgment based on the best evidence available, and then try to learn and adjust rapidly as they go. › Continue reading
Networks and Engaged Communities: Beginning a Conversation about Knight Foundation Research
Written by Diana Scearce on Monday, August 2nd, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( 2 Comments - )
This is the first in the series of blog posts Eugene Eric Kim and I will be doing on networks and communities. We’re working together on a fun and fascinating piece of research for the Knight Foundation exploring the “emerging potential of network practices for informing and engaging communities.” That’s a big and abstract topic. Let’s unpack it a bit.
We’re looking at how social networks – loose connections of people—are and will be organized to make a difference in communities. We’re looking at how people are › Continue reading
Acting bigger by activating networks
Written by Gabriel Kasper on Thursday, July 29th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
This post is third in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Strategy Landscape, an innovation that the Monitor Institute has been developing to help funders better “understand their context”—one of the 10 next practice areas we discuss in our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy. The next practices represent principles and behaviors that are particularly well suited to the more networked, dynamic, and interdependent landscape of public problem solving that is now emerging. They’re approaches that we believe have the potential to become the widely accepted best practices of tomorrow.
The idea is that if the last decade was › Continue reading
Tools: making It easier to work in new ways
Written by Gabriel Kasper on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
This post is second in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
Before I dive into some of the different “next practices” highlighted yesterday that we think may become important parts of philanthropy’s future, I wanted to first say a few words about one of the key pieces of what I think it’ll actually take for funders to start acting bigger and adapting better over the next decade.
Change in philanthropy is especially hard. As organizational theorist Edgar Schein puts it, the only time that organizations learn and change is when the normal level of “learning anxiety”—the anxiety produced by having to shift and learn something new—is trumped by “survival anxiety” › Continue reading
Innovating next practices for philanthropy’s next decade
Written by Gabriel Kasper on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
This post is the first in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
When the Monitor Institute first started its exploration of the evolving “future of philanthropy” ten years ago, I was one of its funders, a program officer at the Packard Foundation. A big part of what we were trying to do was to create an urgency and an awareness that the world around philanthropy was changing, and that if philanthropy was going to remain relevant and achieve its potential in the coming years, the field—and the institutions and individuals within it—were going to need to change too.
Now, ten years and a financial crisis (or two, if you want to count the dot-com bust) later, I’m working on the other side of the coin. The challenge is no longer about › Continue reading
The “Green Revolution”: a case of being blinded by the new
Written by Noah Flower on Friday, July 23rd, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( 1 Comment - )
“New” is a powerful force for getting people excited. New technologies often create new winners and losers, and in the rush to be a winner, or at least find out who the winners will be, many of us end up getting a little ahead of ourselves. This pattern has been on full display in the past year as the complete story of Iran’s “Green Revolution” has emerged. Many of the most respected media outlets in the U.S. reported on the protests in Iran as being powerfully accelerated by the use of Twitter, and the State Department famously asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance out of concern that the downtime could hamper the protesters’ coordination. But now it turns out that it just wasn’t so: as documented in Foreign Policy and elsewhere, the tweeting was happening outside of Iran, serving only to spread the news from Iran to the world and hardly—if at all—used by the dissidents themselves. There were › Continue reading
New Monitor Institute report: “What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World”
Written by Noah Flower on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Filed under News ( Leave a comment - )
The world around philanthropy is changing much, much faster than philanthropy itself. An intimidating range of forces—globalization, shifting sectoral roles, economic crisis, and new technologies—are changing both what philanthropy is called upon to do and how donors and foundations will accomplish their work in the future. For philanthropic and civic leaders looking to cultivate change in today’s rapidly shifting landscape, simply tweaking the status quo won’t be enough. Funders will have to pioneer “next practices”—effective approaches that are well-suited to tomorrow’s more networked, dynamic, and interdependent context.
With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the publication of the Monitor Institute’s new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World. The piece updates our 2005 report, Looking Out for the Future, and represents more than a decade of work by the Institute in exploring the evolving “future of philanthropy.” It highlights the changing context in which funders now operate, and identifies ten emerging next practices that can help funders of all sorts increase their impact over the coming decade.
Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, What’s Next for Philanthropy argues that while the cutting edge of philanthropic innovation over the last decade has been mostly about improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of individual organizations, the next practices of the coming 10 years will have to build on those efforts to include an additional focus on coordination and adaption—acting bigger and adapting better.
We hope you find the report helpful and look forward to hearing any feedback you might have.
A prize for follower-ship: the new Smart Money Award
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Filed under News ( Leave a comment - )
Why don’t more philanthropists work together? It’s one of those puzzling things for anyone just arriving in the field. Every foundation aims to cultivate some variety of social change, many foundations have mission statements that speak of the same values, and many have programs with the same or similar goals. Donors likewise often cluster around the same values and support like-minded projects. But any veteran can tell you that the incentives in philanthropy are almost all oriented against working together, starting with the simple fact that philanthropy is a voluntary act of expression rather than a competitive sport for profit or a requirement mandated by the state.
The new Smart Money Award offers one small incentive in the other direction. Since following in others footsteps rarely earns high praise, it offers that praise officially, recognizing and honoring the choices of philanthropists choose to support worthy projects that already exist rather than striking out on their own. The inaugural recipient: the McKnight Foundation, which used $100 million earmarked for fighting climate change to three major initiatives that were already underway. › Continue reading
New report: scenarios of how technology can help the poor
Written by Noah Flower on Monday, June 28th, 2010
Filed under News ( Leave a comment - )
Our colleagues at the Global Business Network just released a major new report with the Rockefeller Foundation: “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” It takes a novel scenario-driven approach to describing how technology can alleviate poverty, tapping the tradition of scenario planning as a tool for strategic thinking that GBN has pioneered over the past two decades. It presents four stories (scenarios) that describe possible futures for the evolution of political-economy, technology, and the role of development over the next 15 years, and I’m happy to note that the stories all reinforce the importance of cross-sectoral and networked approaches to both problem-solving and organizational structure. › Continue reading
Highlights from the Personal Democracy Forum
Written by Heather McLeod Grant on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Filed under News ( Leave a comment - )
Once again I had the privilege of attending the Personal Democracy Forum in early June – an annual conference held in New York City that focuses on the intersection of the Internet, social media, and politics. Most attendees are part of the liberal “digerati”—bloggers, pundits, politicos, and campaign operatives—rather than social sector folks. However, the content at this conference is some of the best out there in terms of tracking the impact of technology on society and democracy. And, despite the paucity of nonprofit attendees, many of the presentations are very relevant to the work of social activists, particularly those concerned with civic engagement, grassroots organizing, or advocacy. › Continue reading
Noah’s Roundup for June 9th
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Filed under News ( Leave a comment - )
Here are seven particularly interesting items from the past month that I recommend reading:
- The Minnesota Community Foundation pulled off a very successful open grantmaking process with their new Minnesota Idea Open, a grant-as-prize competition focused on fighting obesity that used a diverse group of outside experts to vet the submissions and then tuned over the ultimate choice to a public vote. The process is closely aligned with that of the Knight News Challenge—and not surprisingly, the Knight Foundation was a sponsor. It went so well that the Minnesota CF now plans to make it an annual event and intends to let the public choose not only the winner but also the topic next year. Beth’s Blog has an interview with the VP.
- Twenty-one marquee funders are supporting a new initiative called Scaling What Works, a Grantmakers for Effective Organizations “action network” whose primary purpose is to › Continue reading
Webinar: Social Networks for Social Change on June 8th at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT
Written by Diana Scearce on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Filed under News ( 1 Comment - )
Heather Grant and I will be doing a webinar next week for Stanford Social Innovation Review. It will be an opportunity to present and discuss highlights from our recent SSIR article. We’ll also go deeper on recent research into social change with a network mindset and share a few tips for getting started working wikily. You can read more about the webinar and register at this page. Further details are below.
We hope you can join us! › Continue reading
New case study: KaBOOM!’s network-savvy path to scale
Written by Heather McLeod Grant on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Filed under News ( 1 Comment - )
We have just released a new case study focusing on KaBOOM!, an award-winning national nonprofit that helps build playgrounds in low-income communities, and advocates for children’s right to play. Rather than taking a typical approach to scale, KaBOOM! put its model online, and made it available to anyone, free of charge. Through a suite of online tools—including social networking, online training, codified content, and a Google-map mashup—KaBOOM! has empowered more than 6,000 communities to self-organize and build local playgrounds (far more than the 1,700 it built directly in its first 15 years). In so doing, it has had far more impact and reach, for far less cost. We look forward to your comments and hope that it will stimulate some new ways of thinking that might help you in the work that you do.
You can download the summary, the full report, or preview it below. › Continue reading
Philanthropy’s creative responses to the spill
Written by Noah Flower on Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( 1 Comment - )
The ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens not only the livelihood of many in the Gulf Coast region but also the health of one of the nation’s richest ecosystems, presenting philanthropy with a sudden demand for action. The story of that response, which will certainly span many years, is only just beginning. But there are already examples of how philanthropy is making a difference in ways that embody collaboration, rapid adaptation, and other progressive methods:
- The Environmental Grantmakers Association ran a webinar to discuss funders’ responses to the oil spill and encourage coordination. Over 200 foundations attended the event and EGA is now surveying the group to gather further information about their responses, which will serve to increase the field’s peripheral vision.
- The Greater New Orleans Foundation is using not just grants but also low-interest loans and guidance to help fishermen through its support of the › Continue reading
Working Wikily published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Filed under News ( 1 Comment - )
I’m very proud to announce that an updated edition of Working Wikily has just been published as an article in the summer edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This version contains new examples and is written in a more narrative format that is even easier to read. I hope you find it valuable. You can view it in the reader below or download the PDF from the SSIR website. Please pass it along to anyone you know who might be interested in applying these ideas to their work.
Network “leadership” or network “weaving”?
Written by Heather McLeod Grant on Monday, May 17th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
As part of our ongoing research and practice around leveraging network approaches for social change, Diana Scearce and I have been doing a fair amount of thinking about what it means to be a “leader” in a network. Our recently posted diagnostic tool has a few thoughts on the topic, as do the slides from various training sessions we’ve led. This recent post by Steve Waddell lists several new and helpful resources on the topic, building on new areas of research in leadership theory, and work being done at the intersection of leadership and networks, including this recent framework developed by Claire Reinelt and Grady McGonagill. › Continue reading
New whitepaper: information technology is “Disrupting Philanthropy”
Written by Noah Flower on Friday, May 14th, 2010
Filed under News ( 2 Comments - )
If you’ve found any of this blog’s content interesting and relevant to your work, consider the new paper Disrupting Philanthropy assigned reading. All of the new ways of working in the social sector that we describe in Working Wikily 2.0 are made possible by the wave of new tools and technologies that are now available, and this whitepaper gives a full accounting of the breadth and depth of that wave. The authors (pictured at the right) provide a guided tour through the marvels available today that not only did not exist a decade ago but could not have existed because the technology to make them possible had not been invented or adopted. You’ll find among their examples › Continue reading
Now available: the Network Effectiveness Diagnostic and Development Tool
Written by Diana Scearce on Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( 4 Comments - )
What does a healthy network look like? It’s a very subjective concept, just as the meaning of ‘healthy’ differs for people depending on age, gender, etc. However, just as with people, there is some consensus around what healthy tends to be, and conversely, what unhealthy looks like for networks.
Over the past few years, we at the Monitor Institute have created a diagnostic tool for assessing the health of networks. The tool is intended to help network weavers, network participants, and grantmakers reflect upon the health of their networks against eight commonly cited areas of network health › Continue reading
Thinking out loud about social entrepreneurs
Written by Katherine Fulton on Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Filed under Synthesis ( Leave a comment - )
Like many people, I have long worked to reconcile a dilemma. I admire so many of the great leaders who call themselves social entrepreneurs. And yet I am as certain as I can possibly be that in 20 years we will look back at the strategies that changed the world, and they will not just be about heroic individuals and the organizations they built. I know we need great organizations. But I also know we need great networks, great new laws, great movements and great ideas that spread far beyond their source. Hence the ongoing subject of this blog is one of the powerful new strategies: working wikily.
It was this context that made me an avid listener at this year’s Skoll World Forum, and a grateful recipient of Pamela Hartigan‘s wisdom. In her closing remarks, she proposed her own resolution of the dilemma I wrestle with. › Continue reading
