The workshop will focus on how this climate presents unique opportunities for this sector to become more intentional about strengthening the nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructure.

As a few of the grantmakers have been overly focused on mergers as the solution in these tough economic times, the discussion will highlight other opportunities shy of merger for collaboration and consolidation of management services.

Last Thursday I was chatting with a consultant colleague whom I’ve recruited to be on the panel.  She was recounting her own work facilitating mergers and how these experiences have left her convinced that mergers are often not worth the time and expense that goes into them. She was pointing out that mergers usually require costly consultation and legal services and amazing amounts of time and energy from the staff and board. Rarely did they result in more income to the new entity. While eliminating program and operational redundancies were positive outcomes of some mergers, there are other methods of achieving those same results.

I was agreeing with her that different types of consolidations — e.g.  parent/ subsidiary arrangements or the development of management service organizations — offered more opportunities for nonprofits to increase time and energy devoted to mission while improving the quality of financial and administrative services, and maybe even reducing costs  (or at the very least, decreasing inefficient or ineffective deployment of skills to task). We’ve both been participating in efforts here in RI and elsewhere to get the word out to nonprofits of all sizes of the other options worth exploring.

Barely do I hang up the phone when another colleague forwards me a copy of David LaPiana’s latest article, Merging Wisely, published in Stanford Social Innovation Review.  In the article LaPiana makes the case that funders shouldn’t necessarily be putting pressure on nonprofits to merge. Other forms of partnerships, including parent/subsidiary integration, management services organizations, joint ventures, might be much more effective.

I’ve personally been asking many of my strategic planning clients to at least imagine the possibilities these partnerships might present. I think you’ll find the article worth reading.

When CDCs work well, they demonstrate what is right with this sector. They are embedded in community, asking questions, responding to need, engaging residents. They exemplify the word partnership, making change happen through a complicated set of relationships and interactions with national powerhouses like Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and NeighborWorks(R) America, local for-profit lenders, public planning departments, sister organizations, community members, local public servants like the police, and more.

I’m in awe of their knowledge, commitment and ability to make big change happen.

I’m singing the praises of CDCs coming off five hours yesterday facilitating a strategic planning retreat with the Board and staff of Community Works Rhode Island, an affiliate of  NeighborWorks America.

Staff and board committees have been meeting and thinking over the last few months and this was an opportunity to come together and synthesize the work that has been done to date. For me, it is always a pleasure to work with caring, really smart, fun and engaged boards and staff, so thank you.

And WOW for their commitment — meeting together on a Friday afternoon till 8:00 in the evening. (I don’t know about you, but I do my best to avoid work on Friday nights).

There are a still a few more details before the plan is finished, but this organization already knows how to think and act strategically which is what ultimately matters.

Did I mention Community Work’s commitment to change that transforms communities? That word, transform, is in their mission statement and they take it seriously.

What’s as impressive is that this organization is the child of a recent merger between the Elmwood Foundation and Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services. Based in the Elmwood neighborhood of Providence, both CDCs have worked in Providence’s Southside for more than 30 years, creating close to 1,000 units of affordable housing and investing more than $60 million in the community. Kudos once again to my friend and colleague MJ Kaplan of Kaplan Consulting LLC for guiding these groups through the merger and for lining up a really stellar board.

Next for me, typing up those flip charts (not my favorite task) and merging all the details on paper into a written framework that reflects all the smart and truly strategic thinking that went on last night. Then guiding this phase of planning to its conclusion.

Mr. Nowak’s talk focused on the role of arts and culture in redefining and revitalizing cities. As part of its effort to capitalize on this enormous local asset by rebranding as “The Creative Capital”, Providence has recently launched a community planning effort called “Creative Providence: A Cultural Plan for the Creative Sector.”

Throughout his talk, Mr. Nowak wove an exciting and hopeful thread for a bold reimagining even as we experience the grim unraveling of an economic tapestry based on debt.

Using Philadelphia as an example (he hadn’t toured Providence yet) Mr. Nowak offered a number of illuminating examples of how artists and creative sector entrepreneurs, using an appreciative approach,  “uncover, express and repurpose assets.” Two examples included resuing heavy industrial mill buildings for creative industrial workspace or reclaiming vacant lots for a sculpture park that helped redefine neighborhood. The question posed to the room was how that ability of artists to see can be harnessed to truly reinvent cities that are searching for new identities and economic models.

In thinking about the many interesting concepts presented last night, I woke up this morning thinking again that this third sector of ours needs to stop apologizing for the way it works and stop idealizing some fictitious “smarter than us” for-profit business and leadership model. Instead, we need to reclaim and boldly proclaim our unique way of seeing based on quality of life, a belief in public service and a philanthropic compass to guide our action. It’s time to take the high ground for the what, the why and the how of the work we do.

“The idea that no person or organization is a stand-alone entity seems rather obvious. However, the extent to which a person is connected in a system can be much greater than one thinks. This was definitely one of the most important things I learned early on in this course. It is now something that I think about often…”

— Reina

As a teacher, it is always incredibly rewarding to hear back from a student  that they have found meaning and value in your courses. I always learn from my students — which is why I enjoy teaching (despite all those papers I have to review).

Poet John Donne may have coined the words “No man is an island, entire of itself” more than a half millenium ago, but I interact with too many nonprofit board members who haven’t discovered the power of systems thinking that Reina experienced in just a few weeks.

Each of us, both individually and within organizations are parts of larger systems – think “ecosysem” – that span both the natural systems which supply our water, air and food and also the global web of people, organizational, family and business systems.

How can you apply systems thinking to your organization?

You can start by becoming incredibly curious about the world around you. Here are a few questions to get you started:

• What outside forces affect the people we serve? How?

• What outside forces influence our organizational effectiveness?

• What is happening to those spheres to which we are intricately connected and how would/could that affect the way we work now and in the future?

• What about inside our organization? What is happening here? How do all the parts connect?

• What are the assumptions or “mental models” we carry in our heads? Are they shared throughout our organization? What would we do differently if we saw things from a different perspective?

You can use free or low cost software to make “mind maps” that help you trace how these systems work. You can find a list on Wikipedia to get you started at  http://tinyurl.com/25eq9p

In my view, the most unexpected of these factors is the success (and recognition) of old- and new-fashioned community organizing. And this, I think, is where nonprofits badly need to pay attention.

In TIME magazine, Joe Klein describes how an Obama volunteer spent six months gettting to know the folks in tiny Algona, Iowa, before his vital and surprising caucus victory in that state. Klein says “Obama’s decision to expend so much effort on a field organization was quietly revolutionary.” Schmitz notes that the Obama campaign refused to choose between online and on-the-ground organizing. It excelled at both, creating many different online and face-to-face niche communities and ways to participate in political action for Obama.

We know the result. The organizing strategy generated more dedicated volunteers, more cash contributions and more votes than anyone could have imagined. Now President Obama stands to? prevail in the political battles ahead.

What’s Obama’s political campaign got to do with nonprofits? These days, far too little. Hundreds of thousands of? nonprofits have become deeply integrated into the systems serving critical needs like health, education and many others. No longer movements, they have become guardian institutions for the status quo.

The imperative to capture resources to pursue already-settled courses of action means that the constituents’ money has far more value than their ideas or energies. These nonprofits spend heavily on direct mail appeals without investing in the back end to activate or educate constituents as volunteers and advocates. The message to donors here is: “Just send us the check – we’ll take it from there.”

But, the donors, like the voters, are fed up with enforced passivity. We don’t want “input.” We want to do something. Check out Paula Poundstone on NPR this morning. With great humor, Paula expresses my sense of anxious frustration as I wait for the Big Thing that President Obama will ask of us. We just want to help fix things.

Obama won our votes and our contributions because he asked for so much more. However, my guess is that President Obama will be far too busy to offer most of us satisfying opportunities to help save the nation. (Besides, he doesn’t actually know how to fix everything – some of this we need to figure out for ourselves.)

But our nonprofits do offer a vast range of ways ordinary people can help make the needed national change. The energy and optimism is out there to be captured, if only we can rediscover our neglected organizing muscles.

Block argues, and I agree, that “How?” isn’t the most important question. “How?” is a distraction from the important question “What resistance am I postponing?” or, in other words, “What am I really willing to commit to and act upon?”

I frequently share this quote with teams that are about to embark on strategic planning as I believe it captures the essence of the planning process.

“Most of our problems upon this planet … Have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage.”

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