Skoll has had multiple touch points - direct and indirect - with Kiva throughout its young life.  Kiva is a great example of an organization that has benefited from both the ecosystem work and the direct support the Foundation undertakes.  Matt Flannery starting blogging on the Skoll Foundation’s community site, Social Edge, in October 2005, right when he launched Kiva.  In October 2006, Kiva, which had been struggling to gain traction, got a huge lift when Frontline World ran a story on the organization’s work in Uganda as part of its series on social entrepreneurs, work funded by Skoll.  (You can read Matt’s blog entry about the impact of the broadcast here.)  Also in 2006, Matt was selected as one of the participants in Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI), an annual mentoring-based program to help a handful of promising emerging social entrepreneurs from around the globe scale their programs and connect to resources.  GSBI is supported by the Foundation.  Finally, in 2008, Matt and Premal received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

It’s been great to work so closely with such impressive leaders and such a great organization.  We look forward to the next four years!

The session Corporate Philanthropy: Evolution and Transformation examined how the business community can move beyond today’s economic and political disruptions and support the work of nonprofits in communities around the world – exploring collaborations between the private and the nonprofit sector. The speakers were:

(1)    Richard Brown, VP Philanthropy, American Express

(2)    Evan Hochberg, National Director of community involvement, Deloitte & Touche USA

(3)    Kerry Herlihy Sullivan, President, Bank of America Charitable Foundation

(4)    Dennis White, President and CEO, MetLife Foundation

The conversation provided several insights into how these individual organizations approached philanthropy and also the sector overall. I’ve grouped them into the following categories:

Giving Strategy & Priorities

The goal is to align business strategy to philanthropic needs of target community to volunteerism. Engaging their staff in the foundation’s work was identified as a key aspect that drives programming. Corporations can bring to bear more than money – the talent and time of their staff is factored heavily while deciding strategy. In the downsized economy, there has been a shift to focusing on higher impact programs – those that strongly leverage the corporation’s resources. There was also a growing interest in “collaborative giving” – partnering with private foundations, governments to support “high performing nonprofits to scale”. Panelists mentioned a few Skoll Awardees as examples of successful partnerships: Deloitte’s work with College Summit and Bank of America’s support of Citizen Schools (in partnership with the government and Edna McConnell Clark foundation). Kerry also shared that through collaborative giving the nonprofit is able to submit one report to multiple donors (less effort + builds on synergies).

Corporate foundations also have to balance the interests and strategies of the business. Panelists shared that their support is stronger toward nonprofits whose work align with the communities or consumers of the business. For example, American Express supports the national parks as part of its cultural preservation program – as it aligns with the business’s travel industry focus. On the subject of advocacy; corporate foundation might be reluctant to individually champion a particular policy they prefer to work in coalitions. Richard (AMEX) shared the example of “Winning Strategies” – an initiative that formed several working groups comprised of experts, practitioners and stakeholders invested in developing winning strategies for closing the social & economic divide for young black men. Through pooling their talents, knowledge and resources they aspire to positively impact school dropouts, joblessness and incarceration among young black men, and increase their representation in the pipeline to higher education. Learn more The Pipeline Crisis 

Unrestricted support/capacity funding

Panelists felt that corporate foundations get this need (“understand the correlation between investing in infrastructure and impact”) as it is essential for their business success. Therefore their support is often focused on building the capacity of the nonprofits. However, panelists felt that within the nonprofit sector there was a strong need for a broad-based conversation on capacity building and core funding. They also found it hard to track the impact of general operating support on the local communities and are exploring ways to link core support to social change.

One session was on how to better understand multi-generational leadership within your organization, develop mutual mentoring and peer coaching opportunities and create work structures that foster effective and efficient collaboration across generations. Some statistics that frame this topic is that baby boomers currently in leadership roles at non profits are seeing their work life extend – partly due to long/healthier life expectancies and partly due to having to work longer to support retirement. So how does one balance the tension of fewer available leadership roles with a growing number of youth (GenXers and Millenials) entering the work force and expecting to see growth opportunities? Questions explored during the session included:

(1) What are the structural/cultural issues that promote all generational leaders? How do we prepare/manage multi-generational staff?

(2) What makes people do their best work? – research indicates that they need to feel valued; clear measures of success; transparency of decision making (this is different from seeking input from others in that staff need to know how their opinion means to the senior leadership) and empowering decision-making at all staff levels (as formal policy and reinforced through informal conversations) – there is a need for ongoing leadership development.

(3) How do we change the leadership/career narrative? What is work life? How long is it? How does one factor in leadership growth throughout that timeframe?

(4) What are ways to strengthen mentorship models?

A study conducted by the Building Movement Project in partnership with Civic Ventures, a recent Skoll Awardee, explored the tensions between older (in terms of “encore careers” and younger workforce entering the non-profit sector. What emerged as an important ingredient in fostering collaboration was a focused approach to Talent Management - How to attract, develop and retain good talent? Strive to build a “Leader-full” organization where irrespective of title, staff are trained to be leaders in their space. The discussion did flag that often investment in talent is side-tracked due to the fact that non-profits operate in a resource constrained environment…so one suggestion was that senior leadership need to learn to distinguish between URGENT and IMPORTANT needs. While most tend to focus on urgent needs, which are often tied to programming and beneficiaries, the important, long term investment, in staff and talent is equally critical to sustainable growth. Finally a practical tip from an attendee: design cross-functional teams (up; down) that represents leaders from across the organization to lead major initiatives – it can help to promote collaboration and understanding across generations.

Another great session where the experiences of the attendees added to a rich conversation! We often get these types of questions on leadership from the social entrepreneurs we work with, most of who are founders of their organizations and are required to adapt leadership approaches as they grow – so learning from the experiences of others in the sector is very valuable to us.

This morning I attended sessions framed around the next generation of nonprofit leaders. The “2009 NGen: Moving Nonprofit Leaders from Next to Now” program brings together 200 professionals under the age of 40 to enhance their knowledge and expand their networks.

The first session was around nurturing leadership within your organization and the role of peers and mentors in bolstering your career. The speakers were David Simms, managing partner at Bridgestar and Michael Watson, senior VP of HR at Girl Scouts of the USA. The conversation was started with a list of questions that you need to ask yourself in order to identify and develop your leadership.

(1)    What are you passionate about? What brings you joy?

(2)    What are you really good at?

(3)    Are you getting candid feedback? How often?

(4)    What are you doing to develop yourself? Not relying solely on the org to provide training

(5)    Where did you experience a jump in leadership capabilities? What triggered this and how did you deal with it?

(6)    Who are your mentors? How do you foster intentional learning?

(7)    Do you know your true strengths? How do you use them?

(8)    Finally, who is at the organization because of you – this is not someone you hired but who are you motivating/inspiring to stay with your team/work?

In small group discussions there were many reflections on the challenges and the opportunities to foster leadership…that I am sure seeded many conversations that will occur over the next few days. I want to wrap up with an example that David provided - Imagine you are a sponge that captures a flow of leadership practice. After a while you are saturated and cannot absorb any more…that is the time to squeeze out what you have learned (ie: pass it on to others; motivating and sharing your knowledge) so you can be refilled with new growth. A powerful visualization to keep us on track as we apply leadership best practices!

Gene has a great set of lessons that he’s learned in the process of “building a program for today, but an organization for the long term.”  I think they’re worth repeating:

• • Do one thing well - beware mission creep.
• • Don’t say yes unless you mean it  - don’t morph what you do just to try to meet funder requests.
• • Magical thinking isn’t a strategy - we may all want something to be different, but we need to work with what we have.
• • Pay people fairly for what they do  - mothers2mothers pays their local community mentor mothers, whom they train intensively on the preventive medical practices and coaching techniques needed to make the program successful. (Sadly, this concept is not widely embraced among providers of public health assistance in Africa, many of whom still insist on volunteer community health workers.)
• • “Development” and “Advancement” are euphemisms for sales, marketing and investor relations - call things what they are.  There’s nothing wrong with this.
• • Technology won’t solve everything - mothers2mothers isn’t about the medicine, it’s about behaviors and practices.
• • Neither will process - it’s not about outputs, it’s about impact.
• • Neither cash nor caring are scalable commodities - you need to constantly replenish these.
• • Overhead is not evil - the best ideas, without an effective organization to deploy them, won’t succeed.

Among the honorees this year are Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who has lost three daughters to the conflict yet promotes its non-violent resolution, and U.S. Congressman John Lewis and Elwin Wilson, who reconciled over Wilson’s civil rights era violence against Lewis.  Inspirational folks. You can read about them here.

• - A former telecom executive who helped wire an Appalachian county and brought laid-off factory workers back to profitable farming;
• - A professor who invented a way to transform toxic fly ash into green bricks;
• - A psychiatrist who helps saves soldiers’ lives by offering free mental health treatment;
• - A former NASA exec who works to treat alcoholism in Native American communities by reviving old customs and traditions; and;
• - A couple who honor their son, killed on 9/11, by helping to bring mental health services to countries ravaged by terrorism, violence and war.

This is an impressive group of people.  Read more about them, and watch short videos on their work, here.

Congrats to Vera and the team at Renascer.

Great recognition for two great social entrepreneurs.