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Frank Ellsworth and Joe Lumarda have written a book that, were I in the business of giving away money, I would want to own. Given what is covered in Foundation Management: Innovation and Responsibility at Home and Abroad, I have no hesitation recommending it to funders. But I have to confess that when I read it, I expected a different book and this review is colored by those expectations.
There are two essential words in the subtitle that might shape a reader’s expectations, as they shaped mine: “innovation” and “responsibility”. The book’s deeply qualified contributors ensure that it thoroughly addresses key contemporary topics regarding philanthropic responsibility. But by my standards, they fail miserably to tell us much about innovation.
This book covers things that funders absolutely need to know, including: the legal and philanthropic landscapes in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; the changing roles of legal counsel; new directions at the IRS; and prudent practices for managing a foundation investment portfolio, given many new laws and emerging realities (those two chapters alone are worth the price of the book). If you’re looking to give money more internationally, then this book will definitely help you be a very responsible funder. … [Continue reading...]
I have long had an interest in the extraordinary sustainability and harmony of monastic communities, particularly contemporary ones that don’t rely on coercion or a relationship with the state (or a great lord) for its membership. Unlike large scale cults that may recruit entire families and encourage them to breed, monastic communities rely entirely on bonds of practice and ritual. As we consider the notion of community building in an era dominated by loose ties, I think we may have a lot to learn from such communities.
Because my own predilections lean toward the more compassionate and less authoritarian models of community, I decided to read Thich Nhat Hahn’s Joyfully Together: The Art of Harmonious Community Building. I highly recommend it. Read it first once all the way through, to get oriented to the ideas. Then read it through with a notebook out and explore specific ways to adapt the ideas to the communities of which you are a part. There are clear and useful practices for small and large communities, for elders and young people, for established leaders and people learning to lead.
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I think most of us in the nonprofit sector, myself included, routinely misuse the word “strategy”. It ends up with a much broader and less useful meaning than it could. I try to correct this by clearly delineating between strategy and tactics in my teaching and consulting work. I do this in part to help offset our obsession with quick wins, tips, and tricks, and in part to help people identify the enormous returns we can get when we choose the right strategy for our projects. That’s the context in which I read Mark Kurlansky’s book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
We can look at civil society as a sector that concerns itself deeply with power. In social service work, we focus on empowerment at a personal level. In social change work, we focus on redistribution of power. (I personally subscribe to the notion that there can be deep synergies between these two approaches.) Nonviolence is about as far from being a “quick tip” as you can get. It is a strategy for power that changes the way we think about everything we do.
Living as we do in a time of perpetual war, it doesn’t take much to rally people, even most of civil society, around violent action. We tend to think we are being “realistic” when we do so. But the history of violent and nonviolent action reveals that the former almost never really works and that, at least sometimes, the latter does. Kurlansky’s book should be required reading in today’s schools, but failing that, strategic thinkers in the nonprofit sector owe it to themselves and society to know these things.
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People who work in civil society are not immune to the personal and political delusions about wealth that permeate our culture. Those delusions, combined with the service vs change dynamic in our sector, means that we often embrace “change” strategies that reinforce the status quo — whether it’s in our personal lives, organizational lives, or our economic lives as citizens. Given the prominence of the finance sector on our minds these days, I find that it’s a good time to recommend Wall Street, a book by Doug Henwood. Mr Henwood is one my favorite economists, right up there with Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. The book was written before the current crisis, which I believe gives us exactly the right analytical perspective. We are easily lost in the spin of the day, even our own.
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I read the WorldWatch Institute’s State of the World report every year. The 2008 Edition, subtitled Innovations for a Sustainable Economy deserves special mention. Even if you don’t think of your work as directly related to the environment, I encourage you to consider its connection to the current fate of the earth. In fourteen chapters by as many knowledgable contributors, this volume touches on a wide range of critical issues, including sustainable lifestyles, investing for sustainability, mobilizing human energy, and the parallell economy of the commons. There are issues here that touch on all the work of civil society, no matter how it’s otherwise framed.
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