Making room for young leaders

Turning 59 has sent me into a spin. I want to be young again. One of my favorite blogs is FLiP – Future Leaders in Philanthropy. The contributors are passionate, entrepreneurial, professional, and most of all: demanding. They have high expectations of themselves and the nonprofit sector. And, they will have more fun that I did!

Our Boomer expectations were too low—way too low. I am not saying we did not aim for high results. But, we thought long hours and low pay were measuring sticks of our integrity and commitment. We thought operating “on a shoestring” was admirable. So did Foundations and Boards, and now that’s proving problematic when organizations recruit successors.

Is there truly a leadership shortage taking place because Boomers are retiring from executive positions? There is no shortage of young people who can lead if they have the right tools and support. Lots of changes are already underway to give them what they need (more professional training, better salaries, more benefits, license to be entrepreneurial). More has to be done and I’ll be blogging on that in the future.

You can read about the life changes I’m experiencing in “My Journey: Looking at Nonprofit Work in a New Way,” Chronicle of Philanthropy. April 17, 2008.

--Wendy Bay Lewis

Town Halls for Nonprofits

In anticipation of the Nonprofit Congress June 1 - 4 in Washington, DC, statewide nonprofit associations are convening town hall meetings at the local level. Earlier this week, I was part of the town hall meeting convened by the Montana Nonprofit Association in Bozeman. Our discussion focused on three priorities for the Nonprofit Congress:

• Organizational effectiveness,
  
• Advocacy for the sector, and
  
• Building public awareness and support for the sector.

The New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits piloted The Primary Project to engage presidential candidates in talking about the nonprofit sector. See the video report.

--Wendy Bay Lewis, CivicMind.com

Even lawyers do national service

Broadly defined, national service could be any employment for the public good. In fact, it could include all of us in the nonprofit sector. However, national service is more often narrowly defined as a formal program in which participants work on community development, or teach, or serve in the military, usually for a year or more for nominal pay and sometimes in exchange for a small amount of funds toward college tuition. National service also comes with prestige.

One of the jobs I have not seen described as national service is Legal Aid Lawyer. Does national service assume an employment commitment for a limited period of time rather than a career choice for low pay? In an e-newsletter I received yesterday from the Legal Services Corporation, legislation has been passed by Congress for a loan repayment program for legal aid lawyers. The U.S. Department of Education would be required to “provide loan repayments of up to $6,000 a year—$40,000 for a lifetime—to full-time civil legal aid lawyers who agree to remain employed as such for no less than three years.” The U.S. House and Senate still need to reconcile different versions of the legislation and send it to the President.

The Legal Services Corporation was created by Congress in 1974 “to promote equal access to justice and provide civil legal assistance to low-income Americans.” Legal aid serves Americans who fall at or below 125 percent of the federal poverty level, about $25,000 a year for a family of four. For the 50 million Americans who are eligible for services, more than 50 percent go unserved because of the limited capacity of legal aid offices.

Does a 3-year commitment and a loan repayment option mean that legal aid lawyers are performing national service? Without those provisos, are they just low-paid do-good lawyers? For some people, national service is a career.

A table of contents for social change

This week I wrote a Table of Contents for The CivicMinded Companion, a dictionary for nonprofit and philanthropic professionals as well as everyday citizens. I hope The Companion will be a book that nonprofit executives can give to their Board members, young people will use to plan socially-meaningful careers, and Baby Boomers will read to learn how they can choose volunteerism or engaged philanthropy over retirement.

The book has four sections, each with two or three chapters. The opening section--Serving--will cover community service, service-learning and nonprofit essentials. The second section, on civic engagement, will inventory concepts like “public policy” and “transparency.” Section three, called One Nation/One Planet, will catalog the concerns that motivate, mobilize, and empower us, such as civil rights and environmental justice. The final section--Giving--is devoted to the philanthropic and business sectors, with special attention to new terms like social investing and venture philanthropy. At the end or along the way, I plan to include sidebars about historical and contemporary leaders for social change.

I know the Table of Contents will change as I write the book and I would appreciate hearing your suggestions.

Invest in leaders as well as projects

Foundations often seem separated from nonprofits by a moat. Each side communicates with the other when the drawbridge is down during a grant cycle. In contrast, Susan and Albert Wells, founders of the Windcall Resident Program for social justice leaders, built a footbridge for their private philanthropy. Over the course of 17 years, between 1989 and 2005, they welcomed 400 activists to their Montana ranch for two weeks of reflection and renewal. Susan tells the story of Windcall in her just-published book, Changing Course: Windcall and the Art of Renewal with Seven Profiles by Sally Lehrman (Heyday Books, Berkeley).

Although I have known Susan and Albie for 20 years, I learned much more about the Windcall Program from Susan’s book than either of them ever told me. Windcall alumni are community activists and organizers who work in low-income, usually urban communities and, prior to their mini-sabbatical at Windcall, rarely took time for themselves, much less vacations. As a direct result of their intense work, they suffered debilitating burnout and came to Windcall for a two-week respite. As Susan explains in her own words and those of the residents, they regained their equilibrium through experiences as varied as horseback riding, throwing clay pots, hiking, and writing poetry.

For the first time in their lives, these community nurturers were nurtured – by their hosts, by nature, and by each other. When they returned to work, they took their Windcall experience with them. As one Windcall alum told me, the program is transformative because Residents extend the lesson they have learned to their organizations, colleagues, friends, and families.

Burnout is a serious threat to leadership in the nonprofit sector. A survey conducted by the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network found nearly half of respondents intend to leave the nonprofit sector (some forever) and of those, 90 percent cited burnout “as a likely reason for leaving” followed closely by low salary, lack of career advancement, and job related stress. Stepping Up or Stepping Out: A Report on the Readiness of Next Generation Nonprofit Leaders is available from YNPN as a PDF file.

The nonprofit sector, like society as a whole, has embraced a work ethic based on “productivity and efficiency” which, in Susan’s words, “are antithetical to the very essence of social justice work.” She calls on funding institutions to take a longer view, beyond project performance, and “affirm the important relationship between healthy individuals, healthy organizations, and high-quality, enduring progress."

Philanthropy is not just a word

Over the past several months, I have collected about 200 words, names, and phrases for a lexicon that I think knits together civic, nonprofit, and philanthropic communities. Terms include everything and everyone from Bono, the rocker fighting poverty, to Yunus, the Nobel Laureate who created micro-lending. Now that I’m in the process of drafting definitions, I realize that words like philanthropy have an emotional power that exceeds what a simple definition can convey. Two examples landed on my desktop last week.

The Wall Street Journal and USA Today ran compelling stories on November 15 about the intersection of philanthropy, higher education, and economically disadvantaged students. The WSJ profiled a “nonprofit start-up in Palo Alto” called QuestBridge and several other organizations that help low-income students attend prestigious colleges (Matching Top Colleges, Low-Income Students).

USA Today ran a front-page story on The Fund for Veterans’ Education and similar programs modeled after the GI Bill to assist Iraq-war veterans with college tuition (College-bound GIs get extra help).

In both of these articles, individual funders were an integral part of the story because they were rich and well-intentioned. The new chief executive of QuestBridge, employed without pay, is “one of the multimillionaires” who left Yahoo; the founder of The Fund for Veterans’ Education is a “billionaire financier” who made an initial gift of $4 million; and a substantial donor to veterans’ scholarships is the “son of billionaire George Soros.” The emphasis on their monetary donations seems simplistic. True, they are philanthropists. But more than that, as these stories demonstrated, they want to remedy deep educational and economic inequities that nag at their social consciences. I would call them social justice philanthropists.

WSJ reporter Jim Carlton quoted the founder of QuestBridge, physician Michael McCullough, as follows: “We hope that in 10 years we’ll have added a new generation of talented and thoughtful minds to American leadership, drawn from the lowest economic spectrum.” In addition, as the article pointed out, universities benefit from admitting QuestBridge students by “increasing the diversity of their student bodies without relying solely on race.”

Reporting for USA Today, Mary Beth Marklein quoted Jonathan Soros about why his support reaches beyond scholarship recipients: “Veterans benefit from a liberal arts education, and the community benefits by learning from people of different backgrounds and confronting realities they wouldn't otherwise directly encounter.”

Philanthropy is not one size fits all. Phrases like “venture philanthropy” and “engaged philanthropy” have come into usage to describe strategies where donors take an active role in the organizations they fund. Perhaps “social justice philanthropist” might be used to describe donors, whether traditional or engaged, whose focus is economic, social, and environmental justice. Isn't philanthropy a tool for social change?

A rising tide lifts all the boats.

My research this past week focused on the common good and I got help from Congress. The House and Senate wielded their override power to circumvent the President’s veto and pass legislation to benefit the nation as a whole. The mammoth Water Resources Development Act authorizes $23 billion for water projects including everything from restoring the Florida Everglades and the Gulf Coast areas hit by Hurricane Katrina to sewage plants, dams, and beaches.

According to the New York Times, “Some critics said that the measure did not do enough to reform the Army Corps of Engineers, which would handle much of the work; that there is already a huge backlog of water-related projects waiting for money; and that the current bill was larded with political pork.”

Forty-five years ago, upon approval of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in Pueblo, Colorado, President John F. Kennedy had a much different outlook. He said, “A rising tide lifts all the boats.” Therefore, progress in Colorado is progress for the nation. “We are not 50 countries—we are one country of 50 States and one people. And I believe that those programs which make life better for some of our people will make life better for all of our people.”

He then called on Congress to write “a conservation record second to none,” to add three national seashore areas to the National Park System (Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Point Reyes in California, and Padre Island off the Texas coast) and enact “an open space program for our cities; a significant wilderness bill; and youth employment opportunities which would authorize a youth conservation corps.”

Kennedy recognized that truly beneficial programs have "significance" beyond their specific location, their immediate constituencies, and their moment in time. For him, the common good was a very expansive concept. I'm trying to capture that momentum in a definition. So far, I have a working draft.