In a recent email from THE NONPROFIT QUARTERLY magazine they had an archived article about the need for story telling when it comes to building momentum. Seems to me one of the things lacking today in the discourse that is disguised as dialog is a context. Stories help us provide context.
We are in meetings a lot as people around Hartsville work to find ways to make this community even better. Sometimes we hear great stories, most of the time we hear opinions. The article in NPQ does provide some real food for builing a story-telling skill. Susan Nall Bliss wrote the article and she built a case for why stories are important and also provided examples from some master journalistic story tellers. Here is a paragraph sort of setting up the need for story telling: In the opening pages of Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller famously intones, “I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse.” Miller was castigating the inability of the myth of the Rugged Individual or the Self-Making Person to capture the reality of life for many Americans in the 1930s. A contemporary update might read, “I will give you the Ownership Society as it looks the day after the levees broke.” That story, still in the making, would focus our attention on the things we must do together, because they cannot be done individually: from building roads and a reliable healthcare infrastructure to improving schools and repairing the ladder of opportunity in our society.
I recommend this article and then I recommend HartsvilleToday as a place to put some of these stories that can be told for our community and some of the stories that you might imagine if we don't continue to pay attention to positive growth in our community.
Showing posts with label Non-Profit Quarterly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Non-Profit Quarterly. Show all posts
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Know what to starve and what to feed
The Current edition of NON PROFIT QUARTERLY contains an interesting article about leading in community building environments by a person named Bill Traynor, executive director of the Lawrence(MA) Community Works.
As I read this article I was struck by a core message of effectiveness and efficiency that discussed knowing how to feed those activities that help your organization and community move forward and starve those activities that gobble up your time, talent and treasure but leave you where you were when you started. Traynor is discussing techniques of what he called network leadership and the framing he uses for the discussion is a superior lesson on leadership in today's community building environments. I am hoping that I will be able to link to this article, "Vertigo" so that those interested will be able to gather the wisdom he is sharing. If not, you should get the current issue of NON-PROFIT QUARTERLY because the article is important for community builders.
As he ended the article, the author talked about the importance of having a supportive network who can congratulate you when you succeed and who can help you back on track when things go awry. "Increasingly we struggle together and are intentional about supporting one another—through forgiveness and truth telling—so that we can continue to build connected environments that feed the world by feeding the best of what it is to be human," is the way Traynor concludes the article.
It is worth the read!
As I read this article I was struck by a core message of effectiveness and efficiency that discussed knowing how to feed those activities that help your organization and community move forward and starve those activities that gobble up your time, talent and treasure but leave you where you were when you started. Traynor is discussing techniques of what he called network leadership and the framing he uses for the discussion is a superior lesson on leadership in today's community building environments. I am hoping that I will be able to link to this article, "Vertigo" so that those interested will be able to gather the wisdom he is sharing. If not, you should get the current issue of NON-PROFIT QUARTERLY because the article is important for community builders.
As he ended the article, the author talked about the importance of having a supportive network who can congratulate you when you succeed and who can help you back on track when things go awry. "Increasingly we struggle together and are intentional about supporting one another—through forgiveness and truth telling—so that we can continue to build connected environments that feed the world by feeding the best of what it is to be human," is the way Traynor concludes the article.
It is worth the read!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Resources for Community Building Thinking
The non-profit often gets overlooked when discussions of the economy, the future and the well-being of the communities of our country is discussed. No one should ignore this industry, which continues to be the "doing good" sector even as resources get more and more strapped in our current fiscal woes. One of the resources that many people in the non-profit world look too is the NON PROFIT QUARTERLY, a forum for very high level discussions of all facets of this non-profit field. Ruth McCambridge, editor, does a nice job of covering what is in the new issue. This issue has a story on one of the major questions facing both for profit and nonprofit, is bigger better? Here is what the editor says about this lead story:
Paul Light has suggested that there are four possible scenarios for the future of our sector -- one of these being an "arbitrary winnowing" which would "result in a rebalancing [of] the sector towards larger, richer and fewer [nonprofit] organizations." Dr. Light said nothing in his NPQ article about the private sector but I have noticed a disturbing macro trend worth paying attention to if you are at all interested in retaining a modicum of local ownership and control over the organizations that so richly populate our communities.
In yesterday's New York Times was an article about how small businesses are faring in this downturn. Here is a shocking statistic: from the second quarter of 2007 through the third quarter of 2008, businesses with fewer than 20 employees have accounted for 53% of all job losses in the private sector -- even though those companies employ only 20% of the employees.
One observer comments that this is just the market "being cleansed of unneeded goods and services." Though far from an economist, I might suggest that this phenomenon may be more a question of available capital and a function of a further monopolization of our markets by large business concerns. Slate.com runs a story about CIT Group, the number one lender to these very small firms under the Small Business Administration's 7(a) program. The 7(a) program typically makes loans to small businesses that have exhausted other options. Close to bankruptcy itself, it is under consideration for a bailout -- a step supported by Lloyd Chapman of the American Small Business League, who has traditionally opposed providing bailout funds for large financial institutions. "If my tax dollars are going to be used to rescue banks and other financial institutions," says Chapman, "CIT is the kind of firm I want to see saved." But Slate reports that the "thinking within the administration . . . is that because its collapse would have little or no effect on the larger financial system, bailing out CIT may not be worth the time or the money."
Chapman is concerned that small business is largely overlooked in the federal government's credit programs, pointing out that America's Recovery Capital Loan program (part of the ARRA) will make only $225 million in loans to small business, where CIT made more than three times that in 2008 alone.
banner
I worry that there is an insufficient understanding within this administration about the value of small, locally controlled organizations to civic life and I, for one object, as much on behalf of local owned business as locally controlled nonprofits. We are in danger of losing the essential character of the nation in this trend.
So when the administration proposes working hand in hand with large philanthropic institutions to craft collaborative approaches to "social innovation," and if that conversation remains less than fully transparent to date, excuse us if we wince a little at the more downside potential of that, particularly when the groups mentioned as models are very large, well connected and well funded.
If you are not familiar with this publication and you find the above relevant to some of your thinking in community building and non profits, you will find this publication a treasure trove of discussion over the long term.
Paul Light has suggested that there are four possible scenarios for the future of our sector -- one of these being an "arbitrary winnowing" which would "result in a rebalancing [of] the sector towards larger, richer and fewer [nonprofit] organizations." Dr. Light said nothing in his NPQ article about the private sector but I have noticed a disturbing macro trend worth paying attention to if you are at all interested in retaining a modicum of local ownership and control over the organizations that so richly populate our communities.
In yesterday's New York Times was an article about how small businesses are faring in this downturn. Here is a shocking statistic: from the second quarter of 2007 through the third quarter of 2008, businesses with fewer than 20 employees have accounted for 53% of all job losses in the private sector -- even though those companies employ only 20% of the employees.
One observer comments that this is just the market "being cleansed of unneeded goods and services." Though far from an economist, I might suggest that this phenomenon may be more a question of available capital and a function of a further monopolization of our markets by large business concerns. Slate.com runs a story about CIT Group, the number one lender to these very small firms under the Small Business Administration's 7(a) program. The 7(a) program typically makes loans to small businesses that have exhausted other options. Close to bankruptcy itself, it is under consideration for a bailout -- a step supported by Lloyd Chapman of the American Small Business League, who has traditionally opposed providing bailout funds for large financial institutions. "If my tax dollars are going to be used to rescue banks and other financial institutions," says Chapman, "CIT is the kind of firm I want to see saved." But Slate reports that the "thinking within the administration . . . is that because its collapse would have little or no effect on the larger financial system, bailing out CIT may not be worth the time or the money."
Chapman is concerned that small business is largely overlooked in the federal government's credit programs, pointing out that America's Recovery Capital Loan program (part of the ARRA) will make only $225 million in loans to small business, where CIT made more than three times that in 2008 alone.
banner
I worry that there is an insufficient understanding within this administration about the value of small, locally controlled organizations to civic life and I, for one object, as much on behalf of local owned business as locally controlled nonprofits. We are in danger of losing the essential character of the nation in this trend.
So when the administration proposes working hand in hand with large philanthropic institutions to craft collaborative approaches to "social innovation," and if that conversation remains less than fully transparent to date, excuse us if we wince a little at the more downside potential of that, particularly when the groups mentioned as models are very large, well connected and well funded.
If you are not familiar with this publication and you find the above relevant to some of your thinking in community building and non profits, you will find this publication a treasure trove of discussion over the long term.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
