Thanks to the folks at Training who have given us permission to reprint this article,“How Attitudes Toward Change Affect Decision-Making”by Tracy C.F. Brown which specifically highlights making better philanthropy decisions. ###  The Change Style Indicator can identify factors that can impact a group or organization’s readiness to deal with and sustain change in times of rapid change. Change style assessment creator Chris Musselwhite knows firsthand how personal change style preferences can not only make you more effective in times of crisis or change,they also can help you make better decisions on a daily basis. “How people deal with change—creating it and responding to it—is a function of identifiable individual preferences,” says Musselwhite. “Depending on whether people see change as a danger,a challenge,or an opportunity,they have corresponding individual preferences that reflect their relationship and reaction to structure,rules,and authority when dealing and making decisions involving change.” No one knows this better than consultant Stephanie Clohesy,of Clohesy Consulting. Before opening her own consulting firm,Clohesy made a career out of promoting positive change for the good of society,spending more than three decades working to improve the lives of others. Her work ranged from negotiating with governments on behalf of social scientists seeking to improve public policy to teaching democratic models of dialogue and problem-solving to women faced with rebuilding a civil society after war.
Continue reading How Attitudes Toward Change Affect Decision-Making What would you say if you were asked to come up with a list of the most important resources related to philanthropy? Would you emphasize history and philosophy,or hands-on,practical advice? How would you balance different ideological perspectives on philanthropy’s role? Adin Miller, Senior Director of Community Impact and Innovations at the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, has been thinking about this challenge as part of work he’s doing with Israel’s first community foundation. Adin said that he began with the many reports,essays,and articles that were saved as PDFs all over his desktop —the articles that he tended to turn to himself. The list he started with reflects his own interests and biases, he told me, and he’s looking to the field to help him flesh it out. Adin wrote about this in a November blog post, which he’s given us permission to re-post. Do you have ideas about what else belongs in Adin’s Philanthropy Canon? Click on his Google Document to add to the growing list of essential resources. What should we include in the Philanthropy Canon? Blog post reprinted with permission from Adin Miller. The original post can be found on Adin’s blog —here.
I’ve been working with a team to meet with and mentor community leaders and staff associated with Israel’s first community foundation. The community foundation, Takdim,is based in Ramat HaSharon (a city comparable to Palo Alto) and officially launched in May 2011. The story behind this effort is fascinating Continue reading Building a Philanthropy Canon by Jim Coutré,Vice President,The Philanthropic Initiative,Inc. Reposted with permission of The Philanthropic Initiative. See the original blog post here. Nearly a year ago,Eliza Petro,Program Director for the Izumi Foundation,went on a learning tour to understand the values and processes that characterize today’s landscape of global health and development philanthropy. The journey was part of the Foundation’s strategic planning process and involved interviews with two dozen smart and engaged foundations,philanthropists,and philanthropy experts throughout the country to gain a better understanding of how funders locate,assess,track and evaluate grantees. Eliza generously shared these findings with a group of us at the Opportunity Collaboration in Mexico and I’m delighted to pass them along. Created in 1998,the Izumi Foundation gives assistance to the world’s poorest people by supporting programs that improve health in developing countries. It provides resources to organizations that share its commitment to delivering lasting,cost-effective improvements that build local health care capacity and supports projects in five areas:infectious diseases with high morbidity and mortality,neglected tropical diseases,malnutrition,maternal and neonatal health,and health care infrastructure. In order to maximize the impact of its giving,the Foundation restricts its geographic focus to Africa,Latin America and the Caribbean. This fall,the Foundation released the results of Eliza’s learning tour in a report, “Trends Among US Grantmakers – Achieving the Most Impact Abroad,” which discusses finding the right grantees,assessing and selecting grantees,length and type of funding,achieving and measuring impact,and overall grantmaking philosophy. Below are some key takeaways from the report,which I believe funders and grantees will find useful and be sure to check out the full report if you’re looking for more details in a specific area.
Continue reading A Learning Tour (Without Leaving Your Desk) ‘Tis the season for reflecting and summing up —as demonstrated by the countless top-10 and best-of lists popping up everywhere. So instead of a lengthy blog post this week, the LearnPhilanthropy team wanted to share some big learnings from 2011: 1. Philanthropy practitioners from across the field find value in, and are eager to help co-create, LearnPhilanthropy. This time last year,LearnPhilanthropy was more idea than start-up. In 2011,over 300 grantmakers,donors,advisors,and Content Partners engaged with us to develop this idea and create our first prototype. We reached out to dozens to help up build a Real Simple Taxonomy. We demo’d and user tested the prototype with  hundreds more at conferences across the sector and via one-on-one conversations. And more than 1500 of you have checked in with us and joined a conversation about learning on our blog,facebook,twitter,and LinkedIn pages. We want to say a special THANK YOU to our steadfast Planning Committee,which has provided great advice,support,and enthusiasm from the start! These busy folks signed on for what was originally billed as a short-term gig…and we are very grateful for their continued engagement. 2. Each grantmaker’s path is different…AND… after over 100 years of practice,this field has learned quite a bit about what works! In the course of hundreds of formal and informal conversations with grantmakers,donors,and content providers,a consistent theme emerged: there’s no one-size-fits-all,but there ARE many excellent resources on what good practice looks like,available from a diverse range of sources. Accessing these resources,even knowing where to look,remains a challenge. But grantmakers are eager to tap into that growing body of knowledge in order to develop their own skills and improve their results. 3. Peer learning is where it’s at. In conversation after conversation,grantmakers told us that while resources and workshops were useful for learning,nothing was as valuable as the formal and informal opportunities to learn from and with peers and mentors. Highlighting and enabling more of these peer engagement opportunities are big goals for 2012,and we’ll be looking to you to help us think about how to do it right. 4. A good search function is essential; a good search function is just the beginning. Like the foundation of a house,a high-functioning search with lots of advanced search bells and whistles is something that LearnPhilanthropy simply can’t do without. When you have a question or an immediate need,you expect to be able to find what you’re looking for right away. We must get search right –and it is a complicated beast. But search is just the beginning,because the other thing you’ve told us you want is for LearnPhilanthropy to curate and make meaning of resources —to sort them into meaningful buckets and learning pathways. We are calling this function Collections and it will be a big focus early in 2012. 5. Iterative is, well, iterative. Should we say that again? When LearnPhilanthropy launched,we made a commitment to develop in iterative stages with many check-ins with potential users of the LP system to reality test our direction and assumptions. We believed (and continue to believe) that by doing this,we’ll be more likely to build something that meets real needs. We’re beyond grateful for your willingness to test,give great input,and tell us what doesn’t work for you –we just can’t get enough of your tough love. And we’ll be back in 2012 to ask you for more! Thank you for being part of LearnPhilanthropy in 2011. See you next year! From the LearnPhilanthropy implementation team: Marcia Sharp,Allen Gunn,Dara Major,Barbara Demarest,and Jessica Bearman
This article is reprinted from the LeadersMatter e-newsletter of The Bridgespan Group,one of LearnPhilanthropy’s content partners. Visit Bridgespan’s Bridgestar initiative to find the original article. By Kirk Kramer and Julia Tao,The Bridgespan Group “Leadership and learning are indispensible to each other.” -President John F. Kennedy A strong nonprofit sector requires strong nonprofit leaders–and enough of them to meet a looming leadership deficit. Indeed,Bridgespan research in 20061 indicated the nonprofit sector would need to add 640,000 new senior leaders—the equivalent of 2.4 times the number employed at that time—by 2016. Today,leadership development and succession planning remain top organizational challenges for most nonprofits. Unfortunately,not enough has been done to evaluate what types of investment can have an impact on the development of nonprofit leaders. In its seminal report on the topic2,the W. K. Kellogg Foundation concluded “there are still no known well-developed theories of leadership development that are grounded in what is being learned through program evaluation.” Nonetheless,there are some signs of progress. Earlier this year,The Bridgespan Group had the opportunity to conduct an independent assessment of the nation’s largest philanthropic leadership program?Neighborhood Builders®,operated by the Bank of America Charitable Foundation. Our findings suggest that the Neighborhood Builders’ approach holds useful insights for other nonprofit leaders who are striving to strengthen their own approach to leadership development—and for the funders supporting them. The Neighborhood Builders Program Now in its eighth year,Neighborhood Builders combines several unique aspects:selecting “high performing” community-based organizations through local committees of leaders,pairing leadership training with a meaningful unrestricted grant ($200,000),training both the executive director (ED) and an emerging leader (EL),and fostering relationships within a network that has grown to 1,200 nonprofit leaders. Continue reading What Makes for an Effective Nonprofit Leadership Development Program? The Southeastern Council on Foundations has allowed LearnPhilanthopy to reprint this article on resistance from their  October/November,2011 newsletter. If you or your organization has an article to share about learning or development,please let us know; we’d love to re-publish it! –Editor@LearnPhilanthropy.net by Jennifer Bush,President &CEO of Level Smart,Inc. an advisor to senior level leaders in philanthropy and nonprofits throughout the Southeast. In the face of economic and policy changes that are rocking the philanthropic world,foundation leaders need to find new and innovative ways to motivate their board and staff. Part of this task is to help others within the organization to embrace change. One of the hardest aspects of a leader’s job is getting people to “follow”. Common sense says that the solutions are obvious…at least to the leader. Reality,however,is often different from our “common sense” solutions. How often have you thought: - If only my board member would agree to talk with our mayor and Chamber of Commerce president about job creation,we could get more public support for our education initiative…
- If only our grantees were willing to merge their operations so that they can leverage their back office resources…
- If only my 10-year employee would be more invested in our work instead of doing the minimum and leaving at 4:00pm…
How do you overcome resistance to change? How do you stop seeing others as obstacles – they are just being stubborn,irrational,and unable to adapt to new ideas —and actually turn their resistance into a positive force for the results you want to achieve? Continue reading Dealing with Resistance:Tips for Managing Change in Trying Times By Dara Major At LearnPhilanthropy,we’re working to bring together the wealth of research,resources and ideas on what constitutes good philanthropic practice from high-quality sources across the sector. To help fuel great searches across this site,we’re developing a general-purpose taxonomy –we call it our Real Simple Taxonomy. Great content needs a great search – and sometimes a simple keyword search is not enough to produce the result a user seeks. That’s where a taxonomy comes in: a taxonomy is a classification or categorization system that groups similar items into broad topics or buckets. A taxonomy can help to organize knowledge “at a glance,” describe or cluster key concepts,and facilitate browsing. It can also simply disappear into the background when search works really well. How are we developing this Real Simple Taxonomy? With you of course: please help us to capture what you know and do! We see this taxonomy as a living document,with ongoing co-creation and co-ownership within the LearnPhilanthropy community as the key to building this critter and developing it over time. In other words,we know we won’t get this right,right out of the starting gate. So the approach we’re taking is iterative and highly collaborative – more user-generated “folksonomy” than the traditionally hierarchical taxonomy – and we’ll be seeking broad review at each iteration stage. Check out the latest draft here…Real Simple Taxonomy. Your views on this are important to us,so please take the time to share them below or contact me at catalogue@learnphilanthropy.net if you’d like to brainstorm together  Thank you! We’re working on our look —and we want your advice. And,true to form,we also want any tough love you’d like to cast our way. We’re moving from an early prototype that looked like this… 
To something more like this… 
Continue reading LP Cleans Up for the Holidays By Dara Major The specific learning needs of grantmakers can vary quite a bit,depending on mission,goals,structure and context and,ultimately,individual roles and competencies. We’ve scanned the sector for existing,high-quality frameworks that illustrate a range of perspectives on roles and competencies in a variety of operating contexts,with the understanding that most grantmakers work within multiple frameworks. The examples below include a mix of knowledge (what grantmakers should know) and competencies (what grantmakers should be expected to do): The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers’ Framework for Delivering Education Programs in Your Regional Association:Ten Principles and Practices highlights essential principles for foundations of all types (independent,community,corporate,family,health-care conversion); 
Continue reading Perspectives on Grantmaker Learning – And How LearnPhilanthropy is Learning From Them!  by Jessica Bearman
I was inspired to write this quick post after I watched the goofy MASTERFUL video that Gabriel Kasper put together to summarize the top ten learnings from Growing Social Impact in a Networked World: A Grantmakers’Gathering on Networks hosted by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Monitor Institute. Several things stood out for me. First,it’s rare to see a summary of an event in this format (why make a video when a white paper is so much more compelling?). Second,the video was obviously conceived and executed in a spirit of fun. And third,I found it to be a very effective way to learn. See it here. I went to Google and did a quick search on “Fun and Learning”and quickly noticed that with or without the quotation marks,all the hits were resources for kids. Searching on Adults Learning and Fun yielded a bunch of websites devoted to icebreakers…as though fun is ok,as long as it’s contained at the beginning of the meeting or workshop. And so then I asked myself:“What makes learning fun and how can fun make learning better?” And here’s what I came up with,based on recent experiences facilitating workshops. - HAVE PARTICIPANTS TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES. As adults with a lifetime of experience,we like talking about what we’ve done and learned. It’s a lot more fun to talk about our own experiences in the context of what we’re learning than to hear anonymous examples or –even worse –abstractions. And we learn better that way.
- SOLVE PROBLEMS: As fun as it is to talk about ourselves,it’s also fun to talk about other people and organizations,especially when they need advice. Peer assists and other activities that present real problems to solve are effective –and fun –ways to learn.
- SURPRISE! Continue reading Fun &Learning
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