I will be leading the keynote at the Ohio Grantmakers Forum Annual Conference in October on the topic of Nonprofit Strategy in the New Abnormal and check out my recent guest blog at the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Tell me what you think. Is any of this new or normal?

But I was drawn back into the discussion when he told a story from his childhood – one about he and other neighborhood kids who competed to see how high they could swing, standing up, hoping to get enough velocity to swing the whole way around.  While attempting one of these standing 360 feats a piece of the swing broke and he fell.  He noted that he got pretty scraped up, but no attorneys got involved, there wasn’t a petition to close the playground, he (and other neighborhood kids) were just back on the swings the next day – standing – trying to swing up and over the swing set.

I thought about my own experiences (and the scars still visible on my hand and both knees) from my own childhood mishaps while at play.  But I also thought about the feeling of swinging over a creek on a vine – and making it to the other side – or those perfect summer days playing a pick-up game of ball.  In fact, most of our play was on the street or in empty lots rather than an actual playground.

It was a long drive so this took my mind to the way in which nonprofits have had to create a dynamic in which there is a BIG PROBLEM that has to be defined in order to capture donors and volunteers.  Hammond defined a “play deficit” and the “play deserts” that cause physical, emotional, and intellectual harm to our children.  He connected these to increasing rates of childhood obesity and poor school behavior and performance.  I don’t doubt this.  Play is not only about learning to get along with people, physical activity, and creativity – it’s also about risk taking and pushing the limits.  KaBOOM! has done a brilliant job of bringing a lot of resources to building playgrounds in places that need one.

However, creating this negative frame of reference always bothered me when I was running a community-based organization.  Sure, my communities were some of the poorest in the region – communities that had lost their economic heart and a lot of young residents when the steel mills closed.  But they weren’t communities without good people, good ideas, and a willingness to work.

The calamity that hit them was created by much bigger international market forces and reverberated throughout western Pennsylvania – and other steel-making places around the country.  But to get the resources needed to reshape still viable residential neighborhoods and support the remaining core of small manufacturers in the region meant defining the negatives – the deficits and deserts – and pushing the assets far down the list.

I remember a drive through one of those communities – Rankin – with Paul Grogan, who was then the President of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).  Paul noted that the housing stock didn’t look that bad compared to some of the other places that LISC was working.   That comment really frustrated me.  (Sorry, Paul.)  I think I answered with something like, “Does a neighborhood have to reach rock bottom before it’s worth investment?  Wouldn’t we be better off intervening while there’s still some decent housing and a neighborhood to build on?”  (LISC decided that the answer to that was “yes.”)

All of us are looking at a very difficult funding environment in which these critical questions come up every day.  More and more often foundations are asking for the ROI when they make a grant – or less elegantly – where’s the biggest bang for the buck? How big is the problem and how creative the solution?  Do you go to the biggest problems that require the most significant time and resources?  How long do you sustain the investment?  Does that influence the approach?

All big questions – and ones that make me appreciate the challenges in making these decisions.

What’s your experience been like as a grantseeker or grantmaker?  Do the deserts get all the attention at the expense of the gardens that may be facing a temporary drought and just need some water to bloom again or are the deserts so vast they can’t be ignored?

The passion of the Independent Sector is readily evident here, as is the desire to really roll up our collective sleeves and tackle the big problems facing our country and our world.  Just a few of the quotes that have struck me these last few days:

 “…focus on common moral imperatives.  Don’t go left, don’t go right – go deeper.” – Jim Wallis, Sojourners

“As long as we set organization-level goals, as opposed to community level or national-level goals, we won’t succeed.  How can we claim institutional success if the community is crumbling around us?” – Brian Gallagher, United Way Worldwide

What is needed for this type of community-level collaboration?  “Identify your friends and engage them,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, of the NAACP.  For me this really highlighted the value of social network mapping.  Who else is out there, working on this issue, or related issues?  Who else works in your community, period?  Who can you engage in a strategic discussion about to really make a difference?

Collaborative funding, or “strategic co-funding” as REDF has referred to it – seems like another imperative for the sector.  Our problems are big, and we need real investment.  Last year, 10 foundations pledged a total of $100 million over eight years to help restructure Detroit’s economy and position the city for the future.  Why isn’t that happening in every major city?  On every major issue?

The discussion kept returning to several seemingly immovable social problems such as hunger and poverty. One compelling theme permeating the remarks of all 8 panelists is embodied in the following comment by Brian Gallagher, President and CEO of the United Way Worldwide: “as long as we are setting institutional goals rather than community or national goals, we will fail.”

In a time when social causes are increasingly being pursued by informal networks and other non-traditional entities, those who lead nonprofit organizations should not assume progress means doing what they have been doing, only better. Rather, they should be looking hard at who else is working in their space and how their efforts are connected – or not.

This type of institution-agnostic approach tends to be far more intuitive to younger generations who have grown up in much more collaborative environments than their more senior colleagues. Are we adequately tapping into this mindset in looking to the future?

One panelist lamented the dearth of venues for collective planning and execution around solving social problems; instead collaboration and coordination tends to happen on much more of a fragmented and opportunistic basis. I hope that conversations and workshops at this conference bear some fruitful ideas and generate momentum towards this movement-building approach to addressing our most pervasive social problems.