David La Piana

I have served on the board of Craigslist Foundation for two years and at our recent December meeting I was honored to be selected by my colleagues as Chairman.

I will be joined by Jose Cisneros, the Treasurer of the City and County of San Francisco, as our board’s very able Treasurer, and Kathy Bella, Principal of the Bella Group and expert on just about everything related to nonprofit causes, as Secretary. We also welcome a new board member this year, Rich Moran, an Executive in Residence at Venrock, a venture capital firm in Palo Alto.

Under the outstanding leadership of Lynn Luckow, our President and CEO, and aided by the Craigslist Foundation’s small but energetic staff, we hope to do great things in the coming year.

So save the date for the next Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp on August 14, 2010 at the University of California campus in  Berkeley, CA.   I look forward to seeing you there!

Our new research initiative NonprofitNext and recently published monograph Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector has inspired a lot of talk about how to prepare for a future.

We are clear that the trends we study will have a profound impact on the sector’s work but we don’t know how they will evolve, interact, and respond to other economic, social and political developments. What can a thoughtful leader do in this constantly changing landscape?

One thing is certain: traditional strategic planning with its 3-5 year timeframe is not up to muster in this dynamic environment. That’s why we created Real-Time Strategic Planning to create an atmosphere where futurists can flourish.

What is the best way to find something? What’s the fastest and most efficient way to get something done? Using the internet and social networks?

Those are some of the questions asked in a recent DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Network Challenge competition. All around the country the Pentagon hid (in plain sight) 10 eight-foot diameter red balloons. One was in Union Square in my nearby San Francisco. Then DARPA offered a $40,000 prize for the group that first found all ten.

The winners were the M.I.T. Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Group. They didn’t use GPS, they used email, Facebook and YouTube. Basically, they offered to pay money to people with leads. The effort spread virally through the Internet and the team located all ten balloons in an amazing eight hours and 56 minutes!

Can crowdsourcing to your networks help you achieve your goals faster?

The current unpredictable economic environment for nonprofits is making the traditional three-year strategic planning time frame obsolete. One approach that makes a lot of sense is business model analysis. How well does your current business model meet the need for keeping your organization is the black?

For example, a theatre company traditionally relied on ticket sales for 60% of its revenue and donations from individuals, foundations and events for the remainder. Now, fewer people are buying tickets and the theatre believes the mix needs to shift to 50/50. Business model analysis would test this assumption and if necessary, adjust it. Perhaps ticket sales will fall more precipitously, or perhaps donations will fall even further.

Business model analysis allows an organization to consider every input into its “economic logic” arriving at the best set of alternatives and choosing the most likely path to success. In this environment three-year projections can be misleading, but you still need a roadmap to your organization’s future.

Between budgets, board meetings and the next big fundraiser, most nonprofit leaders have little time to contemplate larger questions. When they do find a minute, the topic is usually the organization’s mission – the good it is trying to achieve. But, is there ever time to consider the philosophical underpinnings of our work? I think this is actually quite important. We devote our lives to important causes, often fighting difficult, even losing, battles, because we believe we are on the right side, the moral side of the issue. But why?

Philosophers, going back many centuries, have tried to define morality, to distinguish good from evil, and to describe our role in the moral sphere. Immanuel Kant, in the 19^th century, wrote a Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals, a work I encountered in an introductory philosophy course a long time ago. Kant’s central argument has always stuck with me. Once a person knows what is right, Kant declares, he or she is under a moral imperative to do it. If you are unclear in your heart where the correct course lies, obviously you can’t act. But, after reflection, if you feel confident in your knowledge – this course is morally correct – then you are bound by morality to pursue it.

This is in a way the (unacknowledged) moral basis of the nonprofit sector. Many people go through life without really considering larger social questions of right and wrong, justice and equity.  Those who do, often arrive at the same conclusions: about basic human rights, group responsibility for individual needs, our duty to the planet and to succeeding generations, and similar weighty concerns. People who think deeply about these issues, those who are clear about what is right, often work in the nonprofit sector. Since they know what is right, they feel they must pursue it.  In this sector, we are all Kantians.

A stunning front page article in the Sunday November 29 New York Times reports that 1 in 8 Americans, and 1 in 4 children, now receive food stamps.

In California only 50% of those eligible are receiving the help, while in Missouri, it is 98%. This last statistic reminded me of one of my early organizing jobs, where I built a network of social service agencies in a two-county region to help eligible people learn of their right to food stamps. We helped hundreds of families build a better nutritional basis for their kids. Then, in 1981, in the aftermath of Proposition 13, the state legislature eliminated California’s Food Stamp Outreach Program.

Now, nearly thirty years later, tens of thousands of eligible children and their parents are going hungry, simply because they don’t know how to access the program.

My friend and colleague Shiree Teng recently sent me a fascinating article on the role of racial assumptions in leadership development.

The article was created by Leadership for a New Era, a collaborative research initiative launched by the Leadership Learning Community, and examines the assumptions behind current approaches to leadership development, principally a focus on individuals.

According to this piece, American society is fully bought into a view of leadership based on the following principles:

• Personal responsibility and individualism: The belief that people control their fates regardless of social position and that individual behaviors and choices determine material outcomes.

• Meritocracy: The belief that resources and opportunities are distributed according to talent and effort and that social components of “merit”—such as access to inside information of powerful social networks, are of lesser importance or do not matter.
• Equal opportunity: The belief that employment, education and wealth accumulation are “level playing fields” and that race is no longer a barrier to progress in these areas.

As a result, we ignore the underlying unfairness of in-crowd status that the majority culture enjoys. Essentially, everyone is expected to work from a level playing field but the field is anything but level. Yet people from other cultures and backgrounds (not Northern European) often do not have access to the networks and information that allow majority culture members to, or example, easily walk into a new work situation and know the “social rules” that will allow them to get ahead.

Where this set of observations is most poignant for me is in its ramifications for leadership development training. Leadership development that focuses on individuals, usually CEOs, assumes that everyone is in the same position relative to using the information gained from the experience. Yet the subtle ways in which dialogue, work processes and even humor in the work place are reinforcing of dominant culture practices does indeed make entry harder for others. An awareness of this dynamic, and efforts to bring together teams and communities for leadership development, could work against this bias.