About the Coady International Institute: Established by St. Francis Xavier University in 1959, the Coady International Institute works with innovative people and organizations to create effective, practical and sustainable solutions to reduce global poverty and injustice. Coady accomplishes this through leadership education, action partnerships, and research. The Institute also engages in initiatives to help young Canadians become active global citizens.
About Gord Cunningham: Gord has more than 25 years of experience in community economic development and community-based microfinance in Canada and internationally. At the Coady Institute, he is involved in several collaborative action research initiatives in Ethiopia, Kenya, Vietnam and South Africa exploring the application of asset-based and citizen-led approaches to community development. Gord also teaches courses in Community Economic Analysis and Mobilizing Assets for Community Driven Development. Gord has co-authored several articles relating to these topics in The Canadian Journal of Development Studies and Development and Practice. He is also the co-editor of a book of 13 case studies entitled From Clients to Citizens: Communities changing the course of their own development, published by Practical Action (UK) in September 2008.
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FROM SUCCESS TO SCALE...Expanding your impact
Matt Nash, from Duke University, was in town to share the findings from the intensive research on scaling social initiatives that the Duke Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) has been coordinating over the last seven years (see http://www.scalingsocialimpact.org/).
This one day workshop explored the practical issues and new approaches to some of the following questions:
When is it appropriate to scale?
What are the key organisational capacities necessary for successful scaling?
What are various models for scaling, and in which cases should they be used?
How can we determine which organisations or ideas should be scaled up, and which are best left small?
How can we harness the potential of movements (rather than organisations) to achieve large-scale impact?
How does innovation spread? How can the spread of innovation be encouraged?
How can capital markets be harnessed to facilitate scaling?
How can governments and intermediaries best facilitate scaling?
About Matthew Nash: Matt Nash is the Managing Director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship. In addition to his development and administrative responsibilities, Matt leads the Fuqua On Board program, founded and directs the Global Consulting Practicum, advises student consulting projects and independent studies, and advises the student run chapter of Net Impact. Matt is also a visiting lecturer at Duke’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, where he co-teaches an undergraduate course in entrepreneurial leadership and social innovation. Matt brings to Fuqua extensive domestic and international social and public sector experience in governance, strategic planning, organization development, performance measurement, business process transformation, and leadership development.
Prior to joining the CASE team, he was a senior consultant in strategy and change management with the public sector practice at IBM Business Consulting Services (formerly PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting). In this position and previous consulting capacities, Matt served a diverse set of clients ranging from community-based organizations, including a nonprofit resource center, a community housing board, and a disabilities rights coalition, to large agencies such as World Vision, UNICEF and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Previously, Matt led the Leadership Institute at Yale's Center for Public Service and volunteered with the U.S. Peace Corps in Romania. Matt is a graduate of the Yale School of Management (MBA) and Yale College (BA), where he received the graduation prize for public service. A recipient of Vice President Al Gore’s “Hammer Award” for reinventing government, Matt was recently awarded the inaugural "Member Achievement Award" by Net Impact, the global network of business professionals seeking to use their skills for social, environmental, and economic impact.
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SOCIAL MEDIA:
A Driver for Social Change
Individuals globally have ideas about how to create a better world. Yet without a platform for idea sharing and collaboration, too often these potentially transformative opportunities never materialise. Social media has the power to change that, by connecting and mobilising people within communities and across the globe.
On 28 September 2010, New Ideas for Africa and the GIBS Network for Social Entrepreneurs hosted a dialogue focused on using social media to drive social change. Leading the conversation were Cindy Gallop, who was visiting South Africa for a week to launch IfWeRanTheWorld South Africa, and Garth Japhet, Founder of Soul City and Heartlines, launching For Good. These online movements create practical avenues for people to begin working with others to make a difference in their communities.
We also shared lessons on using social networking platforms effectively, as well as explored how our projects can best engage with existing platforms.
About Garth Japhet and Cindy Gallop: Dr Garth Japhet, Founder of ForGood, is a doctor qualifying at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1987, with further qualifications in maternal and child health. In 1992 he founded Soul City: the Institute for Health and Development Communication and was executive director until June 2008. Today Soul City is recognised as one of the foremost and most evaluated development communications organisations in the world. It works in 12 countries. It has produced award winning TV and radio series supported by print media and consistently reaches over 45 million people in the region. It communicates around all aspects of public health, in particular HIV/AIDS, using a multimedia edutainment approach. It also uses community mobilisation and advocacy. It has the largest youth movement in South Africa with 110 000 members in over 5500 clubs. Soul City has been the recipient of multiple awards for social change, development and communication.
In 2001 he established Heartlines, an organisation with a similar programmatic approach to Soul City: IHDC but including digital media. It aims to achieve positive social change by promoting lived values, strong relationships and civic action. It works in particular with CBOs and FBOs and has a strong emphasis on mitigating the drivers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He is now full time CEO.
Since 2006, he has chaired the partner group of the Communication Initiative an international virtual network of over 75 000 communication for social change practitioners. Dr Japhet is a fellow of the World Economic Forum and a Senior Ashoka fellow.
Cindy Gallop, Founder of IfWeRanTheWorld has turned her illustrious advertising career into a lifelong pursuit of changing the world, her way -- one daring project after another. Cindy took a risk when she entered advertising, and hasn't stopped taking them since. She began her early career in the UK as a theatre publicist, until an audience member declared that she could "sell ice to an Eskimo," and advised her to make the jump to advertising. Four years later, she joined one of the fastest growing agencies in Europe, Bartle Bogle Hegarty. In 1998, she moved to New York, alone, and began building their US branch. Four years after that move, BBH US was named Ad week’s Eastern Agency of the Year. After all her success in the agency world, Gallop resigned as chairman of BBH in 2005 to do something different. Today, she continues to work in branding and advertising as a consultant, but is also tending some fascinating projects of her own. She launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED2009, in an attempt to squash the myths of hardcore pornography and to begin a dialog around how real people have sex. In January 2010, Gallop will officially launch IfWeRanTheWorld, a simple, web platform designed to bring together human good intentions and corporate good intentions, and turn them into collective action.
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POWER AND LOVE
Why do some groups of people manage to solve complex problems, while others fall?
Across the world people are looking for new ways to create improvements in the live of communities and society as a whole. Join GIBS and the Network for Social Entrepreneurs to understand key insights from the experience of Adam Kahane who has spent the last 20 years working on some of the toughest challenges faced by countries around the world.
We tend to think of our situation as unique but we need to learn from Colombia, Israel, Australia, India and elsewhere as we try to work through stuck problems in business and our society.
Our two most common ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges are the extreme ones: aggressive war and submissive peace. Neither of these ways works. We can try, using our guns or money or votes, to push through what we want, regardless of what others want—but inevitably the others push back. Or we can try not to push anything on anyone—but that leaves our situation just as it is.
To address our toughest social challenges, we need a way that is neither war nor peace, but collective creation. How can we co-create new social realities?
On 18 August 2010, we hosted a forum discussion with Adam Kahane to address this question and develop capacity to resolve the problems of work and public life.
About Adam Kahane: Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners (http://www.reospartners.com/), an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems. He is also a Visiting Practitioner at the University of Oxford and the University of Waterloo.
Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address their toughest challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.
Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), about which Nelson Mandela said: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.” He is also the author of Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2010).
During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell in London. Previously he held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.
In 1991 and 1992, Adam facilitated the Mont Fleur Scenario Project, in which a diverse group of South Africans worked together to effect the transition to democracy. Since then he has led many such seminal cross-sectoral dialogue-and-action processes, throughout the world. He was one of the sixteen outstanding individuals featured in Fast Company’s first annual “Who’s Fast,” and is a member of the World Academy of Art and Science, the Commission on Globalisation, the Aspen Institute’s Business Leaders’ Dialogue, the Society for Organizational Learning, the Global Leadership Network, and Global Business Network.
Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honors) from McGill University (Montreal), an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M.A. in Applied Behavioral Science from Bastyr University (Seattle). He has also studied negotiation at Harvard Law School and cello performance at Institut Marguerite-Bourgeoys.
Adam and his wife Dorothy live in Montreal and Cape Town.
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CULTIVATING CHANGE
Alternative Approaches for More Effective Social Impact
In partnership with the Community Development Resource Association
Do you wonder why excellent ideas, planning, finance and resources still result in failed projects?
Do you struggle to understand why your “beneficiaries” aren’t as engaged as you had envisioned?
Are you looking for alternatives to conventional development projects?
Social changemakers infuse incredible amounts of passion and resources into improving life for communities. Yet too often we become so consumed with financing, project deliverables, management and reporting that we don’t take the time to explore in depth the complex nature of the impact we are trying to create. Change cannot be engineered; it can only be cultivated.
If we do not understand the complexities of social change, we miss out on powerful opportunities and potentially even cause more harm than good. On 20 July, Doug Reeler from CDRA will explore how we can move beyond conventional approaches, to cultivate change more effectively and with greater impact. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of:
How and why social change occurs;
Alternatives to the “project-based” approach to development;
How to ensure your work builds on local, organic growth processes rather than externally imposed templates for change; and
Implications for practice, planning, monitoring and evaluation.
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SIX PRACTICES OF HIGH-IMPACT NONPROFITS
What makes great nonprofits great?
Not large budgets. Not snazzy marketing. Not perfect management. The answer is not what you might think …
“Every institution has its unique set of irrational and difficult constraints, yet some make a leap while others facing the same environmental challenges do not. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.” (Jim Collins)
After four years of surveying thousands of nonprofit CEOs, conducting hundreds of interviews, and studying 12 high-impact nonprofits to uncover their secrets to success, Heather McLeod Grant (Stanford Center for Social Innovation) and Leslie Crutchfield (FSG Social Impact Advisors) analysed their findings in Forces for Good: Six Practices of High Impact Non-Profits, named a 2007 Best Book of the Year by The Economist.
On 27 May 2010, GIBS offered a one-day workshop to dig into these six practices and explore how they can best be implemented within the South African context. This was designed for anyone leading a social venture, partnering with or funding NGOs, or simply interested in understanding how we can create more powerful and sustainable solutions for social change in South Africa. Facilitated by Brett Will, CEO of Network Dynamics and executive of marketing and strategy for Childline SA, the workshop offered:
Guidelines for taking an organisation from good to great
Practical tools for implementing these within the local context
Peer discussion on challenges faced by the South African social sector
Supplementary resources and reading material.
Praises for Forces for Good:
“… an essential roadmap to success for any funder….and a must-read for nonprofit leaders who seek to build the next generation of high-impact organisations”
-- William Draper, director and Jenny Shilling Stein, executive director, The Draper Richards Foundation
"Inspired and inspiring, this book can change the way the world works by changing how leaders think. … Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant have made a significant contribution with a Very Big Idea: the shift in focus from building an organisation to building a movement.”
-- Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last
“If you're a foundation funder or individual giver you have to read this book. It will frame how you think about lasting impact [in the sector] and greatly enhance your due diligence. The six practices should be your six principles of grantmaking.”
-- Edward Skloot, president, The Surdna Foundation