By Rodney W. Nichols
Just as students must master the 3R’s, non-profit organizations must master the 3C’s of curiosity, competition, and compassion. It’s easy to glibly roll out these words. It’s much harder to master the fusion of these attributes, essential for success.
Curiosity means not only the capacity to imagine better social circumstances – a mission of change -- but also the wit to conceive how to make change happen. Competition always winnows the better ideas for that process. And it is compassion – the capacity for empathy about the people who need change, who are to be served – that drives almost all non-profit activity.
Conscience calls for society to support education, food, housing, and health care. But when countries undergo economic upheaval – all too widespread these days – citizens often doubt whether the social imperatives of conscience can be reconciled fairly with the unnerving demands of individual curiosity, upsetting the status quo, and with the relentlessly unsettling rigors of global markets, demanding higher productivity.
The chronic challenge is to ensure that constructive economic change is humane. That is where gifted social entrepreneurs have an opportunity to lead, to combine the 3C’s in continuously adapting paths to responsible progress. Real progress hinges on at least three conditions. First, open economic and intellectual marketplaces. It also demands competitions based upon merit. And it surely both needs and fosters a civil society, building momentum for broad participation by increasing numbers of individuals, following their passions.
The Alliance For Global Good’s new Innovation Fund -- innovationafgg.org -- aims to fuel, and finance, inquiry about how to improve society with reliable sustainability.
Presently, however, many non-profits are so stressed in maintaining their operations that creative insights about possible change in those operations may seem a luxury. But as the Nobel prize winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz remarked, “It is a good idea to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps (you) young.” So it should be for the non-profit community: ask what changes, what new ideas, can bring both new streams of income and higher impacts in the programs?
An exemplary innovation was charted by Sweet Beginnings, part of North Lawn Employment Network, a non-profit in Chicago whose leader spoke at the AFGG’s Congressional conference in Washington DC in November 2011 {www.nlen.org/programs}. Its mission is to provide transitional job training for the formerly incarcerated. To earn revenue beyond the traditional support from governmental and philanthropic sources, the employees of the organization produce honey and honey=based products for retail sales. Business is good, and the jobs program thrives
Another example is Changemakers, an initiative of Ashoka. Changemakers.com} This effort – often categorized as a “prize” – see McKinsey.com/social sector} in a report from 2009– creates open source participation in a “collaborative competition” to identify innovative solutions on topics that have ranged from clean water to geo-tourism. The results are impressive.
On the cover of its “Thoughtbook” in 2009, the enterprise-oriented Kauffman Foundation blazed this remark: “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” { Kauffman.org} Leaders and staff in every nonprofit must create the means to seize the future they aim to shape. Curiosity opens up options for change that will serve missions. And competitions sort out best options.
Earning new revenues – what the Innovation Fund’s competition will stimulate – will break down the traditional perceptions of what a non-profit can do. This transition will meet the challenge posed by a young non-profit staffer in the revealing survey conducted by Changing Our World last year: “I am in business school working for my MBA…creating sustainable revenue streams and thinking more like a for-profit agencies would go a long way toward advancing the field.” { changing our world.com and networkflip.com}
