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JAMES AUSTIN, Faculty Chair, Harvard Business School
AMY DEAN, Executive Director, South Bay Labor Council
LINDA LAWRENCE, Former Vice President, Netscape International AOL Inc.
JAN MASAOKA, Executive Director, Compasspoint Nonprofit Services
JUDY NADLER, Senior Fellow in Government Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University
QUINN TRAN, Co-founder/Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Knowledge Tek Software
Moderated by ANN SKEET, President, American Leadership Forum, Silcon Valley
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Audience Member:I’m part of the Sustainable World Coalition. We work on educating the nonprofit community as well as the general public in terms of sustainability principles and facilitating action. We are getting ready to produce an event for the nonprofit community encouraging greater collaboration and effectiveness. What are some reasons you’ve encountered why there tends to be resistance on the part of the community to work together? Any solutions you’ve found?
Austin: Doing research on collaborations between businesses and nonprofits, interviewing nonprofit folks, I asked, Is it more difficult to collaborate with another nonprofit than with a business? Why? It seems in part rooted in competition, and part of that is fostered by scarcity of funds. They often have to return to the same donor pool. That creates disincentives to collaborate. The second set of barriers tended to have to do with institutional pride, that they may have to give up some control or image or resources in order to join in a meaningful strategic alliance.
Should there be more collaboration within the nonprofit sector? Absolutely. The lost value that exists because of duplications and inefficiencies and underserving common populations is large.
Masaoka: There is enormous collaboration in the nonprofit sector. If you talked to any nonprofit and asked, How many nonprofits do you collaborate with on a monthly basis, you will hear many more examples of who they collaborate with than you will a church collaborating with other churches, for example, or a business collaborating with other businesses. We collaborate despite the fact that our capital market discourages us from collaboration. Most private foundations want to fund things where they are the major funder. They don’t want to be a small player within an organization. Government funders discourage collaboration because they only typically fund county by county, and categorical funding stream by categorical funding stream. If all the banks would only lend money to people that were headquartered in their county, and if all banks were only allowed to work in one county, we would have many, many more businesses than we do now.
Tran: I serve on a couple of boards of nonprofits. One: VNHelp, which stands for Viet Nam Health, Education and Literature Projects. We are about ten years old as an entity. The focus is on helping underprivileged, dirt poor people that need assistance. Organizations and nonprofits seek us out all the time for collaboration. We have volunteers that know the local conditions; very low administrative costs – under 10 percent. We can direct aid to people directly, and that’s why we find more organizations, whether the association are bankers or doctors, seek us out for collaboration.
Austin: The important thing is where collaboration is taking place and why. Why do you get good collaboration when you have a lot of disincentives sometimes to collaborate? When there’s a recognition of comparative advantage across different institutions. Second, there’s enormous pressures to do this. Because of shrinking funds, there are real possibilities of reducing duplication and redundancy that would produce meaningful cost savings to the organization. So the crunch on resources is creating a positive incentive to collaborate. The other thing that is a positive magnet is that oftentimes it’s much easier within the sector of nonprofit organizations to find shared mission and congruency of the people that you’re trying to serve.
Skeet: What is the role and importance of developing suitable role models and/or heroes and heroines for young people? How do you promote more positive role modeling for younger generations? How can you empower kids to become leaders if they don’t have their basic necessary needs fulfilled – learning how to read, medical care, family support?
Nadler: There are leadership education programs in various places. I don’t think they start for four-year-olds, but you can be the line leaders. When my daughter was first in school, that was the highlight of her day. With that came responsibilities. It’s about the character of the children. If we highlight those who have done well and acknowledge those who have shown courage, ethics and leadership, instead of constantly having headlines on those who disgrace themselves, their families and offices, that’s part of it.
Dean: I’ve worked with a lot of young people, and when I first got elected to head the AFL-CIO, I decided to hire young people. I wanted to make sure people were going to listen to me – I was 29 years old. I came to believe that hiring young people is significant in terms of energizing our organization, really a certain perspective that I find very refreshing.
When we hire people within our organization, we had two aces that we look at. One is, Does somebody have the technical skills to do the job? Are they smart enough to be able to figure out the skill set, can we teach them to have the skill set? Second, Are these good folks?
We train people within the organization. We create a culture for the organization. Most training programs for professional development emphasize skill sets; they do not emphasize how to work collectively in an organization. None of those programs emphasize the whole notion of leadership, and I think we need to be able to inject that – and start talking about leadership with our kids at a really young age.
It’s a fair question: When kids aren’t having their needs met or taken care of, how will we instill the important when the urgent isn’t being taken care of? But I do believe that for young people we can start inserting ideas and values. I have a five-year-old son and I’m much more concerned about him developing into a good social being than whether he knows his alphabets or his numbers. I don’t work with him on his alphabet or numbers. He’s going to figure it out. He knows the names of over 200 dinosaurs. But I really do care that he becomes a good person. We spend a lot of time with him, making sure he understands that leadership is modeling, acting, behaving in a way that you want others to be around you. I don’t think that’s a hard concept for a little kid to understand.
Lawrence: There’s something any child can do at any age, and setting the stage for volunteers begins at that level. It begins by your own actions and your willingness to improve your children. It’s our duty, it’s our return, it’s what we owe back for all that we are given, and it’s not that all our deeds and actions aren’t successful, but it’s part of who we are.
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers