I don't think we're very good at this, and I'd like to tell you why...

I have been slowly coning to the conclusion that social enterprises, no less than humans, can be damnably obstinate, merely selfish ... or unselfish and generous. And I'm getting there primarily because an event a few weeks back (What Keeps You Up at Night?) seems to have hit a nerve of dissatisfaction "in the field", and among the stresses reported were:

-- funding orgs that can't see past a specific policy to an actual (desperate) need, which I'd classify as "damnably obstinate"

-- non-profits and social ventures which go about their business in a way which benefits their own constituency while paying little or no attention to other social issues, as for instance when an educational concern pays no attention to environmental issues raised by their office procedures... this I'd classify as the equivalent of human selfishness or self-absorption

-- and organizations that reach out to others, proactively enabling sibling and even "second cousin once removed" organizations to benefit from their research, their resources, their best practices ... and these remind me of the most open hearted and generous of friends.

It would be invidious to name anyone in the first or second categories, it seems to me, but Dan Bassill of TutorMentor is my living proof of the third. His strategy is always to display his methodology and findings in such a way that others can benefit from them, either by drawing details from his research that are applicable to other situations, or by borrowing his successful structures of communication wholesale, or by contributing in to his database with information, suggested procedures, etc which may prove useful to him and to those he serves.

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One of my own continuing themes is that we currently lack real community in the social entrepreneurial sector. Conferences build community, as people meet and greet outside the "main venue" in corridors and over coffee, and I am sure that contacts made at our own Skoll World Forum have been empowering for many who attended, but we still lack the equivalent conviviality in our virtual meeting places.

We treat our online sites more as reference libraries than as bookstores with coffee shops attached, let along coffee shops with poetry readings and shelves of books. We come because we have a need, not because we want to visit...

When will we learn that it's the personal contact, the water-cooler conversation, the sense of pleasant identification, the desire to return to a well loved home away from home which will most empower us to network, to collaborate, to derive the immense (potential) "emergent" strength of our movement?

We have in common that greatest of human denominators, the wish to better not merely our own lives but those of others. Term it "do goodism" and it sounds almost despicable, but in truth it is nothing more nor less than human maturity. Those who lack it are immature, those who are driven by it have commonalities across all lines of age, race or belief.

We should be all the stronger for that, but we need to reach out, to have time for each other's ideas and needs.

So let's begin.

Size in our case dictates that we are our own evangelists, we have a small corps of supporters but as a for profit org have no donors, only customers. Until recently it has been policy to keep the revenue source and social purpose distinct, without being concealed. The simple philosophy being, that we offer a quality service for a commercial return and may do as we wish with our profits.

Like many others, I have recently discovered the power of social networking in the more general form, rather than just Social Enterprise networks. I just linked here from Facebook in fact, from the Social Edge group.

Yesterday, coincidentally I was posting on the subject of marketing tools available to this network and my experience of them. I'd created an umbrella group there for Social Enterprise and several other subtopics, realising as a developer myself, that it would help form a critical mass of likeminded others.

This takes me into the network nurturing, where with Social Edge itself as an example, I find that there's little interest in searching for these topics and participating before attempting to imprint the organisation's own identity.

We've tried to work with nonprofit affiliates, offering products at 66% discount and free assistance, but no dice.

The UK's Social Enterprise scene is all but inaccessible, few advocacies respond to email or written communications, neither do the politicians who endorse it. It gives every impression of a gravy train.

We've offered to relate our for-profit success in full cost recovery to parliamentary interest groups on social enterprise, microfinance and Ukraine the country we work in, all communications were disregarded.

Some of our customers are charities, notably the British Council, an organ of government who I've recently had reason to complain to about keeping us waiting for payment for a year. I question why they fund another web pulpit and at the same time threaten the viability of my organisation's social purpose, described on the website that they will not visit.

To me the nonprofit world is all about competition, but it's not like commercial competition offering the opportunity to secure a small market share and survive. It's about a "zero sum" round of competitions, where the would be entrepreneur line up in some kind of dog show performance to demonstrate their worthiness to mighty foundations.

I offer a recent example in a competition for anti-corruption proposals. It's an area with which we're familiar in Eastern Europe. Taking a stance against it had my colleague threated with guns, drugged, imprisoned and finally barred from Russia for example.

The $5k prize is awarded to 3 orgs. Two are funded by their own governments, the third is a transparency network with a locked down website. Plenty of small orgs could make good use of the funds but the prize goes to the better known funded national groups. From that, all I can deduce is that it makes everyone look good, by being seen as "do gooders" by the widest audience.

What works for me is to stay out of the competitions as they consume vast amounts of time, and focus instead on creating revenue streams from trading.

Heather and Leslie,

Congratulations on your book! I am the manager of the new DemocracySpace blog, a project of the Study Circles Resource Center (soon to be named Everday Democracy), and we just featured Forces for Good in our monthly roundup of new and notable books for social-change professionals. Here's the link:

http://democracyspace.typepad.com/democracyspaceorg/2007/11/november-book-r.html

Charles wrote: "We treat our online sites more as reference libraries than as bookstores with coffee shops attached ... When will we learn that it's the personal contact, the water-cooler conversation, the sense of pleasant identification, the desire to return to a well loved home away from home which will most empower us to network, to collaborate, to derive the immense (potential) "emergent" strength of our movement?"

That's a really great observation. Although this current thread here at Social Edge is being billed as a "live" discussion, it isn't really because we're not all gathered here at once, but whenever we have time to log in.

At DemocracySpace, we are trying to have some discussions - we actually call them water coolers! - that are real-time events. We publicize them in advance, so people mark their calendars to join us. (The next one, on community organizing to address poverty, is set for 1 p.m. Eastern on December 13. The one after that - the launch of our Everyday Democracy Club - will feature Frances Moore Lappe on January 17.)

When a dozen or more people all get online at the same spot at once, it starts to feel like a community - albeit a chaotic community in our case, since our blogging platform, TypePad, doesn't thread comments. I remedy that by posting a threaded version of the session at our wiki later on. Of course, people who miss the actual event can log in later and get caught up.

So what would happen if we could develop a full calendar of online, real-time events for public-interest pros, and help each other publicize them? I think that might go SOME way, at least, toward helping us build community and learn about and become evangelists for each other's work.

Correcting my previous post! Frances Moore Lappe will help us kick off our new Everyday Democracy Book Club on January 17 with a live discussion of her book "Getting a Grip."

When Iam writing these lines here I am addressing to Charles one too.In our recent reflections on Life, with an 82years person, he shared this example: A billionaire was travelling in a luxurious car and in his journey he saw an individual distributing sweets on pavement and this gentleman sitting at the backseat asked the driver to slow down and stretched his hand out of the window and he was also given a sweet. After taking the sweet he realised what he did and started feeling bad why he did it. And he asked his driver an old aquaintance "Why he did it" the reply from the driver was,Sir,"this was your old habit where in you grabbed anything free and that particular moment you forgot that you are a billionaire".

This example is really not leaving me and when we compare this to another observation- why some people dont stretch hands when people are in need.............?

I see this has lot to do with the topic -Nurture Nonprofit Networks and Charles topic.

The sleepless nights are because we are never freed ourselves and we are being chained and we are still hopeful and working for a change - why we are not able to free ourselves and allowing ourselves to be chained?

When I see and reflect on these the reason I could come out is that we failed two critical aspects of Non profit functioning - Respect for TIME (Not in physical terms) & Heart (in telugu we call Manasu).

We have to break free, why we are not able to free ourselves is because we are insecure and my famous statement is(Iam declaring myself it as famous statement)"If Non-Profits are insecure then they should quit non-profit sector" as I see Non-profit come into place (as I did)is to search for answers which Govt and People are not able to do or able to realize that every situation has an answer and situations were created by US and we have an answer for every situation.Purpose of Non-Profits is to search for deliverables or be in situation till we identify answers. Problems arise when we identify answers and we are not able to move on because we hang on with answers and we fail to share or say we fear we might loose identity, here we have to observe how nature works eg -

Koel of Kuckoo family when it lays its egg in Crows nest - it is the Koel chick which hatches first and the Koel chick virtually pushes crows eggs out of the nest so that it will get all attention of the Mother religiously crow feeds the Koel and the the Koel grows more than the Mother still crow feeds it, very well knowing that it has nurtured somebody other than its own clan.

Friends we have lot to learn from nature and learn and imbibe beautiful positions they take while they lead life.

Non-profits have to learn to share and they have to realize only by sharing we grow and contribute.

Prakash, You make an interesting statement which is quite provocative - "If Non-Profits are insecure then they should quit non-profit sector." This notion of being "insecure" raises images of competitiveness, jealousy, being out-for-yourself, and selfishness. And while it's unfortunate, I think it is indeed too often the case that nonprofit leaders behave in these ways. They see other nonprofits are potential competitors for scarce resources like funding and media attention, rather as potential allies in the fight for the larger cause they care about. The reason why "nurture nonprofit networks" arose as a major theme in our book (it's one of the "6 practices of high-impact nonprofits" ) is that the very successful nonprofits we studied have a different mindset. Rather than being competitive and jealous of their peers (as insecure leaders are), they instead become leaders AMONG leaders, galvanizing their peers to join the cause, and going out of their way to share resources with them. They raise money for their peers, as YouthBuild and City Year have done through their efforts to pass federal legislation building their fields, and the Heritage FOundation does by helping other conservative policy groups suceed. They often point the media to their peers, rather than always grabbing the linelight for themselves. The reason they behave this way is because they are driven by a much larger calling than just advancing their own organization. And to do this, I think leaders must be very secure in themselves - in both their abilities as leaders, and in the reasons they're doing the work they do. When leaders are secure, then they can see the world not as a zero-sum game or a finite pie. Rather, they go through life with an "abundance mentality," as an executive director of a local nonprofit executive put it in a workshop I recently conducted for the Trailblazers program of the Nonprofit Roundtable of Washington, D.C. While I don't think all of the insecure nonprofit leaders are about to exit the sector anytime soon, my hope is that they'll see that there is a different way, and that by adopting a different, more secure, less competitive mindset, they might just end up winning after all.

Julie, Thanks so much for both your comments and your practical suggestions. Heather and I greatly appreciate your linking to Forces for Good and helping us share our research findings with as many changemakers as possible. I liked your suggestion of having "scheduled-live" chats, as they bring people together in at least in one dimension--time--if not physically. We had a great experience facilitating a live chat that the Chronicle of Philanthropy hosted in October around the "six practices of high-impact nonprofits," which the newspaper promoted in advance its print pub and also online, and we had a really healthy discussion with about a half-dozen reader/participants. So I encourage you to pursue this idea of scheduled discussions, as I think it helps draw people together in a more concentrated way. I continue to wonder if , however, virtual/online group activities are ever really as powerful as in-person interactions for attracting supporters and allies and turning them into evangelists for the cause? Probably not, but what they can do is create a space for people from vastly different geographies and world-views to come together when they might not otherwise.

Thanks for your reply, Leslie. I agree with you that face-to-face discussions are almost always the ideal. However, in our two DemocracySpace water cooler sessions so far, we have seen some great interaction between far-flung people who have been doing study circles for a while and those who are new to the idea. Here's a transcript of the last session, which included some very engaged young organizers from Wisconsin and an interested newbie from Louisiana:

http://democracyspace.wikispaces.com/November+2007+water+cooler

Do you have a link to your live session on the Chronicle of Philanthropy site? I would enjoy reading that.

I can't seem to find the link to the Chronicle of Philanthropy chat but will try and track it down. Meanwhile, here are links to the articles published about the book in the Chronicle, including an Op-ed we wrote: 1. HOME PAGE COVER STORY “Sparking Innovation" (link on homepage); "From Mission to Movement: Book aims to identify practices of successful charities" By Ben Gose (full article headline) http://philanthropy.com/temp/email.php?id=uxe5uz8s5t6ih849j84bke8ptuh930y6

1. RELATED STORY: "To Identify Stellar Groups, Authors Tell Foundations to Look Beyond Results" By Ben Gose (this article is linked to the cover story) http://philanthropy.com/temp/email.php?id=cs5qaht7rqx81s6j4mqhb51hc7zfr1e0
2. OPINION "Results Matter" (link on homepage); "Rankings Should Reflect Results, Not Donations" By Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather Mcleod Grant (editorial headline) http://philanthropy.com/temp/email.php?id=h1bj1f84gs0o7ombc92cktfv55g0y2yh

I started leading a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program in 1975 and was fortunate to have a supporter suggest I invite others doing similar work to come to lunch so that I could learn from them. I started doing this and over they years we began doing things together that increased benefit to our organizations, while reducing the work and costs involved for each of us.

In 1992 I formalized this concept into the Tutor/Mentor Connection (http://www.tutormentorconnection.org )and began building a master database of organizations in the Chicago region who do some form of volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring in the non-school hours. That now includes more than 400 listings and can be searched by potential volunteers, donors and/or parents/social workers, to locate specific programs doing different kinds of tutoring and/or mentoring, in specific zip codes. The link is http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/Partner/CC/Program_Locator/

By maintaining this database, and using maps of Chicago to show where these programs are most needed (based on poverty and locations of poorly performing schools) I'm able to lead an on-going advertising campaign intended to draw programs togehter, while also intended to increase visibility and the flow of volunteers and dollars directly to every program in the city.

Over time the result of this is greater benefit to my own http://www.cabriniconnections.net program, and greater trust and relationships with many of the other programs in the region. Furthermore, by talking about all programs, not just my own, we've begin to enlist industry leaders to use their own time/talent to support multiple programs. The best example of this is in the legal community where a Lawyers Lending a Hand Program (http://www.lend-a-hand.net) has raised over $2.5 million since 1995 to fund volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago.

This is an on-going process made difficult by lack of resources in my own organization, as well as lack of resources in the other programs in the city. This means people don't have time to network, or think they don't have time, and it means that people keep changing, thus relationships and experiences don't grow, they keep starting over.

The Internet makes it possible to do this work at a lower cost and to share it with people all over the world. The WE now includes people in every major city where the size of the population and the georgraphy makes poor neighborhoods larger and more isolated. The people who can help us are from many places, including this forum at Social Edge.

If you browse the varioius sections of http://www.tutormentorconnection.org you can learn more about this strategy and its history, and find resources to use in building your own networking strategy.

Dan,

this is a great example of how networks can benefit everyone involved, and increase overall impact. i love the idea of tutor / mentor connection. we need more of these in every field, and in every city! as you know, it takes time and resources but by codifying what you know, and mapping other players, you can all leverage the existing knowledge and social relationships to have far more impact than if you each acted alone and in isolation. see also my comments on knowledge mgt. on discussion 3...kudos, and thanks for sharing your examples of networks at work!

Thanks Heather.

I come into these forums to get information, give information, and recruit partners. In another discuss this week one person wrote about a Harvard Business Review article titled Strategy & Society. I looked it up and the ideas are the type of ideas that I hope business leaders will adopt, which will lead to more strategic use of business talent and resources to help build tutor/mentor connection type structures in more places. I wrote about this on my blog at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com

I think the hardest job any of the leaders you describe might be to change the thinking and momentum of people who are already in business, or in philanthropy, or leading non profits, and are so deeply involved with what they are already doing it's almost impossible to get them to step back and ask if what they are doing is accomplishing what they want it to accomplish, or using their resources as purposfully as they might.

While we all chip away at this with different degrees of success, I also focus on a longer term goal, which is to grow future leaders who come into their careers already thinking strategicaly, and using the internet to collaborate and sustain complex problem solving.

I mentioned the Stanford GSB in an earlier message because I'm trying to get a team of students from two or three business schools to work with me in a key T/MC strategy which would result in a tremendous flow of resources to tutor/mentor programs in the SanFransico/Oakland area if Stanford adopt this, and in London if Oxford's Said Business School adopted the idea. If Northwestern or the University of Chicago GSB adopted it, we'd benefit in Chicago.

Can you or others who feel the tutor/mentor connection is a great concept introduce it to key leaders at your own universities who might be willing to innovate into ambiguity in order to make a dramatic change in how chariteis are supported? You can read about the Business School Connection idea at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/GetInvolved/DiscussionForums/tabid/474/view/topics/forumid/116/Default.aspx