Making Nonprofit Collaboration a Foundation Strategy: The Lodestar Foundation
The Lodestar Foundation supports nonprofit collaborations, mergers, and other cooperative activities as a major strategy.
The Lodestar Foundation supports nonprofit collaborations, mergers, and other cooperative activities as a major strategy.
Aid organizations around the world are learning that they can solve their technology and infrastructure problems faster and cheaper together than on their own. Enabling that collaboration is NetHope, a nonprofit information technology consortium helping NGOs establish the technology "ecosystems" they need to serve constituencies in more than 150 countries. Eric Nee interviews Bill Brindley, CEO of NetHope, on how the consortium got started, how it works, and how it is expanding its mission.
What does it take to keep a large foundation focused on evaluation for self-improvement? As part of the Stanford Social Innovation Review's conference on evaluation, Carol Larson, CEO of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, shares tools, lessons, and strategies for assessing performance to create a "culture of inquiry." Organizational qualities such as innovation, collaboration among stakeholders, and freedom to make "mistakes" are critical elements to foster an effective learning enterprise.
LaserMonks, a multimillion-dollar enterprise, sells ink-jet cartridges and other office supplies online to support its Cistercian abbey in Wisconsin and to help others.
In this interview with James A. Phills Jr., the Stanford Social Innovation Review's academic editor, former presidential advisor David Gergen discusses his views on social innovation, why social entrepreneurs should be more engaged in politics, and how the federal government can work with and even fund social entrepreneurs.
Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, not the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
Professionalism has become coded language for white favoritism in workplace practices that more often than not leave behind people of color. This is the fourth of 10 articles in a special series about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Conventional wisdom says that scaling social innovation starts with strengthening internal management capabilities. This study of 12 high-impact nonprofits, however, shows that real social change happens when organizations go outside their own walls and find creative ways to enlist the help of others.
Business leaders play vital roles in the nonprofit sector – as board members, donors, partners, and even executives. Yet all too often they underestimate the unique challenges of managing nonprofit organizations.
The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require someone who catalyzes collective leadership.