Social Change Without Borders — EngagingConflicts.com
Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant have an article (which could be subtitled “Social Change Without Borders”) recently published at ChangeThis, described thusly:
Using Habitat for Humanity as a dynamic example,
authors of Forces for Good, Crutchfield and Grant, present this manifesto on what high-impact nonprofits do to achieve wide-scale social change. These methods are insightful for all organizations, including for-profits and individuals. You may just want to pick up a hammer and take a swing at changing the world.
They studied 12 highly-successful nonprofit organizations for their forthcoming book, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. Their findings are overviewed in this article, which you can download at the end of this post.
These are the 6 things these highly-successful nonprofit organizations did extraordinariy well:
- Advocate and serve. They realize that they cannot achieve wide scale systemic change through service delivery alone, so they add advocacy to access government resources or to change legislation, as contrasted to nonprofits that only provide direct services and avoid politics.
- Make markets work. Use the power of self-interest and the laws of economics which are far more effective than appealing to pure altruism and avoiding engaging with business or capitalism.
- Inspire evangelists. Volunteers are recognized as much more than a source of free labor or membership dues, and are engaged in meaningful experiences to build long-term relationships.
- Nurture nonprofit networks. True collaboration, not merely lip service to it and seeing fellow nonprofits as “competitors”.
- Master the art of adaptation. Nonprofits must listen, learn, and modify their strategies based on external cues and internal evaluation, instead of becoming mired in bureaucracy or overwhelmed with too many ideas.
- Share leadership. Others must be empowered to take action, instead of maintaining a command-and-control hierarchy with the CEO as the “hero”.
You can download a copy of the article by clicking here:
Change the Way You Change the World: A Model for Wide-Scale Social Change
