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Todd Greer: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange Leadership Tools and Strategies. As always, I am your host, Todd Greer, Executive Director of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. Today, I come to you with a slightly different hat. Today, the hat I am wearing is the role of Managing Editor of Nonprofit Performance Magazine. Today, for the Nonprofit Exchange, I want to share with you a little bit about our upcoming issue for the magazine. Our September issue is just a few weeks away, and we are getting ready to go to the designer and to press. I wanted to share with you a little bit of insight.
Before we do that, let’s remind you about a couple things. If you ever want to join the community and be a part of these discussions, thinking about what it looks like to serve in the social benefit sector, what does it look like to be able to engage and grow your nonprofit, we invite you to come and join us. You can find us at synervisionleadership.org, and you can feel free to join the community at /register. It’s a great opportunity for you to think about other people in your sector who are asking the same types of questions as you, to be able to draw closer to ask tough questions, to share your practices that have worked for you, and to think about new and innovative solutions to problems that are facing your community.
We also want to remind you about our magazine, which is what we are going to be talking about today. The June issue of our magazine was focused on giving for impact. I think it’s a really important thing for people to jump in to think about high-quality information and content that we share with you every quarter. You can find that through our website at synervisionleadership.org. All you have to do is look for the Magazine button, and you will be able to access it right there.
Also, if you have missed any old episodes of the Nonprofit Exchange, the easiest way to find those is either by going to the iTunes Store and searching for the Nonprofit Exchange, or by simply going to hangouts.synervisionleadership.org. Those are all there. They are accessible for you, and they are free and easy. Whether you are downloading or watching, you can have access to some great thought leaders from across the country as they share with you on really important topics affecting the nonprofit landscape.
Today, as we said, we want to think of our community. It’s a subject that is really deep and important for the SynerVision Leadership Foundation. We have had a lot of blog posts about community. We have had a lot of conversations with nonprofit leaders from academics and practitioners across the globe who are talking about community. For us this time, it’s a little bit special.
Our September issue is focusing on embracing your community. This is where it really started for us. For us, we came across a co-authored report by Commongood Careers and Level Playing Field Institute. That was called “The Voice of Nonprofit Talent.” It was really focused on the perceptions of diversity in the workplace. It was a study that was published a couple of years ago, but when we saw it in early 2015, it started to prompt some questions for us, as we thought about what is community and how do we think about it.
We have talked a lot about community-building, asking questions about what it means for us as we think about communities to be built. What does it mean for us to think about communities as they remain intact and grow? A lot of times, we throw out conversation points like we do community management or we do community building. Those are pieces of the lexicon that are just buzzwords that we use now. We wanted to think about what is community. What does it look like?
Peter Block, in his book aptly titled Community, he began his entire treatise with the following words. He said, “The need to create structure of belonging grows out of the isolated nature of our lives, our institutions, and our community.” As we think about community in this upcoming issue of the magazine, we want to think of this sense of membership as a way that we find identity, support, and mutual goals and drivers, but it’s also a way that we find the wholeness of community. As we sit and think about our own personal experience, they are but one in the midst of a larger community.
We have tried to ask some deep questions as we have thought about what community looks like and how we embrace our whole community. We are really excited about the end product that is going to be coming to you soon. We have contributions from Penny Zenker. She is an expert who has joined us on the show here.
Leah Eustace, Kathleen Latosch. They are nonprofit consultants talking about diversity.
Al Winseman, who has joined the show. He is a senior consultant at Gallup, talking about the uniqueness and importance of unique talents in your own organization.
We have the Second Chance Organization, based out of San Diego County. It’s a group that works with formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless, and formerly drug-addicted individuals and helps them on a journey from that place of hurt to sustainability.
We are seeing input from the Tamerack Institute, as they think about what is community.
We are talking to The Mission Continues, an organization working with veterans as they come back stateside about giving them a sense of focus as they think about volunteering in their own communities.
We have input from Angela Spranger. She is a professor of management and leadership in the Newport News area. She is looking at the sense of diversity and conflict from the role of an HR practitioner.
We are excited to be able to share with you insight from Stephen Lewis, the executive director of the Forum for Theological Inspiration.
We are totally blown away by the opportunity to be able to think about storytelling from Miriam in the Close Up Baltimore group. They are experiencing the challenges of what happens when community is struggling in Baltimore last year. We are excited about that.
We have some great insight from C Forbes Sargent III on board development and community.
You will see some names you are familiar with. You will see my name. You will see Hugh Ballou, our president and founder at SynerVision.
But for us, it’s really digging into some important questions. We want to think about what it really means to be in community. We want to think about the uniqueness in community. Sometimes, one of the first things we think about when we talk about community is the importance of diversity and inclusion. You will see the questions that surround that. You will see some prompts. Our hope is that as you think about your own community, as you think about your own organization, you will be asking those kinds of questions that make you step to the next level.
Community is so important, and diversity and inclusion are so important. It’s not just from that idea of us thinking about a forced implementation. We want to think about proactive perspectives for diversity. How is it that we can embrace the whole community and think about opportunities unless we bring together the unique skills, abilities, and perspectives of the people that make up our community? Or what about for you as a nonprofit leader? When was the last time you had somebody that was part of your population that you were serving at the boardroom table to think about program development? We think it is extremely important, and it is vital to our growth and sustainability as nonprofit organizations, to make sure that the people we are serving are part of the development of service, not just the end user of this service. We want to think about what it looks like for us as we think about coming together. Are we truly embracing our community, or do we just have a specific niche that we have covered?
We understand very truly that organizations cannot be a one-size-fits-all. They are not able to do everything for everyone, and I would not entice you or encourage you to do that in your nonprofit. But the question is: Are you missing out on a really important part of your community? Are you failing to give service, even in the specific type that you provide, to a specific aspect of your community? Have you thought lately about language barriers, the struggles of individuals who have English as a second language, what they are dealing with as you seek to provide them with programs, services, and resources in your community? Have you looked at what it would be for somebody who doesn’t have the experience of your community as its origination point? How about somebody in an urban community who comes from a rural background, or somebody from a suburban background in an urban setting? What does it look like? Are you bringing those voices to the table?
Even for you, as you think about your board, are you including on your board not only people who can give money to the organization, but also people who bring a unique perspective? Are you bringing young and old? Are you bringing racial diversity? Are you bringing diversity of perspective in job functionality? What types of things are you bringing to the table as you develop your organization?
Throughout the issue, we are going to be focusing on the importance of unique strengths and abilities of diversity and inclusion because our common theme that we are working off is a quote from Doug Floyd. Doug said, “You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same notes.” That is really important in the nonprofit sector, too. We know it’s very easy for us to get a very specific type of person, somebody who comes in. A lot of times, what we have found is that women are overrepresented with nonprofits as compared to men, which is surprising because we don’t see that in a lot of other institutions, yet in nonprofits we do. How are we encouraging men to be a part of it, and not just in the boardroom? How are we encouraging them to be involved in various aspects of our nonprofit? We oftentimes see people later in their career who are more involved in nonprofits. But what are we doing to engage our millennial? We oftentimes see people of a higher socioeconomic status that are involved in the nonprofit sector. How are we making sure that we are embracing and encouraging the development of people that come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds?
These are all really important questions for us, and they are important questions that we are going to be tackling throughout the September 2015 issue. We want you to think about how you can ask these important questions in your organization so that you can grow the impact of your nonprofit. We are very excited. We want you to join in with us. It’s a very important time for us as a nonprofit sector to make sure we are leading the foray into diversity and inclusion. We cannot be at the tail end. We have to be leading the surcharge, the focus. Make sure you are there leading that charge. We encourage you to ask deep and important questions as you function in your organization.
Really excited to always join you for the Nonprofit Exchange. These are simple tidbits, tips, strategies, questions, but they are not easy. I encourage you to join in as you ask these questions in your organization. Thanks again for joining us, and we will see you next week.
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The Nonprofit Exchange: Thinking about Community (Archive Replay) | The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
