By Ellen Irie

“Deliver on the promise of a quality education.” Thus proclaimed LeShawn Routé Chatmon, Executive Director of The National Equity Project (formerly BayCES), echoing the organization’s mandate at its inspirational re-naming event held on Friday, October 29 in downtown Oakland.

BTW is proud to have been a supporter of this event; BTW Managing Director, Lande Ajose, currently serves on The National Equity Project’s Board of Trustees. I attended the event with several of my BTW colleagues and was moved not only by the organization’s vision, but by the stories of the people who are working tirelessly to ensure that all children can access their right to a quality education.

The most powerful and consistent message throughout the evening was summed up by keynote speaker Angela Glover Blackwell, President and CEO of PolicyLink. Blackwell stressed that equity isn’t about one group or another taking a stance or making a claim. Equity is about everyone; equity is for everyone. And as such, everyone has a role to play in ensuring equity.

The evening’s event was designed to illustrate this very point by hosting a panel discussion in conversation with Blackwell. The panel featured five individuals who play different, yet equally important, roles in local education: a district superintendent, a school board commissioner, a principal, a teacher and a community organizer. Their inspiring, and at times tearful, stories demonstrated their personal passions for striving for equity, and why they get up in the morning each day to fight this battle.

These narratives reminded me that a unifying theme in all of BTW’s work is that in one way or another, we are helping our nonprofit and philanthropic clients to strive for equity: equity in access to health care, education, employment, opportunity and more. Quite frankly, this is not the frame that I think about my work every day, but I find it both inspiring and provocative to consider how our work is furthering the aspiration of equity. And let me, in turn, ask you: What are you doing today for the sake of equity?

By Lande Ajose

On October 17, the film Waiting for Superman opened in 27 cities. It has been hailed as the most significant documentary since Davis Guggenheim directed the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The film is being credited with reinvigorating the national debate about the state of public education. As many efforts get underway and commitments to change are made, one voice is noticeably absent: organized philanthropy.

The absence of philanthropy is especially jarring considering how much money foundations pour into public education. According to a New York Times Magazine article, approximately $4 billion was spent on K-12 education philanthropy in 2008. These funds have supported everything form the proliferation of the small schools model to improvements in teacher performance and everything in between.

Some think philanthropy is cumbersome and slow to react as movements organically unfold and evolve. The release of Waiting for Superman is a key opportunity for philanthropy to take part in a movement in the making.  Yet where is organized philanthropy? What are foundations doing, individually or collectively, to harness the energy of this film?

Here are three simple ideas:

1.    Sponsor a community film screening.  Foundations are fortunate to have the ear of stakeholders on both sides of the political aisle. To leverage these connections, foundations could hold screenings in their local community to discuss the film and determine collective actions to address key issues at a local, regional or national level. Such a convening could also offer foundations opportunities to promote the important work of their grantees.

2.    Support others to see the film. Donorschoose.org has teamed up with Paramount Pictures, Walden Media and Participant Media to give movie goers $15 gift cards, which they can donate to a classroom project of their choice. There’s a double bottom line here: 1) create an incentive for others to see the film and 2) support classroom work.

3.    Support community organizations who want to engage in movement building around the film. Several nonprofits have sponsored private screenings of the film and want to sustain the energy generated by this movie. Perhaps foundations could provide some “glue” money to better help them do this?

When foundations are working at their best they are able to seed new approaches to old problems and advance the good work of those in the field.  With the energy created by Waiting for Superman there’s an unrealized opportunity for philanthropy to do both.

by Kim Ammann Howard

Recently, I’ve been thinking about new tools that can help present information in a visually engaging way. More than ever before, we are able to easily and cheaply gather and share such information. This has generated vast amounts of visual content; on YouTube alone, 24 hours of videos are uploaded each minute. However, as we know, more of anything doesn’t always equal better; sometimes it just means more. Below are some examples of tools that visually present information in a way that made me stop and think about an action I could take, how I could incorporate the tool into my own practice and colleagues who might have an opportunity to use the tool:

• Wordle is a free online service that creates “word clouds.” The site analyzes imported text and generates visual displays of words that appear most frequently in the source text. The images show the most common words with greater prominence by increasing font size and using color. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently surveyed nonprofit fundraising staff about their favorite blogs in the nonprofit world and created a word cloud based on the results.
• GapMinder is a free online tool that people can use to create maps that show the progression (or lack of progression) in human development. Through this program, users choose among hundreds of indicators (e.g., unemployment, literacy, life expectancy rates) to create maps that move and shift along a timeline. For example, taking advantage of the attention on the World Cup, one user asked the question whether rich countries are better at soccer by creating a visual display through GapMinder that shows qualifying nation’s soccer ranking relative to the nation’s income per person.
• HealthyCity is a free online California mapping tool that allows users to locate public services, analyze demographic and residential data, create easy-to-read maps and share data projects across organizations. Recently, the Advancement Project utilized their Healthy City mapping tool to coordinate efforts for the 2010 Census and ensure a better count of “hard-to-count” communities.
• Prezi is an online tool to create visually stimulating presentations. Prezi allows users to follow a story line through a presentation and zoom into specific sections for emphasis. In 2009, writer James Geary utilized Prezi at the TED Conference to visualize his presentation about the influence of metaphors on people’s thinking.

Many of the existing tools, those above and others, are easily accessible through the Web and in most cases are even free – something that is critical for many of the nonprofits with whom we collaborate. As we identify and experiment with new tools, and maybe even create our own, let’s share our experiences about how they help us to tell important stories of change.

By Kim Ammann Howard

Everyday, information permeates most aspects of our lives. Rapid advances in technology and our resulting ability to collect and share information takes place at a scale that was hard to imagine, even ten years ago. For many of us, this information explosion results in a “love-hate” relationship that oscillates between invigorating and overwhelming depending on the moment.

The Economist’s recent special issue report “Data, data everywhere” reflects on how, in our information-centered economy, various forms of data have become the new raw material of business in the industrial data revolution we find ourselves in. While other industries continue to struggle during this down economy, the data management and analytics industry flourishes; currently estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, it is growing annually at about 10%. The appearance of new definitions to measure available information is just one indication of these swift changes—gigabytes, which in the only distant past seemed so large, has been quickly surpassed by exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes. While the report focuses on compelling stories of how information is transforming business practices, I wondered about the implications for the nonprofit sector. To what extent can we further harness technology-induced data and tools to transform nonprofit practices? How might we use:

• Data exhaust, the valuable information left from the trail of internet users’ clicks,
• Broader and easier access to public information from the biggest generator and collector of data—the government (e.g., www.data.gov),
• Cloud computing, in which the internet is used as a platform to collect, store and process data, allowing organizations to lease computing power when they need it rather than buying expensive equipment, and
• Open source software, which allows the examination and presentation of data without the purchase of expensive and complicated software packages and updates (e.g., Google Analytics, a free software that provides in-depth reporting on Web site usage).
• Hand held devices and other new technologies that facilitate quicker and cheaper collection and use of information across users and sites.

Whether we like it or not, we are part of a grand experiment of how information will impact our lives. For those of us committed to the nonprofit sector, we are at an exciting moment to influence how these new found technologies can propel us towards the change that we want to see.

By Ellen Irie

Capacity building has been a leading issue in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors for over a decade. This is a good thing. The increased focus has provided nonprofits with time and resources to attend to the underlying structures, competencies and processes that enable them to be more efficient and effective in their mission-related work.

In the last several years, “greening” has also become a topic of much discussion. While greening is a relatively young term that lacks a consistent definition, it generally relates to making a place or processes more environmentally friendly and ecologically sustainable.

I would like to posit—promote even—bringing these two concepts together into the “greening of organizational capacity.” Currently, for nonprofit organizations, green practices are often an add-on—something to do when resources permit (e.g., printing on recycled paper or increasing electronic communication and transactions). But what if being green was essential to strong organizational capacity? I’m not just talking about adding environmental elements into program outcomes, which may be an appropriate path for some nonprofits. I’m talking about green thinking and practices being critical to strong organizational capacity—enabling a nonprofit to reach programmatic outcomes.

Can the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors “green” the frameworks we use to understand organizational capacity? Can we move beyond greening as a feel-good or compliance issue to a core capacity element that is essential for efficiency and effectiveness—not just “nice to have,” but “need to have?” What will this take? Stay tuned for my next post on some specific ideas – and I welcome any of your thoughts as well.