Susan Wright

The Governor General recently framed philanthropy as “time, talent and treasure”, noting that two-thirds of the meaning had nothing to do with money. Wait a minute… isn’t philanthropy all about the money? Well, not any more if it ever was. A growing consciousness about global disparities and what is required for our collective wellbeing is altering our worldview. This consciousness is emerging out of a number of social forces shifting the philanthropic plates and creating a new face of giving. You may want to ask whether you and your organization are part of this emerging landscape.

One of the social shifts is our now digital world – we are indeed McLuhan’s global village. In this networked village, diverse stakeholders connect to create partnerships across language, culture and geographic boundaries as well as business, social and government sectors, young and old, haves and have-nots. A new generation of leaders has grown up in this new digital age. They are more aware, more concerned, more engaged in social issues both locally and internationally. They are learning languages, participating in cultures and experiencing diversities that prepare them for global governance. Corporations who want to connect to these new leaders as employees and consumers are adding social innovation and development criteria to their ethical policies.

For example, giving staff time off to volunteer, developing leaders through participation in international development efforts like building homes and schools or donating technical expertise, and creating partnerships with other corporations, governments, social agencies and donors to build broad alliances and heighten impacts. One such partnership is Encore, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting midlife boomers in finding second careers with “purpose, passion and a paycheque”, funded by a variety of foundations and corporations as varied as HP, Cargill and UPS.

This brings me to the second shift: the search for innovation that combines business with contribution, doing well financially while doing good socially. Many corporations have set up private foundations to support their social interests, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, dedicated to bringing innovations in health, development, and learning to the global community. And closer to home, many Community Foundations support innovation in meeting the social, environmental and economic needs of our communities.

On a much smaller organizational scale, there are a growing number of passionate young entrepreneurs who have a vision of a better world and dedicate themselves to achieving it. These ‘social entrepreneurs’ are the pathfinders who are approaching local and global development with this new worldview and demonstrating with their innovative approaches how much can be done with less ‘treasure’ and more ‘time and talent’. Ashoka describes the social entrepreneur as “a mass recruiter of local changemakers – a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything”.

These entrepreneurs highlight the third shift in philanthropy – a change of focus in our ways of thinking about not only what we give but how we give it. The nonprofits they establish represent a movement toward solutions from within local communities that are culturally appropriate and economically sustainable and away from more traditional forms of aid from without. They arise from listening and learning rather than telling and assuming. They celebrate what local people have already accomplished and support its dissemination. They empower local groups with the confidence to actively seek a different future.

How does this all add up? I see in these examples a significant shift in perspective toward more private, more engaged, more self-directed ways of giving at every level of society. We not only want to know where our money is going, and how much is being spent on getting it there, but we also want to go right along with it. We want to understand the problems we are addressing and lend a hand where we can. We want to see the impact we are having on the lives we touch through increased transparency and accountability from social sector organizations. This shift in no ways discounts the value of financial assistance. Rather, it adds immeasurably to the possibilities for addressing our social needs and the chances of their sustainable success. How might you be part of the (r)evolution?

Daphne Nederhorst is the Founder of Sawa World, a nonprofit based in Vancouver and dedicated to eliminating extreme poverty with a new approach. Sawa (meaning ‘equal’ in Swahili) is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary so I asked Daphne to reflect on her experience.

What does Sawa World do that is different from traditional nonprofits?

Sawa looks beyond traditional charity and foreign aid to local leaders who have found their own innovative solutions to alleviating extreme poverty in their communities. We disseminate these solutions to others living in extreme poverty to create impacts at a wider scale. We train vulnerable local youth as community reporters in video production and presentation skills. They document and share local successes, supporting their replication to other communities in need. For example, one Sawa Leader developed a method of simple sustainable agriculture for local income development. John Mutamba has now improved the lives of over 17,000 people, mainly single mothers with AIDS, living in dire poverty in Uganda. His efforts have been shared through local gatherings, as short videos in kibandas, in the local press, and on radio and television across the country.

To what do you attribute your success over the past five years?

I think the most important factor is that we have a clear bold vision of the results we want to see in the world. We are exploring ways to create a global change in mindset about “international development” in governments, corporations, academic and social-sector systems. People in the poorest countries have much to teach the world – they already have many solutions to their own challenges. What we can do is learn from their successes and promote their achievements more broadly for increased impact.

How is Sawa World working toward this big vision?

I am an Ashoka Fellow and have benefited from being part of their global network of changemakers, giving me opportunities to meet world leaders and learn from other innovators. We are also connecting to build strategic partnerships all around the world and across sectors. We are for example partnered with universities here in Canada and in our target countries. One of the ways they are investing in Sawa World is through internship programs. Two MBA students from Simon Fraser University will travel to Uganda this year to learn about our approach and participate in local successes.

We are also linked with a wide range of global corporations such as Western Union, who hire our trained youth reporters for video assignments and support our efforts with in-kind donations. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has recently hired us to develop videos for their Join Our Core Competition campaign. And we are part of a wide network of social enterprises where ideas, strategies, challenges and successes are shared.

What about the Sawa organization?

Sawa is made up of a very committed and empowered team both paid and volunteer, both in Canada and abroad. In our young vibrant culture, we are continuously testing and innovating, trying new things on a daily basis to learn from our experiences and refine our approach. One example was our difficult decision to scale down to only one country so we could assess how our model was truly making an impact. With this focus, in six months we had reached almost five million people in extreme poverty with solutions from within Uganda and we are now ready to expand to other surrounding countries.

How do you see the future of Sawa World and organizations like yours?

We are part of a major transformation in society where social entrepreneurs and their organizations, like Sawa World, are taking action to change the world and to change our minds about how that happens. We are calling on individuals, businesses, governments, and other nonprofits to join with us in support of local leadership and solutions from within. With that in mind, I invite your readers to a unique offer: sign up for a free two hour consultation with me to learn the ins and outs of being a successful social entrepreneur and/or how to engage your organization in meaningful local or global impact. We also have an upcoming Innovation Tour in Uganda where you can learn from Sawa World’s innovative model first hand. Or you can can support a Sawa Leader and spread local solutions. The main thing is to engage! Call Daphne at 778-888-7292 to find out more about social business.

TCP is currently working with a Canadian university to design a coach training program accredited by the International Coach Federation. Developing the curriculum for this 17-day program has been a wonderful challenge, particularly because it has caused me to revisit coaching from the ground up-the essential principles and processes involved and how they are learned.

One of the themes is, of course, change. Change at the personal, team and organizational levels. Coaching has emerged over the last 15 years or so in response to the constant change we face daily and the limits of our capacity to adapt quickly enough to keep pace. This applies to coaches as well so the field is quite radically different today than when it began, despite some sustaining core principles. As we work through these differences and how to incorporate them into the coach training program, it has occurred to me that I know much more about developing teams and organizations than I do about developing individuals.

As a scholar-practitioner, I have been part of a huge wave of development of concepts of team and organization change; there are mountains of intelligence available. Since the post-war period of the last century, the focus has been on changing systems, gaining greater efficiencies through teamwork and building organization cultures where employees are engaged with others in their work. I remember in a graduate seminar in the ’70s, my professor claiming the team was the basic unit of organization. He reflected the popularity of quality circles, self-regulating teams, communities of practice and many other collective approaches to coping with change and getting results.

Somewhere in the midst of this groupiness, though, it seems to me the individual got lost-and then downsized, outplaced, transitioned and reengineered. One of the contributions of coaches and coaching has been to re-emphasize the individual, the unique person with unique needs and aspirations who requires support for managing the complexity of everyday life. Robert Kegan claims that most of us are “in over our heads” at home, at work and in our communities. The level of development demanded by our surroundings outstrips our capacity to respond. And that is not a place from which to accomplish a change of thinking, acting or being in the world. It is a place of fear, of self-protection, of contraction.

I don’t believe I am alone in coming late to this focus on the individual and understanding its incredible importance in change. I have spent the last several years in a deep dive to catch up, both in my own self-development as a coach and leader as well as in how I bring myself to others. It is exciting stuff! So as this new year begins, I encourage you to take stock of your own capacity for change as an individual, where your unique strengths lie and where you are perhaps in over your head. This is a perfect time of year for reflection and making plans. What is the change you could make that would change everything?

‘Life is full of a number of things…’ That was a saying my mother used to quote quite often. Many of us just finished a year that contained ‘a number of things’: unexpected events, circumstances, obstacles, and other interesting life artifacts.

And for some of us, it has resulted in a good deal of change, some completions, and even some truncations. We find we can’t or aren’t going in the same direction anymore. We can’t do… or be… ‘that’ anymore.

Every so often, what we take as routine …falls apart, no longer works, or just ends. Sometimes it is a relationship or a career. Sometimes it is something we have taken for granted around finances, work, health, even tried and true ways of relating to each other. Sometimes it is the clear and definitive end of an embedded illusion or even a long held dream about how things will turn out or how things are supposed to be. Some of these ‘sometimes’ are currently mine.

When the end of something seems pretty clear but the ‘what next’ isn’t yet fully known, it can be rather uncomfortable for a while. If I am not what I was and I am not what I will be, what and who am I in this moment? And how do I be and what do I do when I don’t know where I am going to end up? In other words, what do I do in the mean time?

I think the answer is….something. Be something; do something – see what sticks and what doesn’t. What that requires from me is at least a little flexibility for a little while, a little willingness to explore, a little courage to try a few things, despite a strong urge to impose stability and structure now for comfort. It means I have to be prepared to fail a few times and learn from it (my favorite definition of experience), to miss the mark and take aim again, to gather the fragments and reconstruct, to scan for other options (firstly, to have faith that there are other options), to start again… and even again. Thank goodness, I don’t expect perfection from myself or others.

So, my challenge to myself is to give myself the space, to be okay with not knowing …again, to be kind to myself when I blow it, to get up, dust myself off, and look around for those other options. And certainly to laugh. Or cry. Or even to laugh and cry at the same time – something at which I happen to be quite talented. FYI, gentle reader, if you ever need a trick to get control of your tears, it is a proven fact that it is physically impossible to cry while drinking a glass of water.

And through all of this, I want to see things straight – as they really are – not the way I wish they were. And I want to remember that the future holds as many possibilities as the past, maybe not in the way that I thought I wanted, but possibilities are there – if I am willing to exchange my current telescopic view…and my rearview mirror, for the vistas in front of me.