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The following is from a handout I created for the CTCnet Conference in which I presented on capacity building models for community engagement. You can download the handout with worksheet (PDF), or read the overview below.

Introduction to Community Engagement

The core competency for any organization—private or nonprofit, funder or grantee—is learning to manage change while maintaining high performance on standard functions and simultaneously building capacity to learn and evolve.

—Evaluations of Capacity Building: Lesson from the Field,Alliance for Nonprofit Management

Communities form the context in which nonprofit organizations operate. Driven by community needs and powered by community resources, successful organizations must continually assess how their organization’s mission and programs fit into the evolving landscape of their communities.

Every organization has the ability to adapt and succeed, but may lack the tools and guiding ideas to make sense of the situations they face. Organizations that are continually expanding their capacity to create their future require the information and tools needed to successfully engage their community.

Building an organization that can adapt and thrive requires two main competencies:

1. The organization regularly assesses community needs and resources
2. The organization regularly responds to new/emerging needs and resources

…read more

Yesterday I posted an article that sought to give a broader frame to the idea of cross-sector nonprofit collaboration: placing collaboration within a process of negotiation to create new value. Today I will break down negotiation a little bit further to show why I think it’s important to take a broader frame of things and maybe even get semantic. Updated to add: :-)

When I’m talking about negotiation, I’m really talking about one particular piece of community engagement. Community engagement is all about self-evaluation (what can we offer the community?), communications/outreach (sending and receiving), and creating opportunities for participation—leadership, governance, programming and volunteerism all included. Negotiation is the piece where you are actively communicating with specific members of the community: individuals, groups, organizations, businesses and government.

So if collaboration is just one option within negotiation, what are the others? To that I really like the Thomas-Kilman Conflict Management Model:

Assertiveness (Y-Axis) is the extent to which you attempt to satisfy your own concerns, values, or interests. …read more

I really like this post from Entry Level Living about the need for nonprofits and for-profits to collaborate in these dicy economic times. She lays out some good examples of collaboration and ties it into a compelling sandwich. But it also begins with a an false cliche (nonprofits war with the for-profits) and doesn’t actually get beyond the the assumption that collaboration is an intrinsic good. The interesting and unanswered piece (for anyone who isn’t a millennial, like the Allison of Entry Level Living and I) is: why the hooey should we care about collaboration?

The answer: you shouldn’t. You should care about creating value, collaboration is just a means to getting there (and not the only one, at that). Entry Level Living lays out some fine examples that do create value, but doesn’t provide a strict method for thinking about value-creation.

So let’s talk about value: …read more

My birthday is coming up on the 24th of November. Twenty-six. In the tradition of my friend Rebecca, below is a list of things I would like.

Intangibles can be emailed to me at bensheldon@gmail.com

Tangibles can be mailed to me at the address below (email me if you need postage/shipping subsidy):

GEO: 42.315195, -71.102057

Consumables (singular)

Please leave your name in the comments if you plan on getting me one of these, so I can take it off the list and not get a bajillion of them.

1. Sack of beans for pie crust pre-baking (ie, I want the SACK, not necessarily the beans)
2. Colorful ~4 cup teapot (not kettle) with tea strainer
3. Banana Fruit Case (a lightweight case for carrying bananas unscathed)
4. Silicon Baking Mat (for cookies, etc.)
5. Ceramic loaf pan

Consumables (multiple)

1. Small ~1″ buttons— fun, emblamatic or colorful… but not ironic
2. 1.5-2″ ribbon (~2 feet worth) for brim of hat
3. Multicolored v5 pens (red, yellow, green, etc.)
4. Loose mint, kukicha, jasmine tea
5. Smartwool socks (medium and heavy weight) for normal size foot (US 10½)
6. Small wind-up toys

Mixed Media

1. The name of a book (or a physical copy if you’re feeling generous) you like that is about (or contributes to a better understanding of) design, color theory, visual literacy or with magical realist (basically any spectacle that gives you giddy chills) themes
2. A drawing of a bicycle (or other bio-motivated vehicle) you love or would love to have
3. A sticker, postcard or primary scrap that represents or espouses an idea or ethos you both believe in and would defend to your grandma (or equivalent old-timey values stereotype… and no irony: it’s too complicated and she wouldn’t find it funny anyways—she’d tell you to say what you mean)
4. A picture of an animal (or animals) that you regularly see

Geo-Contextual Bonus

Find a public spot in your neighborhood or regular route. Compose a short (~300+ word) real or imagined anonymous first-person narrative that begins “On this spot, …” (update: I removed the requirement to write the statement in the first-person.) Write the narrative such that it gives a potential reader the same sense of hope, wonder, and authentic symbolism that you would have should you, on that very spot, look down to find a fresh copper penny heads-up and, picking it from the pavement, find a perfectly minted heart upon the other side… and then putting it back on the ground, heads-up, for someone else to discover (i.e. write a story whose reading equates to that experience, not a story retelling of such an experience). Securely post with tape or staples your story to that spot in an easily viewable place. Send me the location (street address or cross-streets), a photograph of the posted story, and a copy of the story.)

Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s topic is Poverty. Since I’ve recently written about poverty directly, today I’ll be more lateral:

Today I am wearing:

1. Cotton American Apparel T-Shirt (with print-design from Woot!)
2. Denim Banana Republic Jeans
3. Saucony Synthetic Running Shoes
4. Old Navy Underwear
5. Hanes Cotton Socks
6. Leather Belt purchased from Brooklyn St. Fair with Levi’s Metal Belt Buckle
7. Penguin Lambswool Sweater

Discussion Set 1: What types of information have I included in this list? What have I omitted? What types of information would you have included (or omitted)? Why?

Discussion Set 2: In my clothing, what could I have done differently, within the broad context of poverty? Why?

Discussion Set 3: How have you approached this exercise: Realistically, Positively, Pessimistically, Cynically, Pragmatically, Comprehensively, Reductionistically, etc? How did the context or presentation of this exercise affect how you did (or did not) perform it? How might someone else approach this exercise and why?

Discussion Set 4: Is this an appropriate exercise for addressing poverty?

My RSS feeds of late have been delivering to me many interesting posts by Chris Anderson as he explores the different kinds of free. I’ve been specifically interested in his visualizations of the Advertising Model of Free: advertisers pay for advertising, which subsidizes programming, which is then given away for free, with the goal being that consumers will purchaser those original advertiser’s products. There is a great explanation of how broadcast advertising works in the Denver Open Media’s Opening Access video (at about the 1 minute, 30 second mark).

Chris Anderson’s graphic of the same thing is below (C is Consumer, P is Producer, A is Advertiser):

This model of Free is very similar to the standard nonprofit model of giving: Foundations/Donors (D) provide support to Nonprofit Organizations (NP) which then provide free services to Clients/Constituents (C):

…read more

Today, according to NPR (and many other outlets), “more than 30 pastors across the country are expected to preach a sermon that endorses or opposes a political candidate by name. This would be a flagrant violation of a law that bans tax-exempt organizations from involvement in political campaigns.”

I’ve previously discussed two pillars of nonprofit structure: Incorporation (and Discretionary Conception) and Tax Exemption. So today lets talk about Restrictions on Political Activity for nonprofits.

Section 501(c)3 of the Tax code is relatively clear on prohibiting candidate endorsement: organizations are prohibited, directly and indirectly from participating in, contributing to, or speaking on on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.

Nonprofit organizations are allowed though:

• Neutral and non-partisan voter education and registration activities. For example, an organization could indicate how candidates voted in the past or a survey of opinions on an issue, so long as all candidates were included no preference was given to the outcomes.

…read more

In my last post exploring poverty, I defined poverty as “the inability to fully participate in or benefit from society”. This definition sought to move beyond a simple definition of poverty as an economic floor, and towards a broader conception of poverty and a goal for society in general.

To begin this post, I’d like to explore the idea of participation as an opposite of poverty. Using participation as a guide, we can thus provide a conceptual benchmark: a society can be measured by the people who are excluded from it.

Describing poverty as exclusion is not unique. Prof. Yves Cabannes writes extensively upon South American anti-poverty movements and their notions of exlusion. Urban organizer Martin Longoria of Brazil has said “You know what is the opposite of exclusion for us? It is not inclusion, but participation. Active participation is what makes you a full citizen.” (”Poor, or excluded? lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean”. UN Chronicle, March-May, 2001)

Within the United States there are many examples of exclusion, but an illustrative one is an exclusion of age: will our older population, expected to grow with the influx of Baby Boomers (and others of the same age), continue to be able participate within society at the same level they currently do?

There is no easy answer to this question (or the multitude of questions like it); and that we frame it within an easy/complex binary system is perhaps the problem. In approaching questions like these, our most common impulse is to look towards existing problems:

• Older people have difficulty voting
• Older people have difficulty earning a living-wage
• Older people have difficulty socializing with younger people

And breaking these down, we usually approach them as essential elements that are missing or unfulfilled:

• They can’t register to vote
• They can’t get to polling stations
• They are not engaged on issues or by candidates

It is easiest to frame issues as the absence of something currently existing, rather than creating something new. We look for simple indicators of success, rather than describing the outcome as a whole. Our collective inability to accept diversity and create participation can be viewed as a failure of imagination.

Experiment: Describe society if people over 65 years old were fully able to participate within the political system. Do so using language that doesn’t actually use “old people” (or senior citizens, or any subject that would stand-in for an idea of them).

It’s difficult. …read more

In my last post about nonprofit structure, some interesting and important aspects of tax-exemption weren’t fully explored. Specifically, I glossed over why tax-exemption exists in the first place. Let’s rectify that.

The tax-exemption at the heart of nonprofit organizations—along with “nondistribution constraint” (i.e. one cannot profit from, or own equity in, a nonprofit; it may not inure to someone)—is the the key distinction between a nonprofit organization and any other incorporated entity. The reasons why a nonprofit organization should receive tax-exemption (and the government subsidy it implies) are varied and contested.

Norman Silber’s A Corporate Form of Freedom (p. 167-169) presents the following reason why nonprofit organizations—in aggregate—should receive the special privilege of tax-exemption:

• The difficulty in measuring a nonprofit’s income and assessing an appropriate tax. (Boris Bittker and George Dahdert, 1967)
• It rewards altruistic behavior in support of communities that might otherwise diminish or fail entirely without governmental subsidy. (Prof. William Ginsberg, 1980)

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I’ve recently been collecting examples of whale art. My interest mostly lies around their monotonous use in hipster art; and they’re kind’ve cute. I put up on Flickr a gallery of whale archetypes.

Left-to-right and top-to-bottom, the whales are named: Billy, Gus, Tina, Sal, Sanjay, Perth, Jill, Buddy, and Ann. Some of them may be familiar to you.