Timothy Ferris has become my favorite lunatic. Tim is the author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek, which is a book about how to escape the 9 to 5 so that you can travel the world and become a national champion in Chinese kick boxing or learn to scuba dive in Hawaii. You might find it a little bit strange that someone who loves philanthropy so much that she stays up late at night and writes a blog about her field would enjoy a book about how to escape the work world. While I do sometimes dream about leaving my overflowing inbox behind so that I can go on safari in Kenya, I am much more interested in his tips for increasing your effectiveness by focusing on the essential. Tim talks about how your work expands to fill the amount of time that you have to complete it. I got to live this lesson recently when my son got the flu and I was out of the office for 3 days. When I returned I had a full inbox and a pile of work to do. Somehow 3 days worth of work was completed in an afternoon.

Focusing on the important lets you spend time doing the parts of your job that you love, ignoring the parts that are unnecessary (do you really need to get a CNN update every half an hour?), and having more time with the people and things that you care about outside of the work world. Viva la work-balance!

Rusty Stahl, director of my favorite organization for young people in philanthropy, EPIP, has recently written a response to Dahna Goldstein’s essay, titled Foundations Should be More Like Public Companies, which she posted on Sean Stannard-Stockton’s Tactical Philanthropy blog as part of his “One Post Challenge”. Let me diverge for a moment and say how much I enjoy that the One Post Challenge in particular and philanthropy blogs in general have created such a rich conversation about how to make the work of philanthropy more effective. It wasn’t so long ago when those conversations were few and far between because foundation’s good intentions are seen as good enough. I’m glad to see that we are at a point as a society that we realize the stakes are too high to just settle for good intentions, it’s time to expect results. Check out Rusty’s response here.

My biggest pet peeve is boring nonprofit and foundation staff. Terrible PowerPoint presentations from someone from the social sector make me want to scream out “you have the most powerful and emotionally wrenching material out there and all you could come up with is this dry, picture-less, graph-filled PowerPoint about your 10 year strategic plan?!” People make award winning movies about the work that we do everyday, Al Gore’s PowerPoint won him the Nobel Peace Prize, and you can’t keep your staff and board members awake for a ten minute presentation? You should be ashamed of yourself or at least be willing to admit that there is a problem. Luckily there is help out there when we get PowerPoint impaired and forget that the work that we do is about telling stories about the real people that we are helping. Here are some of my favorites:
Andy Goodman- A great communicator who has a fabulous and free monthly newsletter about how to get your messages across.
Cliff Atkinson- His book Beyond Bullet Points reminded me that Power Point is supposed to be a tool to get messages across, not a barrier to real communication.
Chip and Dan Heath- Made to Stick was one of my favorite books this year because it teaches you how to tell effective stories that create results.

Who would you add to this list of communication gurus that are helping us change the world one awake board room at a time?

I was just selected as runner-up for Tactical Philanthropy’s one post challenge and despite my competitive nature I couldn’t be happier to come in second. Did I suddenly have an awakening and discover that winning isn’t everything? Of course not! My sudden comfort with second best is because the winner of the one post challenge was able to harness the power of viral marketing and received 683 comments for their blog posting compared to my 15 comments. The run away success of their post got me thinking about the power of web based networks to do good in our communities. So what nonprofits do you think do a good job harnessing the power of the internet to connect people to causes?

I recently heard about a country that had severe nutrition issues. The United States told Malawi’s government that seed and fertilizer subsidies would hurt the island’s economy. To meet the nutritional needs of the residents, the US government began providing surplus food, as did many nonprofit organizations. This went on for many years. The malnutrition and severe poverty continued even with the food donations. A new political leader decided to ignore US advice and instituted the subsidies. His reasoning was that if subsidies were good enough for US farmers, they were good enough for his farmers. As a result, Malawi is now producing enough food for its residents’ needs with enough left over for export.

My first thought after hearing about this story is that it sounds like a nonprofit urban legend but my next question was: Does philanthropy increase poverty by creating a disincentive for economic development? Are we unintentionally hurting the communities that we intend to help? What do you think?

Correction: Thanks to Nick for finding the original New York Times article this much repeated and adjusted story came from.

The new Program Manager will be responsible for coordinating the work of a team of Ford Foundation staff and managing all aspects of the Gulf Coast Transformation Initiative (GCTI), a multi-million dollar effort that brings the values and skills of the Ford Foundation to helping construct and build healthy and just communities in the three states that were most badly hit by hurricanes Rita and Katrina. The GCTI is a New York-based cross-program initiative of the Foundation situated in the Asset Building and Community Development Program, where the Program Manager is directly supervised by the Director of the Community and Resource Development Unit. This position is constituted as a fixed-term contract of three years duration. More information about this position is available here.

A few months ago, I wrote a column inviting readers to become contributors to New Voices of Philanthropy. The intention of this blog has always been to be a forum for the next generation of philanthropic leadership and I now have a column from one of those new voices, Christopher Scott. Christopher is not only a hopeless optimist, he is also a person that is able to get off the dime and make his idea come to life. He is also the creator of the Nonprofit Leadership, Innovation, and Change blog. From Christopher:

From Idea to Action

Have you ever had an idea on how to make a positive difference in the world? An idea on how to eliminate poverty, reduce suffering, and help raise the quality of life for hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. As nonprofit leaders we all have these ideas where we wonder, “What would happen if I could create this?” If you’re serious about turning your idea into something that will create positive change in the world I have few tips for you. The first tip is to set a goal, because this is key, because once your idea has a goal, it’s no longer an idea, it’s now a project with a deadline. It was Diana Scharf Hunt who said, “Dreams are goals with deadlines.”

The second tip is to take action. I know this sounds a too simple, but when I first had the idea of starting A Day of Hope I had no idea how I was going to do it. I was a broke college student without a job and no money. I knew I wanted to make a positive difference in my community and was determined to find a way to make it happen. So I set the goal to deliver 30 baskets of food and turkeys to 30 families for Thanksgiving. Then I started calling and emailing all of my friends and family to ask them to join me. The end result was that we delivered 48 baskets of food and turkeys to 48 families for Thanksgiving.

One of my all time favorite quotes is from Zig Ziglar, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start, to be great.” If you have an idea on how to make a positive difference in the world, start making it happen. Don’t wait until you get a 501(c)(3) number or receive a large grant. Just start now!

Christopher Scott is an AmeriCorps*VISTA Member working at United Way in Modesto, CA. He also helped to start A Day of Hope which is a student based organization that delivers baskets of food and turkeys to hundreds of families every Thanksgiving.

I am participating in the One Post Challenge over at Sean’s blog Tactical Philanthropy. The one post challenge is an opportunity to generate new conversations about philanthropy and the blogger with the most comments wins a grant for the charity of their choice. If my post wins the grant will go to the Park Avenue Foundation. The Park Avenue Foundation is an amazing organization that provides kids with great opportunities to meet their full potential. I am always amazed when I first meet kids from their programs because they seem like your average overachievers (smart, funny, great community volunteers) but then you dig a little bit deeper under the surface you find out that they are dealing with issues that most adults couldn’t handle like a parent in prison, not having enough food to eat, and the most unstable living situations that you can imagine. I wrote an article about the need for foundation staff to spend time in the community to ensure that they are connected to the community issues that they are making decisions about. Spending time with kids from Park reminds me of why I got into the nonprofit sector in the first place. I get to support organizations every day that help reach kids when they are the most vulnerable and also when they have the greatest opportunity to make positive changes that will make their lives forever better.

So get out there and leave a comment already and tell your networks to do the same. You have until the end of November to make sure that the future engineer that you see above will continue to have a soldering iron in her hand rather than a remote control.

Position Announcement: Program Director – International Programs

Background. The McKnight Foundation is a private family foundation established in 1953 by William and Maude McKnight. The mission of the Foundation is to improve the quality of life for present and future generations through grantmaking, coalition-building, and encouragement of strategic policy reform. The Foundation organizes its work in six program areas: Children and Families, Region and Communities, Environment, Arts, International, and Research. The Foundation granted about $93 million in 2006.

The International Programs. This position is responsible for managing the work of the Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP) and country-level programs in Tanzania, Uganda, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; designing and managing program evaluation and supervision of program staff. More

When I first started New Voices of Philanthropy, one of the purposes was to open up the often times closed philanthropy sector to other new voices. Young people and people of color have often been excluded from the worlds of wealth and “charity” but philanthropy makes many decisions about how wealth is redistributed in our communities through grantmaking. So excluding those groups from the redistribution or philanthropic process, as staff and trustees, means that they are excluded twice.

I’ll be posting foundation job and trustee openings that I learn about through my professional networks or that you send to me at tristaharris at gmail dot com. I know that there are websites like the Chronicle of Philanthropy have their own job postings but my take on these types of boards is that foundations only post their senior level positions there and rely on word of mouth and local postings for entry and mid level positions.

As with all new features this is a work in progress so let me know what you think.