There are tons of nonprofit consultants out there. Some nonprofits do not have the experience or know-how to determine if they are making the right choice on a consultant who is going to guide them on important decisions on fundraising, strategic planning or reorganizing. The Association of Consultant to Nonprofits has a helpful document which I hope will allow you to make an informed choice.

Yesterday, The NY Times website had a short article on venture philanthropy.  I should say that I do not like the term venture philanthropy, as most of these firms are venture capital firms, but have double or triple bottom line philosophy.  The article talks about Jumpstart, Inc., a firm which provide capital and business planning assistance to firms and entrepreneurs looking to make their mark in struggling Cleveland.

Jumpstart, inc. is an interested hybrid venture philanthropy firm as they leverage funds from donors as opposed to a pool of investors.  In addition, the profits do not go back to these donors, however, donors can experience the appreciation that their dollars are improving the economic and social capital of the community.

This “home-grown” approach of raising entrepreneurs in depressed communities also prevents cities from fighting and bargaining over companies.  Moving companies from one city to another means that one wins and another loses.  Growing small businesses locally means that these businesses are more likely to stay and invest.  Here’s a snippet from the article on this point:

Robert Litan, director of research for the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on fostering entrepreneurship, is among those who see great value in Jumpstart’s approach. “The traditional model for helping relatively depressed areas of the country is smokestack chasing, where a city provides incentives to attract companies or to keep them from leaving,” he said. “But the problem with that approach is that it is very expensive and it is a zero sum game from the point of the country as a whole, because if I attract a company to my city, then I win, but the city where the company used to be from loses.

If you are interested you can find the article here.

I‘ve just put together a class on congregation-based community organizing. I thought I would share a list of resources for you in case you are looking to connect your church, synogogue or mosque to a community organizing effort.

Here are three of the well-known national community organizing institutes who work with congregations (I’m sure there are more out there):

• Direct Action and Training Research Center (DART)

• Pacific Institute for Community Organizing

• Gamaliel Foundation

• Jewish Fund for Justice

In addition, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has an excellent page on congregation based community organizing. I would also direct your attention to comm.org’s website which has a 2001 study on the congregation-based community organizing.

Ron Snyder, an organizer for PICO, recently published an article in the New Directions for Youth Development journal, about the work of Oakland Community Organizations and their ability to empower low-income Oakland, CA parents to pressure educational reform in local public schools.

Finally, Jewish Funds for Justice has an excellent video that I embedded in this post on YouTube.

I subscribe to the Micah Challenge prayer report and receive an e-mail once a week usually with attachment which helps me to focus my commitment to work towards empowering marginalized communities and populations across the globe. As a reminder, this is a brief description of the Micah Challenge taken from their website:

Micah Challenge is a global Christian campaign. Our aims are to deepen our engagement with impoverished and marginalised communities; and to challenge international leaders, and leaders of rich and poor countries, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and so halve absolute global poverty by 2015!

If you would like to join the Micah Challenge, check out their website. For the opportunity to sign up for their weekly prayer series, you can do that here. Finally, as holistic and integral mission is a research interest and passion of mine, the Micah Challenge has compiled a list of reflections on integral mission. Please join this organization and be part of the global Christian community looking for ways to deepen Christian involvement for the common good. I’ve attached the most recent reflection with contains insights from Ron Sider on how churches can become involved in the political process.

lots-of-ways-to-impact-politics-r-sider

I’ve just finished a book by Tom Sine called The New Conspirators: Creating the future one mustard seed at a time (IVP, 2008). Thank you, Tom Sine! In this book, Mr. Sine explores the four new ways the church is working and being organized in the world in the 21st century.

Mr. Sine begins the book by dividing it into five significant conversations:

1. Taking the new conspirators seriously.
2. Taking the culture seriously.
3. Taking the future of God seriously.
4. Taking the turbulent times seriously.
5. Taking our imagination seriously.

In conversation #1: For those unfamiliar with the “new conspirator” movements, which are often used interchangeably, Mr. Sine provided me with an excellent overview of the emergent, missional, monastic and mosaic movements. Mr. Sine helps the reader to understand the particulars of each stream and how they impact the church in the west. (These church movements are mainly confined to the US, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom).

Conversations #2 and #4: Being someone that is interested in studying the trends of globalization on local communities, I found these sections most interesting. Mr. Sine, known to be a futurist, is a master “connector of the dots” as author Shaine Claiborne states in the forward. He is able to simplify, but not oversimplify how the global context we now and will live in impacts the role of the church. I thought his description and understanding of this post 9/11 world profound and I believe this is one of the few Christian books which helps disinterested, “over family-focused” evangelicals to clearly see the implications that our current global context will have on the rich, middle and low income groups across the globe.

Some concerns: while I understand some of the reasons for the book, I felt that Mr. Sine tried to do too much in one book. Conversations #2 and #4 could have been separate books in and of themselves. The biggest weakness of the book was the lack of examples in many sections of the book. While Mr. Sine seemed to provide an reasonable rationale for his various assertions, I do not believe he demonstrated consistently where the emergent, missional, monastic and mosaic movements are specifically intervening to deal with our current global context and reality. Finally, I would also have liked to see him point out some of the shortcomings of the New Conspirators in dealing with these five conversations and how they plan to engage them.

Tom and Christine Sine head up an organization called Mustard Seed Associates. Recently, Tom and Christine Sine recently lead a conference on the topic of the book, called the New Conspirators Conference. Mp3s for the conference are available, (they’re not free) here.

Here are two more resources:

The New Conspirators WordPress blog

The New Conspirators book website

I just saw an analysis on microfinance by Lee Hudson Teslik, from the Council on Foreign Relations.  The article also links you to an interview that the Council on Foreign relations staff conducted with Matt Flannery, co-founder of the famous, Kiva.org, a major organization in the microcredit sector.  The article also summarizes the ongoing debate about whether microfinance institutions (MFIs) like BRAC, Grameen and ACCION should run their organizations specifically as charities or as businesses. (I still believe that these MFIs can be run with both in mind - but it seems that research is proving me wrong!).

Also, I would draw your attention to an excellent book on this topic titled The Economics of Microfinance by Beatriz Armendáriz and Jonathan Morduch.  I just started this book, and it is an advanced primer dealing with the pros and cons of the microcredit and microfinance model.  If you’re planning to do research or learn more about this popular method of social change, it’s worth reading.  Of course, the other books worth reading on this issue are both by Mohammed Yunus, winner of 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: Banker to the Poor and  Creating a World without Poverty:  Social business and the future of capitalism.

I will be speaking at Transformational Development conference which will be held from August 14-16, 2008 at George Fox University. The topic of my session will be Seva, Sarvodhaya and Transformational Development: One and the same? The session seeks to deepen the holistic mission conversation by analyzing the transformational development model in light of other two faith-based development models. The two other faith-based development models will be the Seva movement as developed by Mahatma Gandhi and the Sarvodhaya movement, a development model created by devout Buddhist and Sri Lankan academic Professor A. T. Ariyaratne.

For more about the conference, please check out my recent post on it.

If you would like to have access to more information from the social entrepreneur/responsibility blogosphere, FastCompany has a list of blogs they track. You can also search for people or groups that are doing socially responsible work. Finally, each year, FastCompany publishes it 45 World Changers list and its Annual Social Capitalist Awards which are announced in December/January of each year.