Moving, Moving, Moving

Starting with the next blog, you’ll notice a new look to CauseEffectivePerspective.

We’ve built a new Cause Effective website (wshew), and we’re linking the blog onto our site.

Our tech advisors assure us we can redirect you without a hitch – so, let us know if that’s the case!

And take a look at our new site while you’re on board… we’ve piled it full of resources and tools to help make your nonprofit life easier (or, at the least, more productive).

Here’s to progress…

Sliding Into Home

We're at the final stages of preparing for our 30th Anniversary Celebration here at Cause Effective, and we're going through what we've been through with our clients so many times... that feeling of being on a shared enterprise that is rapidly, rapidly, rapidly coming down for a landing.

But it’s the shared enterprise - the team - that I want to take this space to reflect on.

A nonprofit is, by its very nature, one of Tocqueville’s “associations” – a group of individuals coming together for a shared purpose.

In the 1830s, Tocqueville traveled to America from France and wondered at the preponderance of voluntary associations to accomplish social good: “Americans

of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” he mused.

Almost 200 years later, we still are.

But my point here is not the proliferation of nonprofits in the past several decades – though that’s certainly true – it’s the idea of a joint endeavor. At the heart of board-staff relations, at the core of how we run our organizations, is the concept of collective shoulders to the wheel to get the job done.

And even more than the idea, that concept of collective associations – is the feeling of shared purpose and collaboration.

It’s exciting, it’s affirming, and it’s reinforcing. I’m not in this alone – we’re all pulling the cart along, together.


Nothing brings that home more than sliding into home on a special event.

The whole office is working late. People are taking on responsibilities that “aren’t my job” to help each other out. Board members are responding to emails within seconds, even generating an-idea-a-minute to help the engine along.

I know I’m using a lot of movement metaphors here, but that’s what it feels like – we’re being swept along by a collective force that’s far, far stronger than any one of us doing our jobs in isolation.

And the question post-event?

How to keep that collective energy going, albeit at a lower pitch, to keep the communal strength of purpose and lightning-pitch clarity about goals that we experienced with the event.

Stay tuned…

The Communal Moment

My family went to the Rockaways yesterday.

Not to sunbathe, or to surf the waves – but to hand out food and deliver blankets.

It’s not something we usually do on a Saturday, but all of New York is engaged, it seems, in a collective effort to lift each other up.

Hey, there’s 8 million of us here in the City – if we each hauled out a day of muck from a basement, we’d clear out a ton of garbage (or more – and I’m sure there’s more).

So welcome to our post-Sandy recovery.

But as a nonprofit professional, nay as a fundraising professional, I have to step back from the muck and ask: What does this mean for the nonprofits in New York – both now, and going forward?

Well, by the way I titled this blog, you can see what I think is the “seize the message” takeaway.

This is, indeed, a communal moment. A moment in time when everyone – from the Mayor and United Way to churches, synagogues, mosques, activist groups, traditional charities, even large corporations – are all mobilizing ways to help.

It’s a moment of New York City-neighborliness – where Team Ralph Lauren sends a group of 30-somethings to clean up for a day, and Times Up sends bicyclists to deliver supplies when cars can’t get through. Where everyone is finding their own way to help; and everyone is thinking collectively that it’s each of our own personal responsibility to help.

There’s no turning away, like the appeals we get in the mail that we don’t even open. No, this is a zeitgeist moment, a barn-raising moment – of taking responsibility for each other as citizens of the same city, or even the same world.

And isn’t that, at the heart, what all nonprofits are about?

Working to further a social good, not just a personal gain?

We at Cause Effective have been thinking a lot about this, and about how nonprofits can use this outpouring of collective responsibility to further fundraising for Sandy-related relief work – and also to extend our sense of communal accountability post-Sandy.

Stay tuned…

Why Nonprofits Matter: A Reminder

I am writing this via candlelight. But my heart is lit with awe.

At the collective spirit of people to help each other, and at the nonprofits who have mobilized deep in their communities, their neighboring communities, and communities clear across the country, to pitch in.

Of course it's not just nonprofits. This photo is from a neighborhood restaurant which cooked pizzas in its coal oven by flashlight for a neighborhood starved for hot food. And reminders of the generosity of the human spirit abound, certainly in disasters but in the everyday as well.

But the very nature of a nonprofit - organized not-for-profit but in service of the common good - means the helping of others is at its very core. And we certainly saw that after Sandy - from Brooklynites helping Brooklynites to list serves that placed volunteers where they were most needed.

Our own New York State governor said it best:

“New York has one of the largest and most sophisticated non-profit sectors in the country and as we recover from Hurricane Sandy, this sector will be a critical partner."

It was good to hear a political figure acknowledge the tremendous force of nonprofits for good, and what a critical partner they are in building and bolstering a civil society.

Now if only nonprofit funding streams reflected this acknowledgement of their critical importance to the civic sphere...