How has your nonprofit prepared for the new economic environment?

The headlines of the past few days underscore why 2012 will be a year in which communities across the country need Community Wealth Ventures more than ever.


The lead story in the January 1 NY Times describes the Obama Administration’s decision to basically give up on getting anything significant done in Congress in 2012 except the extension of the payroll tax cut. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-to-focus-on-congress-and-economy-in-2012-campaign.html?ref=politics : “President Obama heading into his re-election campaign with plans to step up his offensive against an unpopular Congress, concluding that he cannot pass any major legislation in 2012 because of Republican hostility toward his agenda.”

The lead story of today’s NYT is about Defense Secretary Panetta’s proposal to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget driven by the Obama Administration’s vision of fiscal reality. If these kinds of cuts in defense spending, which are a foregone conclusion, just imagine the constraints we are going to see on domestic and human and social service budgets at all levels of government.

With government both gridlocked and broke, there will be greater and greater pressure in the year ahead for nonprofits and public-private partnerships to advance innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to community needs. As government spending shrinks, more nonprofits will be expected to help fill the gap, notwithstanding the impracticality, if not impossibility, of accomplishing more with less.

Given CWV’s track record of helping high performing nonprofits embrace ingredients of growth and transformation, achieve sustainability and scale, and create community wealth; we may be filling a need, and intersecting with the national conversation, in ways greater than once imagined.

Encouraging evidence that we are broadening our base

Share Our Strength ended 2011 with a record level of revenues, and year-end on-line giving up more than 130%, exceeding $1.4 million. These are remarkable results. The donation I am most excited about however was one we received for fifty bucks.


In the last days of 2011 this $50 contribution came from eight teachers in Fairfax County’s Family and Early Childhood Education Program (HeadStart) with a note that perfectly underscores one of our strategic imperatives for 2012. : “Please accept this donation to the No Kid Hungry campaign on behalf of the eight of us, all Early Childhood Resource Teachers in the FECEP/Headstart program in Fairfax County Public Schools, Fairfax, VA. We work with children and families of poverty each day and know their struggles. This year we decided to forgo our own gift exchange and donate to your cause instead. We appreciate all that you are attempting to do for these kids and their families!”

When teachers tell us that supporting our program is one of the most important ways of advancing their work, it is powerful testimony that ending childhood hunger through No Kid Hungry has the potential to become an education issue and with a larger constituency than we might have imagined. Childhood hunger and nutrition are health issues too. They are also tied to economic competitiveness.

Why is this so important? We’ve done a great job of capturing the imaginations and earning the support of those passionate about ending childhood hunger. But that universe of anti-hunger advocates, by itself, is not large enough to get the job done.
But it has given us a solid foundation from which to grow. Our strategic imperative going forward is to broaden our base, so that just like the 8 HeadStart teachers in Fairfax County who donated at year-end, those who are passionate about education, health care, and even economic growth come to see ending childhood hunger as a priority they should make their own.

All successful movements – from civil rights to the environment - succeed when they are able to cross over and appeal to a broader constituency than their original passionate but small base. It’s exciting to start 2012 knowing that those who work so closely with the most vulnerable of our children, such as the HeadStart teachers in Fairfax County, are reaching out to join our campaign.

Obama has an alternative to skirmishing with Congress: working with Governors on No Kid Hungry

The lead story in today’s NY Times describes the Obama Administration’s decision to basically give up on getting anything significant done in Congress in 2012 except the extension of the payroll tax cut. See: @ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-to-focus-on-congress-and-economy-in-2012-campaign.html?ref=politics

It feels like good politics more than good governing but also a reasonably realistic choice given the recalcitrance of the opposition party to compromise in any way, shape or form. But there is another route for Obama to get things done, and that is by more closely working with the nation’s governors, who while political, do not operate in the same insular culture of Capitol Hill, and are not subject to the same pressures to build or preserve congressional majorities.

At Share Our Strength we’ve seen first-hand the impact that governors can have in bringing Obama’s policy goals to fruition. When it comes to ending childhood hunger for example Democrats like Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe and Republicans like Virginia Gov. McDonnell have been instrumental in helping close the gap between the number of children eligible for food and nutrition programs like school breakfast and summer meals, and those actually participating. Best of all, there are no budget battles to be fought because the programs are relatively small entitlements whose funding has already been assured with bipartisan support.

President Obama campaigned on the idea of changing the way Washington works. One way to do that is to reach out more powerfully to the state executives responsible for implementing programs the federal government has created. One result, even during this difficult economic period, could be an America that achieves the bold goal of ensuring there is No Kid Hungry.

NY Times editorial on hunger tells half the story

The New York Times recent editorial @ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/the-school-lunch-barometer.html?src=rechp  makes the important point that increases in the school lunch program to a record 21 million children is an important barometer of the need created by our nation’s economic challenges. And it makes the case for so many of our children receiving this help.


But the editorial fails to discuss the most relevant issue in the fight to end childhood hunger which is that all 21 million of the children who get a free or reduced price free lunch also are entitled to school breakfast but only 9 million get it,. And when the schools are closed in the summer time, only three million get summer meals. Amazingly, because these are entitlement programs with bipartisan support, the funds are available for all 21 million.

The most efficient and effective way of addressing childhood hunger in the U.S. is to close this gap between those eligible and those actually participating. That is the core of Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry strategy. Read more @ http://www.strength.org/state_partnerships/

Impressive Corporate Leadership in the Fight to End Childhood Hunger in the U.S.

With a remarkable growth rate of more than 30%, to a budget greater than $32 million, there is no one factor that can be singled out as responsible for Share Our Strength’s growth this past year. But our corporate partners have played an especially important role in the fight against childhood hunger.


I don’t want the year to end without giving special thanks to this extraordinary group that includes but is not limited to Walmart, ConAgra Foods Foundation, Food Network, Hickory Farms, Arby’s, Sodexo Jimmy Dean, Ocean Spray, Hillshire Farm, Brown Forman, American Express, Weight Watchers, Whole Foods, Open Table, Sysco, Tyson, Williams-Sonoma, Tastefully Simple, Birds Eye, C&S Whole Grocers, Capital Grille, CGI, Corner Bakery, Ignite Restaurant Group (Joe’s Crab Shack), Ecolab, Family Circle, and the many more you will find on our website at www.strength.org

Many of these businesses are not only generous philanthropically, but play a critical role in creating the jobs America needs to get its economy moving again. And they have not only supported us, but shared their strengths through community service, mentoring, and sharpening our strategy. We look forward to an even more productive 2012 and to our ultimate shared success in ending childhood hunger in America.

The strategic imperative of broadening the base

Recently in Boston I heard Senate U.S. candidate Boston Elizabeth Warren speak and field questions from a crowd of potential supporters. One of the first questions she was asked was how she would be able translate her ideas into concrete policy accomplishments in the hyper-partisan environment of Washington. She used the story of creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as her textbook example of how to get things done and there were some great lessons for our No Kid Hungry campaign.


Warren told how lobbyists for all of the financial and banking interest lined up against the legislation to create the CFPB and how they temporarily prevailed in the Senate to kill a vote on the bill.

“Then we started broadening the base of our support by building a coalition. The SEIU became a huge champion. And we went to the AFL-CIO and they said this is not exactly our top priority but we’ll get involved. And we went to the Consumers Union, which in the past has focused on toasters and other products, and they said we can see why our members might be interested in this. And we went to the AARP which saw that a lot of their members were being taken advantage of by banks and credit card companies. And we eventually built such a large coalition that they had to give us a vote, and once we got the vote, Senators were afraid to vote against us. So it was about organizing that broader coalition.”

Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign doesn’t have special interests lined up against it, but we do face a lot of indifference which is just as bad if not worse. And to overcome it we will likely need the kind of broader coalition that is successful in the kind of legislative campaign that Warren described. This is the strategic imperative to broaden the base that is faced by virtually every movement and important cause.

Noel Cunningham's funeral: extraordinary tribute to private citizen with public following

 Noel Cunningham's funeral was yesterday. It was an extraordinary tribute to a private citizen who had developed such a devoted public following. St John’s Cathedral had an enormous standing room only crowd, that included Noel’s brother, sister and twin daughters, the mayor, Governor Hickenlooper, U.S. Senator Michael Bennett, former Senator Gary Hart, a number of Ethiopians, and close to a thousand Coloradans, virtually every one of whom Noel had roped into one good cause or another. Generations of Taste of the Nation organizers and Cooking Matters volunteers found themselves together under one roof for the first time.



Former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter gave the eulogy, which like all of the newspaper articles over the past week was filled with references to Share Our Strength, Noel’s anti-hunger work from Denver to Ethiopia, and Noel’s endearingly unique combination of relentless persistence and utter selflessness.

In the days just before the funeral Noel’s family revealed that Noel had taken his own life. This stunned the community to a degree I can’t begin to describe but I’m sure you can imagine. Toward the end of his remarks Governor Ritter addressed this directly and tenderly, giving comfort to many in convincingly arguing that Noel could not have intended to hurt anyone but that some unknown and unknowable desperation made it impossible for him to hear or see the many friends who would have sought to help him.

After the service everyone in the church was invited back to Noel's restaurant Strings for a reception that included Noel’s favorite dishes. And it seemed like everyone showed up. Bagpipes played Amazing Grace while we ate and thought about what the minister had said at one point in the service: that while Noel was truly irreplaceable, his deeds were not, and those deeds remain to be embraced and carried out by each and every one of us.