At Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership my guest presenter on Wednesday was Dan Pallotta, author of UNCHARITABLE and founder of Pallotta Team Works that created the multi-day AIDS rides and the 3 day breast cancer walks. His talk was about “why can’t nonprofits achieve Apollo like aspirations?”
As part of his presentation about the various factors that hold back nonprofits, Dan cited as evidence, that since 1970 there have been 46,136 businesses that have crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, but only 144 nonprofits that have done so.
Dan argues that there were two distinct rulebooks: one for nonprofits and one for the rest of the economic world and he used vivid examples to make his provocative points about how the nonprofit sector is discriminated against in the following ways:
- Compensation: If you re CEO of a $50 million a year business that sells violent video games to kids, you are deemed worthy of making $1 million a year. If you work to feed hungry kids and are paid $500,000 a year you are considered a parasite. Talented people who want to have a nice lifestyle feel like they have to go into the for-profit world and make their difference by contributing money once they are wealthy, rather than by contributing their talent.
- Advertising and marketing: Charitable giving has remained stuck at 2% of GDP, not because human beings are wired to give only 2% but because nonprofits can’t build demand and take market share. Budweiser can buy Superbowl ads in a business culture that believes you can spend down to the last dollar that yields value, but AIDS and Darfur are left with no way to build retail demand for their needs. In the business world it would be malfeasance to build a great product or service but not then invest in a great advertising and marketing campaign, as Apple does for example, to create desire and demand for it
- Risk taking for new donors: Hollywood execs almost always have a mix of hits and flops, and the risk taking makes them better over time, but launch a big event in the nonprofit sector and losing a lot of money on it, and you’re finished.
- Time horizons: Nonprofits are judged on an annual basis, thanks to tradition and the IRS form 990. Amazon.com lost money for six years, before becoming wildly profitable, because it understood the need to invest in capacity for long-term return. A nonprofit that began with six years of projected losses would find little donor or foundation support. And so nonprofits keep making only incremental gains.
Dan founded Pallotta Team Works and created the AIDS rides and breast cancer walks after bicycling across country as a Harvard student to raise money for hunger relief. He really gets the power of asking people to share their strength. And in an era of activism in the form of on-line petitions and clicks, etc. he believes “people are tired of being asked to do the least that they can do, people want to be asked and challenged to do the most they can do.”
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
On World Malaria Day: A Fatal Case of Political Laryngitis
In the run-up to the fourth annual World Malaria Day there are have been a flurry of new reports documenting scientific breakthroughs, progress, and the on-going need. In the past few days for example The Institute for One World Health announced that it is ready to enter the production and distribution phase of developing a semi-synthetic form of artemisinin, the most effective anti-malarial drug.
The problem is that while the focus will be on scientific developments, the obstacles to eradicating malaria are as much political as they are scientific.
Malaria is both preventable and curable, and it is has essentially been eliminated from the developed world. But 300-500 million people continue to get infected with malaria around the globe each year and there are more than 800,000 deaths, mostly of children whose less mature immune systems make them the most vulnerable.
Of course they are not only vulnerable, they are so poor and marginalized that they are also voiceless – and therefore there are literally no economic or political incentives and therefore no markets for serving them. They might as easily be considered victims of a fatal case of political laryngitis.
This is true for more than just those who are victims of malaria. There are other so-called neglected diseases, often parasitic, like schistosomiasis lesihmaniasis and Chagas disease. And there is also hunger, malnutrition,
This would be an equally proper focus for World Malaria Day - with special attention to those who are working to create alternative market mechanisms to compensate for the lack of economic and political markets.
As I’ve tried to chronicle in The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men, some of the most unlikely but most promising entrepreneurship and innovations are coming out of labs like those of Steve Hoffman, Jay Keasling, and Stephan Kappe.
But some of the most promising innovations are also coming from outside of science: from economists, activists, and advocates. These include organizations like Nothing but Nets, Imagine No Malaria, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which are also trying to build political will.
The problem is that while the focus will be on scientific developments, the obstacles to eradicating malaria are as much political as they are scientific.
Malaria is both preventable and curable, and it is has essentially been eliminated from the developed world. But 300-500 million people continue to get infected with malaria around the globe each year and there are more than 800,000 deaths, mostly of children whose less mature immune systems make them the most vulnerable.
Of course they are not only vulnerable, they are so poor and marginalized that they are also voiceless – and therefore there are literally no economic or political incentives and therefore no markets for serving them. They might as easily be considered victims of a fatal case of political laryngitis.
This is true for more than just those who are victims of malaria. There are other so-called neglected diseases, often parasitic, like schistosomiasis lesihmaniasis and Chagas disease. And there is also hunger, malnutrition,
This would be an equally proper focus for World Malaria Day - with special attention to those who are working to create alternative market mechanisms to compensate for the lack of economic and political markets.
As I’ve tried to chronicle in The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men, some of the most unlikely but most promising entrepreneurship and innovations are coming out of labs like those of Steve Hoffman, Jay Keasling, and Stephan Kappe.
But some of the most promising innovations are also coming from outside of science: from economists, activists, and advocates. These include organizations like Nothing but Nets, Imagine No Malaria, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which are also trying to build political will.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Five pieces worth reading before World Malaria Day on Monday
Top five pieces to read this World Malaria Day
Ray Chambers and Dr. Tachi Yamada have an column in the Financial Times: Our resolve must not waver as resurgence can be swift and devastating. The link is @ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cd9c94ec-69aa-11e0-826b-00144feab49a.html#axzz1K9cBn8g0
Sonia Shaw’s book The Fever: How Malaria Has Rules Mankind for 500,000 Years, @ http://www.amazon.com/Fever-Malaria-Ruled-Humankind-Years/dp/0374230013/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303481062&sr=8-1
The magazine of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health provides this panel of six experts and six answers @ http://magazine.jhsph.edu/2011/malaria/departments/six_experts_six_answers/page_1/index.html
Jay Winston and Wendy Woods have this piece in the FT on Resetting the Roll Back Malaria campaign has had powerful lessons and results @ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ca2ab162-6753-11e0-9bb8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1K9cBn8g0
My Tumblr page provides links to a variety of interviews and article about my new book: The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men @ http://imaginationsbybillyshore.tumblr.com/
Ray Chambers and Dr. Tachi Yamada have an column in the Financial Times: Our resolve must not waver as resurgence can be swift and devastating. The link is @ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cd9c94ec-69aa-11e0-826b-00144feab49a.html#axzz1K9cBn8g0
Sonia Shaw’s book The Fever: How Malaria Has Rules Mankind for 500,000 Years, @ http://www.amazon.com/Fever-Malaria-Ruled-Humankind-Years/dp/0374230013/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303481062&sr=8-1
The magazine of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health provides this panel of six experts and six answers @ http://magazine.jhsph.edu/2011/malaria/departments/six_experts_six_answers/page_1/index.html
Jay Winston and Wendy Woods have this piece in the FT on Resetting the Roll Back Malaria campaign has had powerful lessons and results @ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ca2ab162-6753-11e0-9bb8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1K9cBn8g0
My Tumblr page provides links to a variety of interviews and article about my new book: The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men @ http://imaginationsbybillyshore.tumblr.com/
What Americans may be telling us about our values
In today’s NY Times two journalists implicitly poses a question on the front page and another, on the op-ed page answers it. The Times lead story is headlined “New Poll Shows Darkening Mood Across America”. It is about the number of Americans who believe things are getting worse – a jump of 13% in just one month, but posed against the encouraging signs of renewed growth since last fall. The question implicit is: why such gloom amid signs of improvement.
In an op-ed about health care that is not intentionally related, but I think may be directly so, Paul Krugman writes about “How did it become normal, or for that matter acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? In his concluding paragraph he writes: “The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just “providers” selling services to health care “consumers” — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.”
So maybe that’s what’s behind the depressing poll numbers. Voters are often smarter and ahead of the politicians trying to figure them out. Maybe they are responding to the pollsters as they are not based just on economic statistics but on a gut feeling about how our values have gone astray.
In an op-ed about health care that is not intentionally related, but I think may be directly so, Paul Krugman writes about “How did it become normal, or for that matter acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? In his concluding paragraph he writes: “The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just “providers” selling services to health care “consumers” — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.”
So maybe that’s what’s behind the depressing poll numbers. Voters are often smarter and ahead of the politicians trying to figure them out. Maybe they are responding to the pollsters as they are not based just on economic statistics but on a gut feeling about how our values have gone astray.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
"We Know the Solutions, But How Do We Deliver Them"
I came across this TED Talk via a Gates Foundation tweet that read: “Saving newborn lives in India: We know the solutions, but how do we deliver them? @http://bit.ly/hSC3pl”
It’s a theme very similar to the first thing I learned about malaria, a curable and preventable disease, from vaccine developer Steve Hoffman in researching The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men. We know the solutions. We don’t know how to make them affordable and how to distribute them to all who need them. The challenges are as much political as they are scientific, for the problems affect those who are so voiceless that there are no markets for solving them.
In this talk Vishwajeet Kumar explains the interventions that reduced neonatal mortality and laif the foundation for other spheres of community development.
It’s a theme very similar to the first thing I learned about malaria, a curable and preventable disease, from vaccine developer Steve Hoffman in researching The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men. We know the solutions. We don’t know how to make them affordable and how to distribute them to all who need them. The challenges are as much political as they are scientific, for the problems affect those who are so voiceless that there are no markets for solving them.
In this talk Vishwajeet Kumar explains the interventions that reduced neonatal mortality and laif the foundation for other spheres of community development.
Monday, April 18, 2011
When "everything is on the table" in budget battles, does that include the truth? Or our principles?
Massachusetts has long had a reputation for being one of the most liberal states in the nation. So over the weekend, when I posted the Boston Globe’s front page story about Democratic Governor Duval Patrick’s proposal to cut 20% of state funding from the Women, Infants and Children’s program of supplemental nutritional assistance, the response on my Facebook page was swift and biting: “disgusting, disgraceful”, “sickening”, “is there any humanity left among politicians?” (The Globe story is @ http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-16/news/29425689_1_wic-cuts-budget-gap
State officials made the usual excuses about having no choice but to make the cuts because of the state’s budget cuts – an argument consistent with the prevailing national view that when it comes to eliminating deficits everything should be on the table. But fortunately facts are stubborn things and they are finally beginning to emerge. Because it turns out that not everything is on the table in budget debates that have been mostly one-dimensional. As the New York Times explains in its lead editorial this morning about last week’s House passage of Budget Committee Chairman Ryan’s budget cutting proposal: “Fully two thirds of his $4.3 trillion in budget cuts would come from low-income programs.”
Here are some additional facts courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The House-passed budget would cut SNAP funding by $127 billion or 20%. This could cut as many as 8 million people from the program. It is an amount equal to the funding projected to go to the 30 smallest states over a ten year period.
Three-quarters of SNAP participants are in families with children; one-third are in households that include senior citizens or people with disabilities.
Eighty-six percent of SNAP households have incomes below the poverty line (about $22,350 for a family of four in 2011). Such households receive 93 percent of SNAP benefits. Two of every five SNAP households have incomes below half the poverty line.
SNAP lifted 4.6 million Americans above the poverty line in 2009, including 2.1 million children and 200,000 seniors. No benefit program kept more children from falling below half the poverty line in 2009 than SNAP — 1.1 million
The House budget cuts spending by an amount almost identical to the amount needed to pay for its proposed tax cuts (as opposed to deficit reduction). So when politicians say that everything must “be on the table” when it comes to balancing the budget, one might ask: Even the truth? Even our principles?
State officials made the usual excuses about having no choice but to make the cuts because of the state’s budget cuts – an argument consistent with the prevailing national view that when it comes to eliminating deficits everything should be on the table. But fortunately facts are stubborn things and they are finally beginning to emerge. Because it turns out that not everything is on the table in budget debates that have been mostly one-dimensional. As the New York Times explains in its lead editorial this morning about last week’s House passage of Budget Committee Chairman Ryan’s budget cutting proposal: “Fully two thirds of his $4.3 trillion in budget cuts would come from low-income programs.”
Here are some additional facts courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The House-passed budget would cut SNAP funding by $127 billion or 20%. This could cut as many as 8 million people from the program. It is an amount equal to the funding projected to go to the 30 smallest states over a ten year period.
Three-quarters of SNAP participants are in families with children; one-third are in households that include senior citizens or people with disabilities.
Eighty-six percent of SNAP households have incomes below the poverty line (about $22,350 for a family of four in 2011). Such households receive 93 percent of SNAP benefits. Two of every five SNAP households have incomes below half the poverty line.
SNAP lifted 4.6 million Americans above the poverty line in 2009, including 2.1 million children and 200,000 seniors. No benefit program kept more children from falling below half the poverty line in 2009 than SNAP — 1.1 million
The House budget cuts spending by an amount almost identical to the amount needed to pay for its proposed tax cuts (as opposed to deficit reduction). So when politicians say that everything must “be on the table” when it comes to balancing the budget, one might ask: Even the truth? Even our principles?
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Countdown to World Malaria Day, April 25: failure to imagine or failure to care?
One of the insights at Share Our Strength that has fueled our growth is that most failures are failures of imagination, more so than the excuses we tend to latch onto regarding failures of financial support or planning or execution. Indeed this is a central point of my new book The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men which is about those who have made the leap to embrace the possibility of not just treating malaria but eradicating it.
In the Washington Post last week, Michael Gerson who worked in the White House for President George W. Bush writes compelling about a different kind of failure of imagination – the failure to imagine the very real life or death consequences from budget decisions, like those reflected in the proposed cuts in global health programs that could lead to 70,000 African children dying from malaria and other preventable maladies.
As Gerson explains: Fiscal conservatives tend to justify these reductions as shared sacrifice. But not all sacrifices are shared equally. Some get a pay freeze. Some get a benefit adjustment. Others get a fever and a small coffin. This is not fiscal prudence. It is the prioritization of the most problematic spending cuts — a disproportionate emphasis on the least justifiable reductions. One can be a budget cutter and still take exception to cuts at the expense of the most vulnerable people on earth. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron is pursuing even greater austerity while increasing funding for development. The full column can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the_real_world_effects_of_budget_cuts/2011/04/06/AFpEFXxC_story.html?nav=emailpage
Moral imagination is supposed to be what differentiates us from other species. But our boast is bigger than our bite. We remain only partially evolved, a work in progress to be both admired and resisted. As proposed cuts in the most effective global health programs show, we are at times as Bruce Springsteen sings “halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell.”
In the Washington Post last week, Michael Gerson who worked in the White House for President George W. Bush writes compelling about a different kind of failure of imagination – the failure to imagine the very real life or death consequences from budget decisions, like those reflected in the proposed cuts in global health programs that could lead to 70,000 African children dying from malaria and other preventable maladies.
As Gerson explains: Fiscal conservatives tend to justify these reductions as shared sacrifice. But not all sacrifices are shared equally. Some get a pay freeze. Some get a benefit adjustment. Others get a fever and a small coffin. This is not fiscal prudence. It is the prioritization of the most problematic spending cuts — a disproportionate emphasis on the least justifiable reductions. One can be a budget cutter and still take exception to cuts at the expense of the most vulnerable people on earth. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron is pursuing even greater austerity while increasing funding for development. The full column can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the_real_world_effects_of_budget_cuts/2011/04/06/AFpEFXxC_story.html?nav=emailpage
Moral imagination is supposed to be what differentiates us from other species. But our boast is bigger than our bite. We remain only partially evolved, a work in progress to be both admired and resisted. As proposed cuts in the most effective global health programs show, we are at times as Bruce Springsteen sings “halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell.”
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