I still remember the Stanford Social Innovation Review Podcast that we listened to last semester which talked about cross-section collaboration with business sectors. It seems to be a good choice to involve cross-section collaboration to enhance effectiveness and efficiency. In chapter two of this book, Forces for Good, Crutchfield and Grant suggest nonprofit organizations to combine advocacy and service and provide three ways to bridge the divide. (It seems that people involved nonprofit area need to seek opportunity in all the other areas. I’m actually very curious about whether MBA students learn how to collaborate with nonprofit organizations or government, or they just focus on their own business? It’s off the topic anyway.)
The three models to bridge the divide of service and advocacy is very interesting to me. It seems like the two models — “Start with service, add advocacy” and “Start with advocacy, add service” — are not supposed to combine service and advocacy consciously. It’s more like a trend or a unpredicted event which lead them to bridge service with advocacy. For America’s Second Harvest, the defining event came when Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) was threatened to be cut completely (p.38). In Environmental Defense’s case, they started to follow the trend after they sued companies and government agencies to end the practice to stop the use of the pesticide DDT. On the other hand, those organization which “combine service and advocacy from the outset” seems to make up their mind to bridge the divide in their strategic plan. The National Council of La Raza, for example, had a vision of both “strengthening communities and advocating for larger policy change” (p.44) from the outset. The cases in this book are all successful organizations. However, they went through quite different experiences to achieve the same goal: bridge the divide of advocacy and service.
It’s still unclear to me that how to bridge the divide since it seems each way of the three can lead to success. If we start from service, when should we add advocacy? Do we just wait till the defining event come which will lead us to the trend (and vise versa)? If we start from combining, how can we be sure that our effort will lead us to a good result? Even though I understand that advocacy would be worth doing after reading this chapter, I would question the topic when put it into implementation.
Hi Xiaofei,
ReplyDeleteI hope in the field of museums that advocacy becomes a strategic choice, rather than a trend.
I was reading “Exhibiting Public Value: Government Funding for Museums in the United States” by the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) and they were stating how the government does not have a lot of information on museums. For example, the report mentioned that there is little standardization of data, language and definitions, which would indicate that museums are not collaborating very much (a trait of high impact organizations according to Cruthcfield and Grant). Another problem the IMLS found was that, “Very few systematic studies examine the breadth and depth of museum attendance or use of targeted museum programs and services for different museum types over time.” Finally the IMLS notes that museum funding information is difficult to obtain. If museums banded together, became more transparent, and government coordination became more efficient, then society would see exactly what funding museums get, and how little it can be.
I think that if museums engaged more in advocacy they would be forced to collaborate with one another, record more data and standardize it, and better articulate their value to the community and do it more often. This may lead to better funding.
You can read the IMLS’s 2008 report here: www.imls.gov/pdf/MuseumPublicFinance.pdf
I am not sure that I see it as a trend, but rather a necessity if a nonprofit wishes to bring its mission to a larger scale. Most of the nonprofits in the book started out by providing program services, but realized that their capacity for instigating broad change was limited. Indeed, nonprofit organizations could use their resources to expand their mission-related programs, or they could use such resources (if not restricted) for advocacy.
ReplyDeleteTo me, a lot of nonprofits do great work in "filling the niche" where the government and private sector do not provide essential services, but more need to be done to broaden the social impact of nonprofits, and greater advocacy could be the key. This is especially prevalent due the increase of lobbying and advocacy for all organizations, either for-profit or nonprofit (e.g. Citizen's United Supreme Court case). Thus, it becomes necessary for nonprofits to compete, on an advocacy level, for the broad societal changes they hope to initiate. Otherwise, they might be drowned out by those that do advocate and lobby.