Tamar Synder at The Jewish Week offered that "While startups are more vulnerable -- they're younger and in many cases haven't built up large reserves of cash to get them through hard times -- they're also more adaptable" (Start And Stop For Jewish Startups?).

Esther Kustanowitz tweeted in realtime and then blogged after at My Urban Kvetch about Jumpstart's presentation of the key findings at the LA Federation, where she compared institutional resistance to change with "GVH (graft-vs.-host) disease, when a transplant patient's body treats the transplanted tissue as enemy cells and begins destroying the very organ that may have been its salvation" (Jumpstart's New Jewish Organizations Survey: Tweeting and Reflecting).

Bob Golfarb gave his reaction to Jumpstart's suggestion that the new startups represent a Jewish communal form of the "Long Tail" phenomenon by asking "Is that the case with new Jewish organizations? Or are there simply a great many small organizations that show up as a long tail on a graph, without any special economic efficiencies resulting from new media?" (Survey of New Jewish Organizations - A Response) posted at eJewishPhilanthropy.com.

Jacob Berkman, writting at JTA's philanthropy blog The Fundermentalist gave a rundown of reactions to the study (New study looks at new Jewish nonprofits).

Capping an eventful first week, The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Ben Gose highlighted the study's findings for the secular nonprofit world, noting especially the diversity of the people involved in Jewish startups, from the relatively unconnected to the deeply involved, all seeking options they had not found in established Jewish institutions ().

Overall the response has been encouraging and informative. As we consider potential policy recommendations and other next steps, we really do hope to hear additional comments, reactions, and feedback from as wide a range of stakeholders as possible (see, and please fill, comments box below).


Shawn Landres and Joshua Avedon are the co-founders of Jumpstart.

Cross-posted on the Jumpstart blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.166027 2009-02-11T12:33:18-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

Jumpstart http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jumpstart/ By Joshua Avedon

As the U.S. stimulus plan continues running the legislative gauntlet, the British government has just approved 42.5 million pounds (over $63 million) for a "third sector action plan" which includes a community resilience fund to help small organizations deliver services to the most needy, a "modernisation fund" to help with collaboration and mergers of nonprofits and a volunteer brokerage scheme that will help unemployed workers gain new skills while helping their communities.

Here in the U.S., many people have called for government money from the stimulus to be directed to American nonprofits - but perhaps there are steps we can take as a community of public interest organizations that don't require a handout, just all of us joining hands.

How about a recovery plan by and for America's third sector economy?

One bright light in the economic train wreck is that the nature of philanthropy itself has changed greatly over the past few years, thanks in part to the Internet, to the advent of "venture philanthropy" and to the maturing of the baby-boom generation, which will be on the receiving end of the largest transfer of wealth in history over the next decade or so. These changes have increased the adaptability and ingenuity in the nonprofit sector, and they make the likelihood of a recovery much more possible.

We're seeing a paradigm shift in the way that work for the social good is funded and executed. More are more funders now are partners in the work itself, alongside the nonprofits they finance. It's now possible to envision a coordinated response that mobilizes major donors, organizations with robust infrastructures, and individuals giving in small amounts, all working together to initiate the recovery.

The first step in any effective response requires a real accounting for which organizations have been hit, and are at most risk in the short-term. There will be an obvious and much warranted emphasis on nonprofits that deliver services to the needy, because even as their resources have dwindled, the need for their programs has increased. But it's also important to make sure that organizations that work for systemic transformation don't become victims; it is their work to change our culture and society that has the most long-term impact. In a recent study by The Atlantic Philanthropies, CEO Gara LaMarche noted that "funding advocacy and advocates is the most direct route to supporting enduring social change for the poor, the disenfranchised and the most vulnerable among us, including the youngest and oldest in our communities." In our triage of nonprofit victims of the downturn or the Madoff scandal, we must be able to keep the big picture in mind even as we move swiftly to staunch the bleeding of those patients most vulnerable.

Let's start with the grass roots and work up.

Projects like donorschoose.org, JGooders.com, and Kiva have pioneered the concept of targeted micro-giving and loaning- matching up organizations and projects in need with individual donors who give in small amounts to achieve modest goals. While some of these are for-profit enterprises supporting the nonprofit sector, many are nonprofits themselves; Razoo has figured out how to do this without charging donors or nonprofits any fees. Any nonprofit that doesn't have a micro-gift strategy needs to get one right away. Technology has made this simple, and these new initiatives, which make giving feel personal, even when doing so online, are going mainstream. A number of other projects have sprung up that help coordinate volunteer labor and community support systems, like lotsahelpinghands.com, JCorps, and networkforgood.org, which does both donations and volunteer coordination. The combination of efforts like these can be a lifeline for small nonprofits struggling to survive.

At the tree trunk level, we have large-scale nonprofits with stable infrastructures and expansive donor bases. They are well poised to survive hardship, and normally do so by downsizing and cutting back on program delivery. But rather than reaching for the pink slip pad, these organizations should consider ways to become more efficient rather than just scaling back across the board. Programs that don't achieve their goals should be cut, but the ones that succeed should have their budgets expanded. Technology and inter-organizational cooperation are the keys to this effort.

One thing this crisis should be making clear: we are all in this together. There is no room for turf battles in the new paradigm.

At the tree top level, there are megadonors and large foundations. There has already been a sea change in the way that philanthropists see their long term giving, with many foundations opting for an accelerated schedule of disbursements in an effort to have the maximum immediate impact. Some foundations that usually only give a minimum yearly disbursement have actually increased their expenditures, not just to compensate for the reduced dollar amounts now that their corpus has shrunk, but because they believe that intensified investment in their grantees now will keep them in business for when the economy rebounds. And it isn't simply about the dollars: some foundations are now considering how they can help their grantees collaborate, build capacity and develop new technologies in order to make sure their investments to date keep doing good.

We could survive crises like the economic collapse or the Madoff scandal by hunkering down and just trying to weather the storm. Competition for scarce donor dollars could cause us to go head to head with one another, each of us hoping that our particular cause won't be a casualty in the lean years ahead. Philanthropists could draw back and decide that increased giving will have to wait for more prosperous times ahead.

Or we could mount a coordinated effort to fight back the torrent, and demonstrate that those of us working in the nonprofit world are capable of seeing the big picture and will join hands to rescue America's third sector economy.

Joshua Avedon is Jumpstart's COO & Director of Strategic Initiatives]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.148705 2008-12-05T10:17:42-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

Jumpstart http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jumpstart/ By Shawn Landres, Joshua Avedon, and Lee Meyerhoff Hendler

Forget global warming. The ice age is coming. After a decade of philanthropic investment that has produced a flowering of innovation and social entrepreneurship not seen since the late 19th century, all signs point to a flash freeze.

Over the past several months, a number of philanthropies have suspended new grant applications and limited renewals. Though most are doing so in response to economic contractions, many also are taking the time to reevaluate focus, strategies, and mission to ensure that during this critical period their funding has the greatest impact possible. A few leading funders have pledged additional reserves to support existing grantees put at risk by the loss of other revenue sources. This kind of commitment is vital, especially when it comes to supporting the many new startups that have launched over the past decade but do not yet have the stability that comes from generations of membership and funding growth. However, every prediction points toward a perfect winter storm of foundation and donor cutbacks amidst a struggling national economy.

This freeze has a cost -- today's and tomorrow's innovation. Creativity is a process that depends on momentum, and even a short break in funding can slow the forward motion just enough to make the current uphill climb too steep. A funding freeze will stifle the great ideas that are just now, and soon will be, gaining traction -- and undermine critical work with those already on the periphery, whether the margins of our communities or the edges of the social safety net. In other words, slowing our creativity today will set back our progress tomorrow.

Instead of turning a cold shoulder to the challenges we face, we offer a few suggestions based on our experiences working with groundbreaking new initiatives in the Jewish community. The lessons we've learned from the past decade's pioneers offer much to the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors as a whole.

First, we have to stop funding projects simply because they've been funded before. Too many mainstream organizations plod along bemoaning their lack of success while throwing precious resources at problems that money alone can't solve. Personal loyalties and emotional ties to long-standing projects must be balanced by dispassionate reassessments of programs that have accumulated over the past few decades. There's probably a cash-starved startup that has figured out a way to do the same thing faster, cheaper, and with greater success.

Second, while we identify what doesn't work, let's take advantage of what does. This means a paradigm shift in the nonprofit economy: applying the latest technology and best practices to everything from operations and human resources to program delivery and communication. Organizations no longer can depend on brand loyalty; programs must be impact-driven. It means abandoning extensive and expensive command-and-control overhead. And it means taking advantage of already existing social networks to scale up and out, instead of relying on formal inter-organizational alliances that may not have kept up with current needs. In the Jewish community, it means changing our measure of success from being Jewish to doing Jewish, from being righteous to doing justice.

Third, we have to reorient philanthropy -- especially Jewish community philanthropy -- to incorporate a steady commitment to future thinking and R&D. Just as healthy investment portfolios allocate 10-15% to emerging industries, markets, and products, so, too, a healthy philanthropic portfolio should allocate a similar proportion to emerging innovation and next-generation leadership. This approach would balance ongoing funding for blue chip institutions that have stood the test of time, strong up-and-comers at the mezzanine level, and dynamic start-ups with seed funding.

In short, the recession presents an unparalleled opportunity to cast a critical eye on all of our current practices.

The good news is that much of this is happening already. Emerging philanthropists and nonprofits at the forefront of social innovation already are changing the underlying economy of communal enterprise. The future of effective philanthropy is a venture model, where many approaches are funded with the expectation that only some will succeed, but with the confidence that we will learn as much from failure as from success. This is not about throwing money at projects and seeing what sticks. To the contrary, recently published research from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ("Intentional Innovation," August 2008) found that "systematic innovation" not only is possible, but indeed "yields much more productive, scalable, and sustainable ideas over time." Intentionally innovative funders continually challenge themselves and their grantees to look outside for the best ideas and the most effective leaders to enrich their vision and strengthen their capacity.

For their part, innovative startups provide ideal experimental business models. Without bureaucracies, building funds and calcified infrastructure, startups can be very efficient at spending limited funds and maximizing return on investment. They leverage technology and existing networks to build community without marketing budgets and lengthy planning processes. They test their programming in public and then tweak as they go, responding in real-time to the needs of their market, and without the filter of cumbersome market research. And they are more likely to produce results that reflect the culture of the people they serve, rather than a rigid framework imposed from above.

The reality is that most startups operate with a recession mindset to begin with: they excel at making the most of limited resources. Without the assurance of a steady cash flow that comes with organizational maturity, they must find -- or more often, invent -- cost-effective solutions to longstanding challenges. Moreover, their overhead tends to be much leaner, as teams of two to five people master multiple skill sets to do the work of staffs twice and three times their size. And startups are compelled to work collaboratively with one another, exchanging ideas in a creative commons of peer learning and resource sharing.

As Hazon's Nigel Savage recently argued, "if we lose half a generation's worth of innovation in the Jewish community, that would be really tragic." But now need not be the winter of our discontinuity. In northern Europe and colonial America, long, cold winters brought the practice of "bundling": wrapping young couples in a bed together. It kept them warm, fostered safe intimacy, and had an unintentional salutary effect on reproduction. Today, bundling connotes marketplace efficiencies. As we contemplate the coming cold season in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, we need not be bound by a frozen inheritance. Together we can bundle our way to a tomorrow we choose and, in doing so, force the spring.

Shawn Landres and Joshua Avedon are the co-founders of Jumpstart, a thinkubator for sustainable Jewish innovation. Lee Meyerhoff Hendler is a trustee of the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, based in Baltimore, MD.]]>