Category Archives: NGOs

Jul 06 2012
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Career, Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Jaspal Shakya (OpportuneJobs.com)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am the Co-Founder and CEO of OpportuneJobs.com, a for-profit initiative of SkillsKarma Services Private Limited. OpportuneJobs.com is a one stop portal for jobs, fellowships, internships, volunteering, consulting services, RFP/EOI/Tender, events and news. It is a creative enterprise managed by a group of young, passionate, innovative and skill driven entrepreneurs, whose constant endeavor has been addressing the needs of development professionals and corporate/NGOs/social enterprises across India. As a CEO my responsibilities include developing and implementing strategies, making major decisions, and managing the overall operations and resources of OpportuneJobs.com.

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Jun 21 2012
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Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Aubrie Campbell Canfield (Actuality Media)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am Co-Founder (along with my husband) and Production Manager of Actuality Media, a service learning documentary production company. We coordinate study-abroad experiences for individuals interested in media and we teach them how to create short documentary films about nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs and other change makers around the world. Within the organization I am responsible for overseeing all aspects of our production process (research, prep, shooting and editing), instructing the students while on location, and developing current and new programs. I am also about to undertake a speaking and screening tour, traveling to University campuses in the US and Europe and talking to media students about the importance of telling stories that matter. Actuality Media is a for-profit LLC based in the USA, that was recently certified as a Benefit Corporation. All our media is available here.

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Jun 11 2012
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Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Tom Rippin (On Purpose)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am the CEO and Founder of On Purpose, a social enterprise that is a leadership programme for professionals seeking to transition into the social enterprise space at a relatively early point in their career. We believe that the way capitalism works is changing and that equipping as many as possible of the very best talent to work on new models of how society works is a critical mission.

What that means in practice is that I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to develop people, helping them get used to working in new ways and/or organizations, modeling behaviours and exposing them to others who model useful behaviours and a lot of networking and network sharing. Beyond that, I also have to run the nuts and bolts of the organization and the actual programme (now together with my colleague Kate Richardson).

The programme runs for one year, full time and we recruit high-calibre professionals (from any sector) who have at least several years’ work experience. During the programme these “Associates” do four things:

  • Work for six months each in two organizations that are combining social (or environmental) and commercial ways of working (for which the Associates are paid a living allowance)
  • Attend half a day a week of training covering the most important topics from both the social enterprise and commercial worlds
  • Meet once a fortnight with a mentor who helps them add as much value to the organization they are working for as possible
  • Talk to a coach once a quarter about their personal goals, their career and how they are transitioning into social enterprise

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May 10 2012
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Development, Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Good Profile – Krystina Nguyen (US Peace Corps – Cameroon)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What are you up to nowadays?

I’m currently serving as a Small Business Advisor for the US Peace Corps in Ngaoundere, Cameroon.  The Peace Corps is an independent U.S. government agency that places volunteers in developing countries in various sectors across business, education, health, agriculture, environment, and community development. Peace Corps Volunteers serve for 27 months (two years of service after three months of technical, cultural, and language training) living at a level next to those they are serving. Each Volunteer is placed with a partner organization and can branch out to various other projects in the community. I will be finished with my contract in July 2012.

There are currently two core competencies for my Community Economic Development division: 1) Enhance opportunities for income generation and 2) Build local capacity for economic growth.

My partner organization is MC2, a microfinance organization found throughout Cameroon.  I serve as a consultant on various projects including strategic community outreach, benchmarking the loan review process, and training staff in IT.  I also manage and organize micro-credit cooperatives in the VSLA model; when individuals are too illiterate or marginalized for a traditional microfinance institution, the cooperative provides access to credit, a mechanism for saving, and an opportunity for low-risk investment.  As youth under twenty-five years old make up 60% of Cameroon’s population, I work with A2Empowerment to provide scholarships and income-generative activities for teenage girls who have dropped out of school.  My last weeks will be spent overseeing the final logistics to organize a market for a community of 8,000 people.

That being said, every Peace Corps position, even within the same division, is different. This is because the needs of each community and each Volunteer are different.

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Feb 27 2012
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Career, Forum, NGOs, Social Enterprise, Weekly Ponder

Weekly Ponder #6 – Money Talks: Should Doing Good have more Impact on Your Wallets?

Weekly Ponder #6

Money Talks: Should Doing Good have more Impact on Your Wallets?

Raise your hands if you have heard the following phrase: “Doing Good While Doing Well.” Now raise your hands if you did not know that this refers to companies and investors. Yes, the money goes to them. Not to you. That is, not to most of you, who are likely neither a company nor have the money to play impact investor. If you care about such things as “doing well” (ah heck, let’s call it what it is: money), my ponder of the week may resonate.

Personally, and frankly, I cannot imagine why we would care about how much “good profits” those responsible/sustainable corporations make or why we would care that the (already wealthy) impact investors get a little extra cash in the bank, without first talking about making “good living” ourselves. Perhaps that explains my aversion to a phrase which smells like good PR but lacks personal significance that I can relate to by any measure.

A further thought. To review a perennial bone that I love to unearth occasionally (see previous post where I mentioned the issue of compensation), I continually try to tell myself that the following is not true: that the vast majority of “do-good” jobs that DIRECTLY affect the (social/environmental) bottom line, e.g., working for social enterprises and NGOs, do not seem to pay so well. We’re not even comparing to traditional for-profit jobs here. We just have to compare that to those do-good jobs that exist more to ENABLE other change-makers, e.g., foundations, institutions like World Bank, ADB, and consultancies. If you didn’t know, allow me to suggest this carefully: the latter make (a lot) more money than the former! Today’s question is not why there is a difference and whether that is appropriate or fair, or exactly what levels of positions we are talking about here (although both may be addressed by a future post). Today’s question may be simply about why do-good pay is (relatively) low and unattractive period – and whether this is okay.

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Feb 14 2012
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Good Profiles, NGOs

Good Profile – Monisha Kapila (ProInspire)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am the Founder and CEO of ProInspire, a nonprofit building the next generation of nonprofit leaders by expanding the talent pipeline, developing professionals, and increasing diversity.  As CEO, I oversee the growth of our program and expansion into new areas related to developing leaders for social change.

Is “doing good” a key reason why you chose this job? 

I started ProInspire because I was passionate about connecting nonprofits with talented business professionals who wanted to pursue careers where they can “do good.”  Like any sector, talent is critical to ensure that nonprofits can be effective in achieving their missions.  I believe I am doing “good” in the world by leading this organization.

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Feb 07 2012
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CSR, Good Profiles, NGOs, Philanthropy, Sustainability

Good Profile – Robert Albright (FSG Social Impact Consultants)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I work as a consultant in Boston for FSG, a nonprofit strategy, research, and evaluation consulting firm. I’ve been with FSG since 2009. During my time at FSG, I’ve worked on a range of projects with corporations, nonprofits, foundations, school systems, and other public sector entities. FSG started out as Foundation Strategy Group more than 10 years ago, based on the concept of bringing more strategic thinking into the social sector (particularly the philanthropic sector). Over time FSG has broadened its scope to work with cross-sector players in addressing complex social problems in education, global health, and global development. Most of my work has focused on FSG’s U.S.-based clients, primarily in education and economic development.

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Dec 22 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 3) – Fixing the “pay” mentality

References:

Key Ideas from “Deferring Good Careers (Part 2)” Post (Dec 21, 2011):

  • Although we should keep highlighting, showcasing and offering them up as inspiration, we should at the same time move away from the prevailing culture of idolizing the very few individuals that start social enterprises and other do-good organizations and instead focus more holistically on how we can attract and retain top talent to push these organizations to the next level
  • Once we look underneath the human resource structure of such organizations, we realize how limited actually the pool of available positions is for top talented but not as proven people. We in fact discover what I referred to as the “middle layer” made up of functional jobs and other work-horse positions that are realistically the entry point for the majority of young people looking to do-good nowadays

In this Part 3, I want to think about one aspect of what it takes to attract the right talent to the available pool of positions by focusing specifically on compensation, which I would like to show to be a major obstacle for building more world-class, sustainable social enterprises and NGOs that want to scale their impact ever more.

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Dec 22 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 2) – Defining the available job pool

Key Ideas from “Deferring Good Careers (Part 1)” Post (Dec 20, 2011):

  • Philanthropy may be a subject of passion for those who already have made or sit on a good deal of money, but for the rest of us it should not be as relevant because (1) there are not enough of us with a lot of money and time to worry about where to put them to the best use and (2) philanthropy is not a full time job; it in fact detracts from the harder, more important idea we should think about, which is how we can incorporate a significant portion of our “do good” intentions into an attractive, life-long career instead of relegating it to mostly a by-thought or feel-good hobby in our spare time (or retirement)
  • The questions we left with were (1) how should a young person choose between making more money sooner and engaging in “doing good” later, vs. pursuing sooner an occupation that promotes his or her ideals of “doing good” and is meaningful, but potentially sacrificing building wealth in the long term? and (2) how much ought this “doing good” thing be valued both by employees and employers?

In this Part 2, I will now try to set up the conversation by first examining what the actual availability of positions is we are talking about. In Part 3, I will then attempt to qualify the career trade-off at stake and focus on the problem of compensation within this space for available positions.

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Dec 21 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 1) – Why philanthropy is not a career answer for us

Reference:

“Could Silicon Valley Rethink Philanthropy?” and “Rebooting Philanthropy in Silicon Valley?” (Claire Cain Miller) – published in The New York Times in December 2011

Key Ideas:

  • Yet another set of articles expounding on the encouraging trend that the new generation of “young rich”, especially around Silicon Valley, engage more and differently in philanthropy than previous generations that followed the trend of “make money first, then give away much later”
  • Close-up is on Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, daughter of a real-estate billionaire, wife of Netscape’s co-founder, teacher of Strategic Philanthropy at Stanford, and latest would-be philanthropy evangelist who strongly believes that we need to not only increase number of rich young people giving, but also how effectively they do this (using business principles, being more methodical and rational, etc.)

My view:

  • As I write this I actually received a free copy of Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen’s book “Giving 2.0” with my last Stanford Social Innovation Review issue. It still remains unread on my table.  The theme reminds me strongly of “Philanthrocapitalism – How Giving Can Save the World” by Matthew Bishop a few years back. I also passed on that book. Let me explain.

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