Nicholas Kristof to join CitySquare for "Up Close"

Rethinking non-profit work

The high cost of "success"

I've been aware of the reality for quite awhile now. 

And, that fact doesn't make it easier or more comfortable to write about it! 

You see, the truth is in my world, the non-profit sector in a city like Dallas, the more success you enjoy the higher the stakes for survival!  Yes, that's right, survival. 

Most entrepreneurial leaders and endeavors understand the risk and the necessity of what I call "strategic over-extension."  You take risks to achieve significant gains.  You decide not to "play it safe."  In my case, the needs of hurting people fuel the risk taking, at least in part.  I'll grant that some portion of the approach is defined and shaped by who we are as individuals.  Personality types, strengths and weaknesses, psychological makeup, experience in life, all play a part in one's leadership style and pace.

Over-extension leads to more funding.  More funding leads to more people engaged both in terms of meeting needs, strengthening communities and organizing low-income folks for action and growth in confidence and self and collective efficacy.  More impact in these areas leads to more attention from other non-profit organizations and leaders and more place in local media. 

Success leads to options for partnerships.  All these factors combine to push growth.  As the growth track continues, you find yourself pushed up and out even more.  In due course, the process repeats itself in something of a dynamic swirl, but with even higher risks and stakes.  The cycle upward can repeat itself again and again, depending on how much risk a leader is willing to take, as well as how much stamina he or she draws upon. 

Outsiders who observe the growth part of the process begin to make assumptions about organizations that grow, innovate and expand.  At the top of this list of assumptions is the notion that the growing, "successful" organization has everything under control, needs very little to continue and can be regarded as established and without need. 

Of course, nothing could  be further from the truth! 

The more an organization grows, increasingly taking on higher stakes risks, the more that organization needs entrepreneurial investors, supporters and partners. Rather than seeing "successful" organizations as the most logical place for continuing investments, many folks turn to smaller organizations or to "start up" efforts, I suppose in the hope that such groups offer new solutions or easier access for personal engagement.  Closer investigation of the older, larger organization will dispel such myths.

Other observers lead their own non-profits.  The smaller nonprofit organizations approach often to investigate the prospects of receiving assistance from larger organizations in one form or the other.  At CitySquare we like to remain open to such collective efforts, but the assumption that we are "flush" with readily available resources is far from the truth! 

We encounter these realities again and again.  As a result, we continue to adjust our approach to resource development.  We keep trying to find new venues for telling our story.  At the same time, we reach out to trusted, long term partners to keep them posted on our successes, but even more on our struggles. 

An example of our dilemma can be seen in our current efforts to develop a new community, one-stop-shop resource center in historic South Dallas-Fair Park.  Located at the southeast corner of I-30 and Malcolm X, we call it the Opportunity Center.  We are in the midst of a $13 million capital campaign.  At the same time, we are attempting to fund an annual budget of even more than that! 

Forget our success to date.  We find ourselves in an updraft of real risk:  we need help! 

Sure, we've enjoyed some success and we've touch and lifted thousands of people since our beginnings in 1988.  But, still, we don't have everything figured out! Not by a long shot.

We continue to need loyal, long term investors.  We need partners.  We need new sources of funding.  We need help building viable, conservative cash reserves--an unheard of luxury in many anti-poverty organizations. 

So, don't be fooled by our appearance or our supposed milestones. 

The game is not over. 

The deal is not done. 

And, most of all, we need the help of people just like you.

Treating folks right. . .

Robert Egger is a hero of mine and of a number of us at City-Square.  Founder and CEO of the DC Central Kitchen, this man "gets it."  For him, hunger is not about food.  Rather, it is a symptom of a larger issue/problem. 

This report appeared recently in the Huffington Post.  Read it and watch it.  Give me your reactions.  Egger is attempting to align and redefine non-profit influence and power.

Robert Egger: Fighting Hunger And Stereotypes
The Huffington Post Abby Wendle
First Posted: 01/21/11 05:52 PM Updated: 01/21/11 06:26 PM

Robert Egger, founder of the DC Central Kitchen and the Campus Kitchens Project, has a unique approach to charity work, which came to him the first time he volunteered to feed the homeless.

I looked at the homeless men and women and thought, we can shorten the line if we make them part of the process," he said.

In the late 1980s, when Robert proposed the idea to take donated food from restaurants and train the homeless to cook it, people were skeptical.

"They were stuck in an old fashioned kind of charity. They had all these different reasons of why it wouldn't work. People would tell me, 'you can't train the homeless.' I was shocked by that," he said.

But Robert was determined. With a James Brown song as his mantra, "Open Up The Door I'll Get It Myself,", he spent months applying for grants and appealing to donors. Finally, he got a $25,000 grant, bought a refrigerated truck and opened DC Central Kitchen. At the time, he wasn't sure exactly how it would all work.

"I was making it up, no one had really done this before," he said. But people came. "Men and women who were alcoholics and heroine addicts, then crack addicts," he said. And they kept coming. "In 1996, we had welfare reform and a lot of women who had never worked before needed jobs. Now we're dealing with felons," he said.

The Kitchen also attracts some of D.C.'s biggest names to volunteer. The day President Clinton came remains in Robert's memory as an example of the power the kitchen has to get the well-off to rub elbows with the down-and-out.

Clinton didn't know how to cut a carrot," Robert said. "It was up to a student in the basement of a shelter to teach the President how to cut a carrot. That's the power of what we do. We show that everybody has a role to play and everybody has value. We don't fight hunger as much as we fight stereotypes," he said.

The organizations that Robert started do, in fact, also fight hunger. Everyday, the DC Central Kitchen takes 3,000 pounds of good food that would otherwise get thrown out and turns it into 4,500 meals that are served at shelters and addiction recovery centers. The Campus Kitchens project replicates DC Central Kitchen's model at 26 high schools and college campuses across America, teaching students to cook recovered cafeteria food and serve it to those in need. Combined, the kitchens are steadily fighting back against the food insecurity 50 million Americans, including 10 million children under the age of six, face.

But the kitchen also fights the stereotype that nonprofit organizations cannot be financially self-sustaining without donations.

"Right now, we're forcing people to choose between being a .org or a .com," Robert said. "The future is a hybrid, like economic Buddhism. We can take a middle road and do both."

Two unique aspects of Robert's organization allow it to walk this middle road. The DC Central Kitchen launched Fresh Start, a catering employment project, to generate revenue. Fresh Start currently generates 50 percent of the Kitchen's funding -- the rest come from grants and donations -- by buying fresh food from local farmers and successfully competing in Washington D.C.'s catering market. Fresh Start also provides made-from-scratch meals for seven elementary schools as part of a pilot project to improve the quality and nutrition of what students eat.

Secondly, the kitchen's Culinary Training Program trains dozens of Washington D.C. residents who are homeless, poor and convicted felons each year. Robert's "ragtag army of food lovers and badasses" learn to work in the food industry. The training program aims to get at the root problems that cause hunger.

"Hunger is so not about food -- hunger is a symptom. Hunger is about wage, it's about being in prison," he said.

Click here to read entire report and view YouTube video.

We agree with Egger, and we have for a long time.