Category Archives: Public Policy

The Art$

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It was weird.

Dear reader, your Man About Town has been to the very precipice, where I stood and looked down.  It was weird.

You see, it all started when some of the lovely folks over at the Municipal Art Society (Hi Mary! Hi Anne!  Hello Vin!), invited me to come and do a research project for them called “Who Pays for the Arts.”  The job was to tool through data provided by the Cultural Data Project (CDP) and better understand how arts organizations in NYC make their money.  To whit:  in order to apply for public funding in NYC, you have to submit, like, a gajillion data points to CDP.

Exciting!  Data geek that I am my little heart just fluttered with glee.  Numbers!  Charts!  Oh yeah!  Uh huh!  That’s right!

So I started digging through the data and the very first question I asked was, you know, what does the distribution curve look like?  Given that I’m looking at total 2010 revenues for 723 organizations, and that the whole group all mushed together made $2.5 billion, how many groups are on the high end, how many in the middle, and how many on the low end?

And this is what I found: Continue reading →

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s… What the Hell Is That?

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Also posted in my guest blog on Rooflines.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… What the hell is that?

In my last blog post I spent a good chunk of time talking about the trend toward “complexification” in the nonprofit sector.  There are plenty of small, scrappy, neighborhood based nonprofits around (as a matter of fact, that number continues to grow), but we’ve also seen the emergence of nonprofits with $100 million plus in annual revenues, hundreds of staff, sophisticated operational structures, and highly complex financial instruments built to conduct their business.

I argued that we’re past due in borrowing some tools from our for-profit colleagues, including stronger staff development and retention regimens, the ability to access substantial capital for opportunistic growth, shaping board relationships that focus on organizational development and not just fiduciary oversight, and developing a nonprofit sector trade association to lobby on the collective needs and issues of our sector.

We’re clearly entering a new era that will continue to blur the lines between for-profit and nonprofit.  And let’s be honest:  it’s a little scary.  Why?  Because we’re all very worried that we might somehow become like, you know, them.

Continue reading →

The Complexification of the Nonprofit Sector

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This post also available on Rooflines.  

“Substrate” by Jared Tarbell

Intuitively, just from being around the nonprofit sector for a stretch, it’s easy to tell that things have gotten more, well, complicated.  Organizations are bigger, operations more tentacled, financial tools more wonky, budgets bigger and bigger.  And don’t just take my word for it.  Thanks to the lovely folks at the Standford Social Innovation Review you can enjoy this whole, provocative article: “Why More Nonprofits Are Getting Bigger.”  

The problem is, I don’t think we’ve really done a good job of keeping up with our own complexification.   Continue reading →

It Came from Chicago

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Reposted from by guest blog on Rooflines.

It Came from Chicago

Let’s just come right out and say it:  New York City is the best.  At everything.  We are the smartest, the hardest working, the most creative, and the best-looking.  If you trace every social innovation of the past century back to its roots, you’ll find some determined, no-nonsense, big-hearted denizen of the Big Apple looking up from their work with a twinkle in their eye.  The settlement house movement?  Yo!  The community development corporation?  Booyah!  The artisanal industry incubator?  Hoo hoo hoo!

Pro bono service provision to the public sector?  Oops, wait.

Chicago’s better at it.  And it’s coming to town. Continue reading →

In Praise of (Stinky, Noisy) Bars

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Reposted from Rooflines.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper

The vaunted “third space” isn’t home, and isn’t work – it’s more like the living room of society at large.  It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect.  It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection.  It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.

And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar. Continue reading →

NY City Council Testimony on Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts

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This past Friday (May 11, 2012)  I had the pleasure of testifying before a joint hearing of the Committee on Small Business, and the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations of the New York City Council.  The topic?  “New York City’s Cultural Sector and Derivative Small Businesses.”

Hello!  Mouthful!

But I was asked to offer framing comments to complement testimony by my colleagues  from the Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts Working Group.  I’ve skipped the preliminaries (you know, hello and thank you committee Chairperson for this opportunity to yadda yadda) and cut right to the meat and potatoes:   Continue reading →

NYC’s Philanthropic Bagel Hole

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Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines.  

New York City has everything, just like this bagel.  Yum!  The secret, as they say, is in the water.  And water, as they say, is life.

But there’s a hole in the bagel, dear Liza, dear Liza.

When I first came to NYC, still wet behind the ears and tasked with helping distribute money from Deutsche Bank’s foundation, I was sent to meetings.  Lots of meetings.  Very interesting meetings, where the community development banking luminaries of the day would hold court:  Carol Parry, Phyllis Rosenbloom, Mark Willis, Marc Jahr, Bob Rosenbloom, Michael Feller, Greg King, Hildy Simmons, Gary Hattem.  Or other meetings, where the United Way, Ford or Rockefeller called the tune, and the jolly members of NYRAG would troop in to talk about the inner workings of domestic microfinance, workforce development, educational reform, financial literacy, homeownership, arts and economic development, you name it.  There was a palpable core of philanthropic leadership really focused on the challenges of the city, and they held significant mass.  Their effect was gravitational: where they led, others followed.  They drove discussion, led thinking, catalyzed partnerships, commanded attention.  You may not have loved what they thought, or how they went about things, but their presence was manifest, and their impact was broad.

New York City still has the strongest and most vibrant philanthropic community in the country.  It’s still provides enormous leadership in social investment strategies, community development finance, building public / private partnerships, and program innovation.  But something has changed.  Over the years, there’s been a growing vacancy in the focus on New York City itself: on its systems, challenges, nonprofit leaders, and neighborhoods.

In short, despite the incredible presence of philanthropic leadership and resource, the attention has moved elsewhere.  I’m not sure that most folks have even noticed.  It’s been a creeping drift, a steady ebb.  A spreading hole in the center of our little everything bagel universe.

Continue reading →

Building a Healthy Nonprofit Ecosystem

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Hurricane flooded I-10/I-610 interchange, New Orleans, LA

Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines:  In the halcyon days of my youth, way back in 2006, I went to New Orleans.  I traveled there at the behest of the corporation that I worked for at the time, as we had made a $2 million disaster recovery commitment to the city, and we were trying to figure out how to spend it.

Now, there’s two things you need to know about spending $2 million: (1) that’s a lot of money, and (2) it’s really not very much money at all.  When you get right down to it, in dealing with a post-crisis situation of the scale of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the troubled city of New Orleans, spending that kind of money in a way that was both responsible and impactful was a damned hard thing to do.

So there I am, the well-meaning Yankee, fresh off the plane in my shiny city slicker best, traipsing through the Lower 9th Ward.  I was there several months after the floods had receded, but it was still a silent, mud-stained, wracked and ruined wasteland.  I remember picking up a dirty and detached doll’s head (Woody, from Toy Story – a memento I’ve kept with me always.  He’s staring at me as I write this now), and thinking, well, I’ve got to start somewhere.

Continue reading →

Why Leadership Pay$

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Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines.
In previous blog posts (Why Evaluation Stinks), I’ve discussed how the fragmented nature of the nonprofit sector makes it very difficult to impose top-down, comprehensive evaluative frameworks.  The primary problem is that even if you have two nonprofit organizations, each working with similar clients and conducting similar programs, the mix of supports from philanthropy, contracts and earned revenues will be such that the way they achieve their results will be unique.  The nonprofit sector, operating as it does on the margins of the market economy, is forced to pull together resources higgledy-piggledy, and this mix varies so substantially for each nonprofit (and indeed for each year of its operations), that you really can’t draw comparisons easily between two otherwise similar service activities.In short, our twinkling field of a thousand lights are all very different.There is, however, an upside to this.  Each organization cuts its own path to achieving its mission, providing us with a diversity of models and strategies.  Some succeed by focusing on a specific, artisanal niche where they excel, while others grow through horizontal or vertical expansion.  But there’s one thing that all successful organizations have in common:  they exhibit strong leadership.  And when I say leadership, what I mean is that the manager or managers of the organization are considered trustworthy, intelligent, passionate and capable.  They may also be considered tyrannical, obtuse, plodding, or distraught, but in their own way they get the job done and they get it done well.

As you well know, measuring leadership is a damned hard thing to do.  There are no leadership widgets produced as such.  Or are there? Continue reading →

Dear Mom, Here’s What Crashed the Economy (Part III) – And How to Fix It

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Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines. 

Mom at the Darke County Fair, Greenville, Ohio

Happy New Year!  And what better time to talk about my favorite ideas for getting us out of this fine mess of an economic jim jam we’re all bunched up in.  But first, a recap of my previous two posts:

  • In Dear Mom (Part I) I talked about the absolutely bizarre and vitriolic discussion around what role US federal housing policy played in the collapse of the global economy.  Basically, it played a very minor role, in spite of lingering (or, should I say, malingering) opinions to the contrary.  When even the industry publication American Banker weighs with a super geeky online commentary saying pretty much what I already said in my blog post, I think we can all put this bugbear to bed.
  • In Dear Mom (Part II) I took a pretty heady Wall St Journal editorial by Republican dissenters to the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission and broke down their top ten reasons for the economic collapse into plain English.  I’m proud of this blog post, really.  It works.  And my mom says you should read it because it’s good for you.
But now that I’ve debunked the junk and laid down the ground, I owe it Mom and to you, dear reader, to put my money where my mouth is and talk about what my favorite fixes include.  So to begin. Continue reading →