Painting projects, bake sales, and stuffing envelopes are helpful. But are activities like those always the most valuable form of service that a family can offer?
Take the father who happens to be a Silicon Valley computer engineer. He wants to serve. But are the most common volunteer opportunities the best outlet for that motivation? Is there some way to leverage his considerable professional skills?
Take the local nonprofit executive director. Nonprofit leaders routinely report that their biggest headaches, after the usual fundraising ones, lie in the area of organizational capacity. Small organizations especially often have jerry-rigged IT systems, inadequate accounting practices, and ad hoc marketing strategies.
It's enough to drive an Executive Director crazy. She got into the game because of some passionate commitment to a cause. And now she finds she also has to be some combination of a CIO, CFO, head of HR, and web designer. As a result, the core mission of the nonprofit suffers.
Can a mutually satisfying connection between that engineer and the nonprofit be forged?
In the business world, the consulting industry has arisen to make this connection for the sake of making a profit. Companies have long recognized that the answer is to focus on your mission, while relying on outside help broadly categorized as “outside consultants.” Consultants have become accustomed to hefty fees for this service.
But the standard cost can be prohibitive for nonprofits. In many cases, a single project done by an outside consultant would eat up a considerable part of the annual budget.
And yet to rely on the volunteer model is problematic for both individuals and the organization. Volunteering high end skills requires initiative, experience with the nonprofit world, extra interactions with the organization beyond just service provision, and the motivation to use precious hours of free time. For professionals with families, those demands can seem so great that the thought of using their skills to make a social impact can seem like just a nice idea.
For the organization, volunteers can be too unreliable, especially when it comes to mission critical functions like their computer network. And the quality of volunteer work can be variable -- and yet must often be accepted regardless of quality lest the offerer be offended. One of the big obstacles to the productivity of some nonprofits is creaky IT systems. Often, those systems are comprised of the work of successive volunteers -- each who only knew one software type, implemented it, and then moved on to something else. The resulting effort gets cobbled together with the technological equivalent of a duct tape.
In short, nonprofits need a healthy infusion of professionalism: work done for fee with all the expectations and protocols associated with that system.
And professional skills are often some of the most valuable resources contained within upwardly mobile families. Traditional conceptions of service focus on volunteer hours, the usual definitions of philanthropy on the financial captial given. But the intellecutal capital of a professional father and mother remains a under utilized resource in service and giving.
It is important to mobilize those resources not just to serve nonprofits, but also to transform the lives of the professionals. Every year, several SixSeeds families go for a week long service trip to a squatter community in Tijuana, Mexico. We focus on efforts on painting the local school. It is a wonderful experience and does leave something of an imprint on the family.
But when the parents return home stateside, the reality is that painting schoolrooms will not constitute much, if any, of their life going forward. Apart from family time, the bulk of their lives will be constituted by their professional work. Thus, if the virtues engendered by a trip like the one to Tijuana are to flower, they have to find expression in their professional skills as well.
Consulting Within Reach (CWR), a startup firm based in Silicon Valley, is seeking to structure professional service in a new model. It is mobilizing the skills of cause-motivated professionals to deliver services to non-profits in an affordable manner. It is, in the lingo of the day, a "double bottom line" enterprise: seeking financial return (in a modest way -- CWR calls itself a "for profit Lite") while maximizing its social impact.
A critical aspect of its business model involves working within the constraints of the family lives of its professionals. Some team members are stay at home moms who left high level careers years ago and are just now looking to reengage professionally on a boundaried basis. With CWR, they now can take on discrete projects -- as CWR structures the work to fit around soccer practice, naps, and family trips.
CWR shares with SixSeeds some common families, office space, and some shared leadership. One of SixSeeds' most important family projects involves helping to build the organizational capacity of Guard Support, the Dalton family's service project. The CWR team has been tasked with executing on that plan.
If you have interest in CWR specifically or have thoughts to share about the broader issues involved, contact us!
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