Workshop Descriptions and Presenter Bios
(Presenter bio follows workshop description)

• Achieving Mission through Social Entrepreneurship (Thursday only) - Larry Clark, President and CEO of Comprehensive Health Education Foundation (C.H.E.F.®)
• Building and Sustaining Multicultural Alliances - Carmen Morgan, Director, Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations, Asian Pacific American Legal Center
• Measuring Your Success: A Practical Approach - Victoria Dougherty, Project Director, OMG Center for Collaborative Learning
• Open Space: "What about your LFP program keeps you up at night?" - Susan Partnow, an organizational development and training consultant, Partnow Communications, Seattle, WA
• Predictable Management Challenges (Friday only) - Susan Kenney Stevens, Consultant and author of “Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity”
• True Sustainability—Moving from a ‘Tin Cup’ to an Investment-Driven Organization - Tom Ralser, principal, Capital Strategists Group
• What Makes Your Moving Story Move? - Bob McKinnon, President, YELLOWBRICKROAD

Achieving Mission through Social Entreprenuership (Thursday only)
This workshop is designed for executive directors, board members and project directors.

Social entrepreneurs recognize a problem, re-envision it as an opportunity and use entrepreneurial approaches to bring social change. While they share many characteristics with business entrepreneurs, their success is measured by impact on society, rather than profit. This workshop will present a clear understanding of what a social entrepreneur is, what one does, and where there is a value and need for an entrepreneurial approach in foundation and nonprofit work.

Learn to identify some of the entrepreneurial assets present in your organization and some opportunities where entrepreneurial approaches could be effective in advancing your mission. Presenters will offer simple action items to help your organization achieve entrepreneurial strategies and a tool for ongoing assessment and use of existing entrepreneurial strengths.

Presenter: Larry Clark, President and CEO of Comprehensive Health Education Foundation (C.H.E.F.®), is passionate about social change. He is a frequent speaker on topics pertaining to social enterprise and entrepreneurial thinking in the nonprofit sector, focusing on income generation, intellectual property development, capacity building and strategic partnerships. In 2005 Clark led the team that founded MissionWise, the consulting division of C.H.E.F. that helps nonprofits integrate business skills and innovation into their operations.

He currently serves on the national boards of Grantmakers in Aging and the Center for Social and Emotional Education, and formerly on the boards of Community Anti Drug Coalitions of America, the Social Enterprise Alliance, and Philanthropy Northwest. Clark was also a member of the National Advisory Committee for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Local Funding Partnerships. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. Learn more at www.chef.org.

Return to top

Building and Sustaining Multicultural Alliances
This session is designed for project directors and agency executives who are leaders within coalitions and are in a position to broaden their coalitions.

In order to accomplish long-lasting social and systems change it is necessary to go beyond collaborating with traditional service providers, and to forge new alliances that bridge social, economic and cultural divides. This workshop will explore ways to identify new partners and to develop and sustain diverse coalitions. Project leaders will learn how to organize and grow networks that cross class, racial, gender and cultural differences.

We will explore dynamics that serve to inform and sometimes undermine meaningful collaborations. This highly interactive session will provide strategies and techniques that work to build alliances across differences of ethnicity, language, sexual orientation and economic status. We will also focus on the skills needed to develop lasting coalitions that go beyond a single issue or project.

Presenter: Carmen Morgan is the Director of Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations (LDIR), a nationally recognized human relations and community-building program co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, the Central American Resource Center, and the Martin Luther King Dispute Resolution Center in Los Angeles, CA. Under her leadership the LDIR program has expanded to Flint, MI, to Philadelphia, PA and to the Central Valley region of California.

Previously Morgan was the Associate Regional Director for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international human rights organization.  There she oversaw gay liberation, sovereignty education, criminal justice, peace education, and economic justice work in Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Southern California. Before joining AFSC, she was the National Director of the Youth & Family Program of the A World of Difference Institute where she oversaw human relations training and programming for youth service organizations. She received her B.A. at Pacific Oaks College and her M.A. at Claremont Graduate School.

Return to top

Measuring Your Success: A Practical Approach
This workshop is designed for participants at the beginner level of evaluation regrdless of their level of organizational responsibility.

Do you want to have ready access to information that improves your decision-making and is responsive to the requests of your funders and other stakeholders?  This workshop will present a framework and tools for evaluating your work using a practical approach. Participants will learn about basic evaluation concepts and tools to better articulate the logical connections between the activities, assumptions and outcomes of their work.

Participants will also learn how to select appropriate indicators to measure their outcomes and how to work with an evaluator. The workshop will include time for participants to apply the concepts and tools to their own work through individual exercises.

Presenter: Victoria Dougherty is a Project Director at the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, an independent nonprofit research and consulting organization based in Philadelphia. She has provided evaluation training to over 100 nonprofit organizations, including a recent program for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Local Funding Partnerships project directors. She also advised the Philadelphia Foundation staff on how to assist grantees in the development of outcomes and indicators, and provided evaluation training to grantees of the Chesapeake Bay Funders Network. Other current projects include directing three evaluations of initiatives designed to increase access to higher education.

Before joining OMG in 2003, Dougherty was the project director for the Community Research and Program Evaluation Unit of the Connecticut Policy and Economic Council. Previously, she was a team leader in the Office of Evaluation and Inspections of the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dougherty graduated with a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College. Learn more at www.omgcenter.org.

Return to top

Open Space: "What about your LFP program keeps you up at night?"
Open Space is for staff at all levels of an organization.

In this lively session, you will set the agenda. We’ll use Open Space Technology, which was born out of the experience of people who love the coffee breaks at a conference better than the formal presentations. Open Space Technology is a powerful way of bringing people together to search for solutions to complex issues by creating the conditions for respectful conversation.

All topics are welcome including living in the urgent vs. the important, organizational turbo-changes, conflict resolution, or whatever you want to talk about now that we're miles from home. The “take home” offers a better night’s sleep, new ideas, inspiration, and deepened understanding and networking after you’ve had a chance to work on issues that concern you. Learn a new meeting technique you can bring back to your organization.

Presenter: Susan Partnow is an organizational development and training consultant who enjoys being a catalyst for individuals and work teams seeking positive changes. She works to transform conflict into creative energy through workshops, retreats, and coaching. Partnow specializes in facilitating dialogue and large group processes, using such cutting edge techniques as Appreciative Inquiry, Spiral Dynamics, World Cafes, Dynamic Facilitation, and Open Space Technology.

She serves on the Steering Committee of the National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation. A former teacher and speech pathologist, Partnow received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.A. from Northwestern University where she was a Rearwin Fellow. Many who attended her 2007 Open Space workshop suggested we bring her back this year. Learn more at www.partnowcom.com.

Return to top

Predictable Management Challenges (Friday only)
This session is for new as well as experienced managers.

Just as nonprofit agencies go through “lifecycle” stages of organizational development, so do nonprofit executives. This workshop offers a hands-on application of the lifecycle concepts presented in the Friday morning plenary session. The afternoon session will be organized around five predictable management challenges:

• founder intentionality,
• developing board ownership,
• building your bench,
• hiring for fit, and
• growing with the job.

Bring your own questions and challenges, and learn from the presenter and your colleagues how they have managed through these leadership dilemmas.

Presenter: Susan Kenney Stevens, Ph.D., is a consultant and lecturer on management, financial and organizational issues pertaining to philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. The first edition of her book Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity (2001, Stagewise Enterprises, Inc.) won the 2002 Terry McAdam Book Award sponsored by the Nonprofit Alliance, New York Community Trust and Chronicle on Philanthropy. She was formerly Principal in Charge of LarsonAllen Public Service Group, a national accounting and professional service firm, and was a popular workshop leader at our 2006 LFP annual meeting.

Over the past 20 years Stevens has written extensively on financial and management issues pertaining to philanthropy and the nonprofit sector including books, journal articles, and a variety of case studies used in university-based nonprofit management courses throughout the country. A 1981 Bush Foundation Fellow, Stevens received her bachelor’s degree from the University of St. Thomas, and a Ph.D. from Union Institute and University where her doctoral dissertation examined the entrepreneurial behavior of nonprofit founders.

Return to top

True Sustainability: Moving from a "Tin Cup" to an Investment-Driven Organization
This session is designed for top management or board-level involvement.

To move a nonprofit organization from a charity mindset to one of sustainable investment requires delivering outcomes that investors value. This session introduces the Organizational Value Proposition® concept as a tool for strategic planning, program development, and fundraising. Learn about the concept of nonprofit return-on-investment (ROI) and a five-step approach to implement an ROI program. This tool focuses on gaining funds from non-grant sources when more traditional methods of fundraising have not worked well or have stalled.

Participants will learn:

• Why the investment-driven model is more likely to provide sustainable funding in a tight money economy. 
• How to develop investable outcomes: translating specific outcomes into specific benefits for different stakeholder and investor groups.
• How to provide clear, meaningful results that keep your organization from being confused with others in terms of mission or program efforts.
  

Presenter: Tom Ralser is founder and principal of Capital Strategists Group (CSG), a consulting firm that develops sustainability plans and fundraising strategies for nonprofits. His work with nonprofits across the U.S. led to the development of CSG’s Organizational Value Proposition®. This concept is widely used by corporations, foundations, and individual donors to confirm that nonprofits are creating a return on their investment (ROI) by delivering outcomes with true value to the community. Ralser is also the author of ROI for Nonprofits: The New Key to Sustainability (2007, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

He has presented his Investment-Driven model, sustainability planning, and other methods at conferences across the country, including the National Center on Nonprofit Enterprise, the Nonprofit Excellence Conference, the National Cooperative of Health Networks, Communities Joined in Action, the New York State Association of Rural Health and many more. He earned a bachelor’s from Illinois State University and an M.S. from the University of Utah. Ralser holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. Learn more at www.CapitalStrategists.com.

Return to top

What Makes Your Moving Story Move?
This session is for staff at all levels of an organization.

There are many groups like yours with moving stories about the lives they are changing. In the face of that competition, how do you make sure your project’s moving story actually moves others to act on your behalf? There is a Native American saying, "It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story."  In this workshop learn how you can create a culture of storytelling: where all of your stakeholders, internal and external, use their voices to tell your story.

This workshop builds on previous training about how to recognize and write a good story. Among the topics we'll cover are: understanding the context of your story (i.e.  "it's not what you say but what they hear”), overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of your story creating change, and sharing best practices on how to design your storytelling activities to move others to act.

Presenter: Bob McKinnon is Founder and President of YELLOWBRICKROAD, a company that leverages the power of communications to create social change. McKinnon works with foundations, corporations, government, non-profit organizations and media companies; focusing mainly on education, health and nutrition, media and culture, childhood obesity, domestic violence and the environment. His clients include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Geographic, the California Department of Public Health, and The Boys Club of New York.

Previously, McKinnon was an Executive Vice President at one of the world's largest advertising agencies, Saatchi & Saatchi, working with brands such as Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Toyota and the International Olympic Committee. He earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University and a master's at the New School, a university in New York City. Learn more at www.yellowbr.com.

Return to top