Some insanely smart people in this country argue that giving tax breaks to companies creates jobs and drives the economy. They continue to advocate for trickle-down economic theory.
I don't get it.
Despite the tax breaks and a rebounding economy, companies are hoarding cash. They are not reinvesting it in jobs or research and development. As the Wall Street Journal and many others have repeatedly reported, they are sitting on trillions of dollars that is doing nothing for the American people.
Now, the Chronicle of Philanthropy is reporting that roughly 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies are keeping their cash giving flat in 2011. So the savings are clearly not getting invested in the community through that vehicle.
Where is the evidence that tax breaks are creating jobs and building our economy?
It is easy to vilify the companies, but that isn't fair. They are acting in the short-term interests of their shareholders. That's how we designed companies to work.
What is interesting is that while companies aren't investing in our nation, corporate leaders as citizens want to be doing more. For example, with corporate giving flat, they are finding creative ways to leverage their products and skills to provide non-cash resources to the community.
A mentor, Charles Coustan, told me years ago that "you can trust an individual but never a company." That to me sums up the problem.
Corporate leaders want to do more but constantly have to compromise their altruism and patriotism to meet the short-term needs of their company. They are split in two -- the passionate citizen and the corporate executive accountable for quarterly earnings.
If we want to create jobs and have companies contribute more to our national wealth, the solution isn't tax breaks but instead changing the incentive system for companies to let executives bring their values to work. We need to reward long-term value and wealth creation and not quarterly earnings.
Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.
Born out of the ashes of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the Unusual Suspects Theatre Company is a model mentoring program using theater arts to reach youth in underserved and at-risk environments, including kids in foster care, violence-plagued neighborhoods, gangs and juvenile corrections facilities. Between 2005 and 2008, the organization quadrupled in size and was recognized by the White House with the Coming Up Taller Award, the nation's highest honor for out-of-school arts programming.
Although the theater company's successes naturally bred media exposure, the coverage Unusual Suspects received didn't always paint a full picture.
"We knew that the depth of what we were doing was exceptional," Executive Director Sally Fairman explained. "But what was often coming out was 'Kids are writing a play. Isn't that fun?'"
Marketing had never held a dedicated place in the organization's annual budget, but Sally knew that accurate messaging was central to building a larger, more engaged donor base that could help sustain and fuel the theater company's current and future growth.
"We were always marketing ourselves," Sally said. "That's just part and parcel of being an arts organization. But we were never strategic about it."
To address this need, Unusual Suspects made marketing a central piece of their 2008 strategic plan and set out to raise the funds to hire consultants in brand strategy, graphic design, and documentary film-making. After a promising grant from another foundation fell through, Unusual Suspects was left wondering how they were going to pay for their planned marketing efforts.
It was around this time Frances Carley, Unusual Suspects associate director of development, heard about Taproot and applied for a Key Messaging and Brand Strategy Service Grant in 2009.
THE WORK
A pro bono Taproot team, led by Account Director Chris Kurjanowicz, was quickly assembled to assess Unusual Suspects' brand and messaging needs.
"The team was great," Sally said. "They spent a lot of time with the discovery interviews, learning from board members, staff, and other stakeholders what each perceived we were doing. They attended workshops and performances at almost all our sites, and they read through all our marketing materials. They did a very hands-on assessment of the organization."
It was through this in-depth assessment that the pro bono consultants produced what Frances described as an "a-ha!" moment for the nonprofit organization. Prior to the pro bono engagement, Unusual Suspects staff and volunteers usually explained their work as a theater arts program for at-risk youth. But the Taproot team provided the insight that what they were really doing was deep mentoring through theater arts.
"Nobody takes it to the level that Unusual Suspects does," Chris explained. "Nobody deals with the really hard-core kids, or spends as much time per youth as the Unusual Suspects does. The way they were communicating potentially left the impression that they were teaching kids to sing and dance. But mentoring emphasizes that they're providing communication and social skills--skills to use when they get out of jail."
Once this insight was shared with and agreed to by the Unusual Suspects board, the Taproot team fleshed out "arts mentoring" into a comprehensive brand strategy. The deliverables they submitted to Unusual Suspects included an elevator pitch, a boilerplate, organizational descriptions of varying lengths, and key messages broken out by target audience, as well as training in how to best use these materials.
THE IMPACT
Unusual Suspects began to implement the brand strategy immediately both by talking about their organization differently and by incorporating the key messages into all marketing and promotional materials, from their Web site to their playbills. And they have already seen tangible results: in the past year and a half, individual contributions increased more than 700 percent.
"I believe the messaging has helped us get there," Sally said. "It has helped us capture people's imaginations with this work, so it's definitely been a contributing factor to that increase."
They were also able to secure additional grants from new funders.
"Foundations are not funding new organizations with the economy the way it is," Frances explained. "They are sticking with organizations that they've worked with for a couple of years. I think the messaging helped us to distinguish ourselves. It's given us an edge."
Unusual Suspects are not done making the most of the brand strategy provided by Taproot. The theater company is in the process of redesigning its logo to match the messaging and plan to hold a formal communications training for all personnel.
Sally summarizes the experience of working with Taproot: "Working with a professional team of this caliber was a new experience for Unusual Suspects. We ended up learning so much about our organization through their eyes and expertise. They were so dedicated, and it was clear they were genuinely interested in our work and in helping us."
Upon successful completion of the Key Messaging and Brand Strategy Grant, Unusual Suspects applied for and was awarded Taproot's Board Recruitment Service Grant in March 2010.
Jason D. Nemeth is a principal at Nemeth Consulting and a pro bono copywriter with the Taproot Foundation.
I recently interviewed my colleague Phillip Henderson for the Stanford Social Innovation Review about the
challenges he faces as the president of the Surdna Foundation, a $755
million charitable family foundation known for its innovative work.
Prior to his appointment at Surdna, Henderson was vice president at the
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a trans-Atlantic public
policy and grantmaking institution that he joined after an early
groundbreaking career in Eastern Europe.
Aaron Hurst: I'm a little distressed about something random that I wanted to bring up with you because I think you might be an expert in the topic. The whole idea of Europe sharing a single currency gave me so much hope. Try to imagine in our current political system ever agreeing to anything like that. But I've been reading that the odds of the euro lasting another 10 years are not that great.
Phil Henderson: The euro turns out to not be strong enough to tie together all these disparate political actors. Even as the euro fails, it's hard to imagine that undoes all the progress that is being made.
I arrived in Eastern Europe in 1992, and all these countries were groping for the what-the-hell-do-we-do-now? The notion that these countries would one day be normal seemed far-fetched. The West did two things: step one was they opened the gates to NATO, and step two was allowing membership in the European Union which was a slightly more difficult step. Those seemed unreal in 1992. Now it is 20 years later, and it's hard to imagine what was unimaginable back then.
I still go to Romania a couple times a year, which is where I first landed in 1992, and it is night and day between now and then. But for people who are going there now, all they say is, 'Holy crap, what a crazy country,' and I say, 'Well, yeah, but so much less crazy than it was 20 years ago.'
AH: Fast forward 20 years. What ends up defining the collaboration at this level? Is it the United Nations? Is it another body that's emerging now?
PH: My guess is that no new institutions of consequence will be invented, and it's probably because the kind of political consensus that existed in the world in the post-1945 era, when the IMF and the World Bank and the UN and all these places became what they are, is unlikely to be repeated.
So you end up with things like efforts to create a World Court and other things that, notably the U.S., almost as a knee-jerk reaction, reacts to negatively, no matter what the thing is. You kind of have to think about the institutional structures that exist, and that's one reason that NATO continues to perform a viable service: because it's an organization that the U.S. largely controls and trusts.
I don't know what the future holds, but the landscape of institutions will not change. I have a hard time hazarding a guess of fast-forward 20 years.
AH: You can draw parallels to the nonprofit sector in the U.S., which is dominated by legacy organizations like the United Way that have been around for decades. These organizations created tremendous social impact in their prime but were developed out of the necessity of a different time. They now have so much inertia and so many large funding institutional bodies supporting them that, even though other players have since entered the sector, they still maintain a large role despite all the frustrations and challenges with their relevance.
PH: I think 'inertia' is the right word.
There was an interesting article in the June issue of The Economist comparing IBM and Carnegie Corporation, both of which are turning 100. The takeaway for me was just how prolific the Carnegie Corporation was in creating an institutional presence in the first half of the twentieth century and how that seems to have waned significantly.
It's hard to lay that at the feet of the Carnegie Corporation, but it certainly suggests there's something different now about the scale at which any individual actor can work. We've spent a century churning out all of these huge social service organizations and foundations that are not scaled to close down in our lifetimes, but the landscape has changed since then. The United Ways are no longer the spark of innovation; they are now the legacy of whatever that innovative moment was. Now it seems the landscape is so crowded that it either stifles or crowds out the creative minds, or maybe just creates a different context from which we start.
AH: There has been a push to get some of the larger legacy foundations to spend down their endowments. But in the few examples you see, it seems like there's a lot of dysfunction with that as well. What is your stance on the issue?
PH: I've reached the same conclusion, having just watched the abrupt leadership change at Atlantic and some of the churn that's going on at the Soros Foundations. It's messy, but I take a more measured view. I think giving away money is really hard, and there's no easy formula. Just increasing your giving to do really big things in a really short period of time doesn't make you any smarter. You may get more creative out of necessity because you're panicked, but I'm not sure that necessarily leads to better outcomes. It can be messy in a spend-down scenario, just like it can be messy in a different way in perpetuity. I don't think there's a clear-cut solution that if we just do this, then all philanthropy will get better. It just doesn't work that way.
As a family foundation, Surdna has discussed the spend-down strategy before, and the current family members say, 'why would we deprive a future generation of our family the ability to affect cultural change as much as we have?' We think our problems are the most important problems, but so did the generation before us, and probably the generation after us will reach the same conclusions, so who are we to say?
Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.
Since 1974, Westside Family Health Center (WFHC) has grown from a grassroots women's clinic to a Federally Qualified Health Center that annually cares for nearly 9,000 under-served patients of all ages and genders in the in the Santa Monica area. Yet while their clinic grew in size and scope of service, it often lagged behind in terms of technology. But they knew that the right use of technology could help them better serve and educate their patients, as well as assist the organization in fundraising and volunteer recruitment. So in 2009, WFHC set out to develop its first ever information technology strategic plan.
High on their list of priorities was to update their Web site. They'd owned a URL since 1999 that, at worst, had lain dormant for long stretches of time and, at best, was updated once a month by an off-site volunteer.
"It was pressing, but also the thing we didn't know how to do," explained Michelle O'Donnell, development director for WFHC. "Marketing, if we had to, we could fake. Web sites we couldn't fake. With all the expertise on our senior staff, not one of us knew a single thing about Web sites."
So when Michelle heard about Taproot, she applied for their Advanced Website Grant and was awarded a pro bono team in April 2009.
THE WORK
During the discovery process, the Taproot team assessed the state of WFHC's current website, as well as their hopes and goals for the new one.
"It required quite a bit of finessing," said Nora Hansanugrum, marketing manager for the Taproot team. "The original design did not take into account the audiences they were trying to reach. It was not organized in a way that was easy for users to find information. It also didn't have a lot of branding to it, and that's something we wanted to fix. We wanted to make sure that their Web site represented an extension of who they really were as an organization."
Given some of WFHC's primary goals for the new site, such as making forms available for clients to fill out prior to their visits and updating the site in a timely manner with news and events, the Taproot team realized that WFHC would be best served by a simple internal content management system that would allow them to easily refresh their content without needing too much technical knowledge.
In addition to building the new Web site, the Taproot team spent many hours educating Michelle and other WFHC staff on how to use the site once it was live. They conducted workshops on topics such as how to write and take photographs for online channels.
"They were very good at understanding that we weren't experts in this but that we were willing to learn," Michelle said. "They gave us resources, places to go to get more information, classes we could take. They were good at understanding our limits."
THE IMPACT
The finished design addressed the needs of all three of WFHC's target audiences - patients, volunteers, and donors. Three prominent tabs on the homepage addressed each of these groups, and the Taproot team went so far as to incorporate color-coding into the design to further differentiate whom a given page was speaking to.
The Taproot team also discussed with WFHC future goals and plans for their site that fell outside the scope of this particular grant, such as incorporating an employee portal or integrating social media. Not only did the team keep these potentialities in mind while designing the site, but they also provided WFHC with strategy, design, and writing guides to help them with future updates and changes.
"We really wanted them to become self-sufficient in managing their website and understanding what the function and purpose of it is, so they knew what considerations to take into account should they want to enhance it later, and so they can accomplish what they ultimately want to achieve," Nora said.
Their efforts have paid off. Michelle has trained two additional staff members in the use of the content management system and continues taking classes herself. Nora and other members of the Taproot have stayed in touch with WFHC to answer questions and see them across the finish line.
"It's really pretty. It's really clean," says Michelle. "We love the art they selected. We can't wait for the world to see it."
After successful completion of the Advanced Website Grant, WFHC was eager to take advantage of Taproot's other services. In September 2010 they applied for a Key Messaging Grant and received that award in March 2010. Jason D. Nemeth is a principal at Nemeth Consulting and a pro bono copywriter with the Taproot Foundation.
Earlier this year at Taproot Foundation, we delivered our one millionth hour of pro bono service to the communities we serve. That's a lot of valuable time and expertise from business professionals that has been leveraged to help strengthen the nonprofit sector and make the work we do more sustainable.
To celebrate this milestone, Taproot Founder and President Aaron Hurst sat down with one of our pro bono consultants, Dan Djuplin, to find out why pro bono matters to him. Dan is a business development project manager who works full-time at a New York City advertising agency and is also training for his first triathlon. But even amidst his busy schedule, he has found time to offer about 300 hours worth of professional skills to three local nonprofits, helping them develop key messages, brand strategy, and Web sites that will help them expand their reach and effectiveness.
Being the newest of the five cities to establish itself within Taproot's national framework, Taproot Los Angeles continues to expand and evolve as we gain traction in the community. Now in our third year, there is more of a pressing need to establish our city's presence than ever before. With our Program team overseeing higher numbers of Service Grant projects through to completion, Los Angeles continues to re-craft and redefine itself as more skilled pro bono consultants join our ranks, donating their time and expertise to nonprofits in the community. In effect, we are witness to a continuous and extraordinary kind of synergy happening between the two.
Last month, Taproot Los Angeles witnessed another extraordinary kind of synergy: a six-member pro bono video shoot led by LA filmmaker Jason Wawro. Jason and his crew donated their time, their resources, and their passion for pro bono to assist Taproot LA in creating a video collective for our city.
Also in collaboration at last month's shoot were nine PBC interviewees, who, after braving the volatile LA traffic, showed up at our Chinatown office to share their excitement and experiences with working alongside LA's nonprofit grant recipients. As makeup artist Leah worked to flawless execution to prep and powder each video participant, Jason and his crew worked tirelessly into the early evening to light, interview and shoot each PBC, as well as some of the Taproot staff and a nonprofit award recipient--in this instance, Downtown Women's Center. The entire video project was spearheaded by two of LA's PBCs, Angela Barfield and Roxanne Hawkins, who we fondly refer to as "Roxangela." Roxangela worked together on a Service Grant project for Barlow Foundation in the recent past and have since been in pro bono partnership with Taproot LA, sitting down with us each week to help envision where our local PR and marketing efforts could lead us.
The consultants interviewed made up a cross-section of all four of our practice areas: Web/IT, Strategy Management, HR/ Leadership Development and Marketing. PBC design duo Barry Deck and Chi Chi Bello are currently working together on a web project for A Place Called Home and were interviewed together, lending further credence to the tenet of teamwork.
Last month's shoot was what we anticipate will be the start of many similar collaborations to come and will enable us to visually showcase other final deliverables through the eyes of Service Grant recipients and PBCs, some having completed one or more Service Grant projects, and some in the early stages of their first.
The crew remarked that they had never heard as many 'thank yous' as they had from Taproot's staff throughout the day. One of the group, having been on her 16th straight day of work, said, "It's rare that we ever hear thanks when we're working. We're simply expected to just come in and do it right." The crew exemplified the kind of pro bono spirit we love and admire in each of our consultants, and we are grateful to all the PBCs and entire crew who donated their Friday to help us spread the good word. Just imagine what the pro bono landscape could look like in the not too distant future if every skilled and available consultant was engaged in effective pro bono community engagement.
Special thanks to the film crew (Jason Wawro, Derek Edwards, Mike Guspari, Syd Yang, Ben Benesh, and Leah Dempsey) our pro bono consultants (Andrew Ma, David Nordella, Jerry Moore, Chi-Chi Bello, Barry Deck, Teresa Scaletta, Larisa Gurnick, Gena Davis and Raul Barrera), the Downtown Women's Center, and Executive Service Corps of Southern California for allowing us to use their space to film.
Vanessa Celentano is a Recruitment Associate at the Taproot Foundation.
For the past 10 years, Taproot has developed the pro bono ethic into a powerful movement by strategically connecting business talent with nonprofit organizations and providing key resources to advance social impact. To date, we've delivered nearly $86 million in pro bono professional services to more than 1,300 nonprofits, moving the needle on some of today's most pressing issues. All this was done thanks to the spectacular leadership, commitment, and generosity of our board of directors.
While biased, I believe Taproot has one of the best nonprofit boards in the country (and as a member of the BoardSource board myself, I should know)--and now we're asking your help to find new, exceptional individuals to join us.
Our current, outstanding board understands the gravity of their responsibility and shows up in a big way. They take their governing role seriously, they push me to think bigger, and they raise the resources we need (our average member generates $80,000 in cash, in-kind, and in pro bono contributions).
After extensive research on best practices, we developed a Board Recruitment Service Grant in 2009--and have applied those principles to our own work: we recruit talent we need, put our skilled board at the front and center of our operations and enlist them as a driving force for the entire organization. Last year we reached out to our pro bono consultants and nonprofit clients for nominations for our national Board of Directors. We received over 100 nominations and in March elected five stellar new board members. We just posted Q+A interviews with all of them on our blog:
We are now seeking nominations for Taproot's 2012 board class, who would be eligible for election next March. This year we are looking for executives who have a passion for our mission and reside in New York, Chicago, San Francisco or D.C. Our focus is on new members who can bring the following critical leadership skills and experience:
Executive Leadership We are seeking members who have the capacity and experience to grow into leadership roles on our board. This requires previous nonprofit executive committee experience and the ability to provide an average of at least five hours per week of board service. These nominees are likely currently:
Retired/semi-retired managing director of a management consulting firm in one of our cities
Retired/semi-retired ED of a national nonprofit organization or foundation
Semi-retired venture capitalist or investment banker
Early "retired" entrepreneur
Financial Leadership We believe in having a deep bench of members with strong financial backgrounds. They are able to not only play a key role on our finance and audit committees but support our fundraising and planning efforts. These nominees are likely currently:
Accounting firm partner
Accounting firm partner
CFO (corporate or large nonprofit)
National nonprofit board treasurer
Thought Leadership Taproot is the leader of the pro bono movement but also in the fields of capacity building and social innovation. We seek to populate our board with members who are fellow leaders in these fields to push our thinking and help to connect our work to their network. These nominees are likely currently:
Publisher of a leading social innovation publication
CEO of a leading organization associated with social innovation (e.g., scaled social entrepreneur)
Leader at a professional services firm well known for pro bono (e.g., Bain, BCG, etc.)
Leader at a national capacity building organizations (e.g., NFF, Ad Council, Bridgespan, etc)
Philanthropic Leadership We work with hundreds of foundations and companies and value their perspective and networks on our board. These nominees are likely currently:
President of F500 corporate foundation
C-suite corporate executive
President of a national foundation
President of an association of foundations (e.g., GEO, COF, etc.)
If you know someone who fits any of these profiles, please let me know, and I will forward their name to our Governance Committee by Sept. 1st. Please include their name, your affiliation with them (ie how do you know them) and a few bullets on why you believe they would be a great fit. The Governance Committee will then review the nominations in the early fall and get back to you with next steps.
Thank you for everything you do and for your help in finding exceptional leadership for our 2012 board class.
Below is my open letter, requesting your help finding new leaders
willing to help govern and guide Taproot over the next several years.
Know someone who'd be a perfect fit? Please take a quick minute to write
me an email with how you know them and why they're great. Look forward to hearing from you, soon!
Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.
Enter any Taproot office, and within five minutes, besides being surprised by our yellow walls and striped socks, you'll also be surprised at how many times you hear the phrase "Service Enterprise." It's not uncommon for Taproot staff to be using words that no one else understands--we certainly have a particular lingo of our own consisting of far too many acronyms. But we're hoping that this newest addition to our vernacular catches on in the outside world.
Service Enterprise is the concept of employing volunteers in your core business functions to help expand your organizational capacity. As part of our work with Reimagining Service and California Volunteers, which Aaron wrote about in this blog post, we've learned that many organizations--like MEND in Pacoima, CA, which engages more than 500 volunteers a day to provide vital services to people in need--have been doing this for years, allowing them to greatly expand their impact. At MEND, not only do volunteers serve as service providers, but they also help to run back office functions. Apparently volunteers are all the rage these days.
You probably don't think that would be a revolutionary idea at an organization like Taproot, which mobilizes and provides pro bono volunteers to thousands of other nonprofit organizations. But it might surprise you that until recently, we haven't institutionalized a way to tap into that volunteer supply and their skills for internal Taproot projects. It's easier said than done.
Since our retreat in January, we've been all abuzz over the idea of "service enterprise-ing," and how to do it (yes, it's the best verb since "Googling"). It's not easy creating the infrastructure and support for to provide those pro bono consultants with a positive experience that also benefits the organization. Slowly but surely, we're testing the waters.
But our experiments have yielded excellent results. Just recently, a team of Taproot pro bono consultants--Karl Shaikh, Dodie Elhakei, Daphne Chan, and Shruti Malani--volunteered their time and expertise to help me and the rest of the product development team improve our Financial Analysis Service Grant. The team went above and beyond our expectations to create a set of deliverables that will help Taproot greatly improve our offering, and help nonprofits get the financial help they need.
There are also teams helping us plan identify opportunities engage more deeply in each of our cities: one team in the Bay Area (Tina Weinfurther, Daphne Chan, Bijal Shah, Anson Tsai, Jaime Pursuit), and one in Los Angeles (Larisa Gurnick, Glenn Spreen, Jeannine Champlain, Margaux Thomas, and Jason Arnold). There are consultants helping us train our other volunteers (Esther Clayson, Carol Septow, and David Baker). And there are pro bono fellows helping us with everything from product development (Alexandra Larschan), to web development (Kevin Flood), to finance and administration (Kino Song), development (Esther Kang and Kyson Bunthuwong), impact measurement (Camila Salamanca Nunez), recruitment (Tara Foreman), external affairs (Nicolle Bennett) and corporate engagement (Yoann Kassi-vivier).
This bevy of smart and savvy professionals is helping Taproot drastically expand our ability to help other nonprofits. Thanks to them for all their amazing, hard work. And, of course, for allowing us to finally use our new favorite term in the progressive: we're service enterprising! Ryan Cohen is a Product Development Fellow at the Taproot Foundation.
What does it take to get CEOs to see the business value of philanthropy? Part of it is showing them the multiple levels of value it creates, and I don't think that there is just one door that you open that appeals to everyone. Some people are more wired to be much more community-minded. I'm a big believer in creating a sustainable cycle, and in order to do that, you have to think about all the stakeholders that are involved in your community investment and what they are getting out of it.
Between Reimagining Service and The White House, you are doing a lot of coalition work. Why have you taken this approach to social change? Coalition work is so important because it fosters diverse thinking brought to the table. It needs to have its little collisions before it rests in a place where the most important things have surfaced, and it's not just a diluted or a lowest common denominator. With Reimagining Service, the different pieces that have been brought to the table have created a more compelling solution, and it's not a solution where you have to do every piece and part in order for it to work.
Why did you decide to take part in Reimagining Service? There was an a-ha moment of, 'Whoa, there's going to be a lot of people volunteering, and are we ready? And are these good intentions going to turn into impact that means something of value to the community?' All of us who are involved in Reimagining Service were in violent agreement that there was a need to address this opportunity.
When I started Taproot and started working in the volunteering and service fields, I was pretty shocked by the amount of territoriality and politics that were involved in this field. I think that was a reaction to change. The things that Taproot has done in the 10 years you've been doing this work has been game-changing. I think change is scary, but when you look at civilizations, it's those that change and embrace the change, as scary as it can be sometimes, that ultimately succeed. As Don Fisher (co-founder of Gap Inc.) said, "Change or Fail."
At Taproot, our passion is strategically building capacity for nonprofits using quality pro bono resources. But to provide the best services, we need to know what organizational models are best suited for promoting both efficiency and creativity to bring about social change.
At Taproot, no one knows this better than Laura Weiss, our vice president of Service Innovation. As a former architect and executive of innovation firm IDEO, Laura brings a keen design perspective to the challenges facing nonprofit organizations. In her latest essay, she writes:
"Organizations that enable some freedom of activity are naturally
structured for creativity. They are often characterized less by
prescribed roles, functions or departments and more by the types of
human interactions their culture desires. Typically these are reflected
in such things as a strong sense of community, interdisciplinary
collaborations, a 'one-team' mentality, and an open environment (both
literally and figuratively).
When thinking about what kind of
structure is the right kind of structure, we need to ask ourselves what
kinds of behaviors we are trying to encourage so that our relationships --
both internally and externally -- deliver unique value and have real
impact."
As Fourth of July weekend kicks off and feelings of patriotism begin to surge, the idea of public service naturally moves to the forefront of the national consciousness. It's a great opportunity for Americans to think about ways we can give back to a country that has allowed us freedom and the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
For many Americans, "public service" conjures up images of soup kitchens and trash pick-ups. While those things do address the urgent needs of our communities, why not think long-term as well and find a way to make sustainable change by building infrastructure and capacity?
At Taproot, we've seen how pro bono service can have far-reaching effects on nonprofits. Just last week, we received a note on our Facebook page from ColorBurst Screen Printing, a nonprofit that provides job training for and employment opportunities for adults with autism and other developmental challenges. Our pro bono consultants provided to them a key messaging and brand strategy Service Grant in 2008, followed up by a donor database Service Grant in 2009. Colorburst just wanted to let us know of the long-term impact their pro bono engagement had. "ColorBurst
is celebrating it's best year ever--and it all started with our first
Taproot grant!" the message read. "That first Taproot project led to a number of changes
that have helped us to grow."
And it goes even further than that. Taproot wants to see pro bono service deeply integrated into the way our society thinks about work. Taproot's Founder and President Aaron Hurst points out the impact this can have on our cities in an essay written for this summer's issue of Next American City magazine: "Just as we redesign our work around new technologies, we have the
opportunity to strategically redesign our work in cities around
volunteers as well. We start with questions about the fundamental nature
of the work and how it could be done differently if we used volunteers.
It takes creativity to be open and see the ways volunteers can be a lot
more than just a replacement for paid labor." Pro bono service is a bridge that brings people together, creates understanding, and yields lasting impact on today's most dire issues. We've already won one revolution to gain our independence; now let's win the pro bono revolution for social change. This Fourth of July, let's work to make pro bono not just an idea, but rather an ideal of the American way of life.
Joshua Winata is an External Affairs Fellow at the Taproot Foundation.
Born out of the ashes of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the 
The finished design addressed the needs of all three of WFHC's target audiences - patients, volunteers, and donors. Three prominent tabs on the homepage addressed each of these groups, and the Taproot team went so far as to incorporate color-coding into the design to further differentiate whom a given page was speaking to. 
Being the newest of the five cities to establish itself within Taproot's national framework, Taproot Los Angeles continues to expand and evolve as we gain traction in the community. Now in our third year, there is more of a pressing need to establish our city's presence than ever before. With our Program team overseeing higher numbers of Service Grant projects through to completion, Los Angeles continues to re-craft and redefine itself as more skilled pro bono consultants join our ranks, donating their time and expertise to nonprofits in the community. In effect, we are witness to a continuous and extraordinary kind of synergy happening between the two. 
What does it take to get CEOs to see the business value of philanthropy?
