038: A Conversation with Hildy Gottlieb – Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio

Tony’s guest this week is:

Hildy Gottlieb, author of “The Pollyanna Principles”

Read and watch more on Tony’s blog: http://mpgadv.com

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No. Dahna welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host tony martignetti i hope you remember last week. I hope you were with us last week when we had all about awesome auctions and sassiness was roger divine of schoolauction dot net was my first guest, and he told us all about online silent and gala auctions. And then scott koegler, our regular tech contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news, joined me yet again to explain that software as a service or sas, which i was calling sassiness, is gaining popularity, and we talked about whether your office should be a part of that trend this week. It’s a conversation with hildy gottlieb she is the author of the polyana principles, and she has transformative ideas for nonprofit organizations to create what i think is monumental change in themselves and their communities and the world, and i’ll be spending the hour talking to hildy, and she’ll be sharing her ideas on tony’s take two at roughly thirty two minutes into the our planned giving is a jealous mistress. Whatever job responsibility you might decide to pair planned e-giving with your plan giving program will not realise its potential. And that’s from a blogger posted i did this week and that’s on tony’s take two this week. So right now, we’re going to take a break. And after that, i’ll be joined by hildy gottlieb for the hour, talking about her book, the polyana principals. Stay with me. Dafs you’re listening to the talking alternative network. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. Is your marriage in trouble? Are you considering divorce? Hello, i’m lawrence bloom, a family law attorney in new york and new jersey. No one is happier than the day their divorce is final. My firm can help you. We take the nasty out of the divorce process and make people happy. Police crawl are said to want to nine, six four three five zero two for a free consultation. That’s lawrence h bloom two one two, nine, six, four, three five zero two. We make people happy. Hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com durney welcome back to tony martignetti non-profit radio i’m spending this hour with hildy got lead. Hildy is the author of the polyana principles reinventing non-profit organizations to create the future of our world, published by renaissance press in tucson, arizona, he’ll be helped develop the current master’s degree program in community leadership at do cane university, where she has taught she was awarded a points of light citation from president bill clinton, and she hosts the monthly podcast making change for the chronicle of philanthropy. She’s, the co founder of creating the future, a nonprofit organization in tucson organized around the polyana principles. Our other books include friendraising community engagement strategies, fir boards who hate fund-raising but love making friends, community engagement, step by step action kit and bored recruitment and orientation. A step by step common sense guide i’m very pleased that hill, these most recent book, the polyana principles, brings her to today’s show hildy. Welcome, tony. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. Oh, it’s, my pleasure to have you. Thank you. I’m going to start by reading a little quote. That is in your book you say that we are creating the future, right? Now, with every decision we make with every word we speak with every action we take, what is the potential for our future under the polyana principles? The potential of our future with or without the polyana principles is amazing the potential of our future because we are creating the future with everything we do with every you know, if i say something nasty to my kids in the morning, i’m creating my future and her future and probably her teachers future and all of that. If we have a wonderful morning, we’re creating the future in that way. And so the future is ours to create. And that just means anything really is possible. Unless it’s physically impossible, anything is possible. Yes. Only the laws of physics constrain us pretty much excellent. Look, pretty much well. And, you know, we thought the laws of physics constrained us and wouldn’t let us get to the moon. And we proved that wrong. So you never know, right? Just on a system level, of course we’re going to dive into the detail, but on a broad level, what are the polyana principles? Boy? Oh, boy, let me out! Let me move that. Question teo, too a little bit of a different context because my listing out the principles people are going no, no, no, yeah, we’re going to talk about each one in detail. Now i don’t mean for you to list one, two, three, four, five, six. But just as a general. Like what? What? What? What sort of a system is it? God. Okay, well, what it really is is it looks at the question what will it take for every organization in this sector to reach his potential? Because that potential is it’s amazing communities. It is the community’s we all want to live in healthy, vibrant, amazing places toe live. It really is humanity’s potential. And so the pollen of principles comes from analysis of looking at with all of the work that organizations were doing globally. We have millions of organizations with millions of people working in in this sector globally. Why is everybody so frustrated that change is not happening and certainly it’s happening incrementally. But why has everyone in this sector so universally frustrated that we’re not creating the results? We innate li sense that we can create. And when we looked at what was going on in the sector and we looked at it from a very practical standpoint because we were we were consultants who came out of a former life as business, turn around people. So from a very practical perspective, saying, you know, we changed our lives to change the world, how come things aren’t changing this fast? And what we found was really two things going on, the first reason that organizations don’t create the communities that they know in nate leave that they had the potential to create is because we don’t aim at that we aim at fixing problems, which are very, very, really need to be fixed, but we’re sort of aiming reactively rather than aiming at what would it take to build healthy, vibrant, humane communities? And we’re going to have opportunities to talk about that as we talked about the principles, what goes into that? Okay, and then another, please continue. Yeah, so that’s that’s really, what the principals are about is how do we create a system that do it name at the change that we want to see in communities and do aimed at our potential. So that’s that’s the quick answer to your question of what are the systems that that undergird that the pollen of principles air really named thank you and the organizations that we’re talking about working through on would you have just about a minute and a half or so before break before we get into the details of the different principles? But those organizations were talking about working through are commonly called non-profit organizations, and you have that in your subtitle, but you prefer community benefit organization. Why is that? Well, because non-profit talks about what we’re not, you know, when i when i meet you, i don’t immediately look at all the things you’re not. I look at all the things you are, tony, nice to see you, you’re not very tall, exactly exactly. And so when we call ourselves by what we’re not, we’re comparing ourselves to something and not measuring up and when we call ourselves community benefit organizations that’s exactly what we are and it’s exactly what we’re about excellent love the phrase, and we’re going to talk about the potential for community benefit organizations making change within themselves within their communities and within the world. When we returned with hildy gottlieb after this break, we’ll get into detail about the polyana principles. Please stay with us. They didn’t think dick tooting getting ding, ding, ding ding. You’re listening to the talking, alternate network, getting anything. Good. Are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Dahna are you feeling overwhelmed and the current chaos of our changing times? A deeper understanding of authentic astrology can uncover solutions in every area of life. After all, metaphysics is just quantum physics, politically expressed hi and montgomery taylor and i offer lectures, seminars and private consultations. For more information, contact me at monte m o nt y at r l j media. Dot com duitz looking to meet mr and mrs wright, but still haven’t found the one. Want to make your current relationship as fulfilling as possible? Then please join us, starting monday, may second at ten am for love in the morning with morning alison as a professional matchmaker, i’ve seen it all. Please tune in and call as we discuss dating relationship and more. Start your week off with love in the morning with marnie alison on talking alternative dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Schnoll welcome back to tony martignetti non-profit radio my guest this week, hildy got leave, the author of the polyana principles. Well, we were going toe to step through the principles because obviously, i think that’s important for people to understand what the what the system is and what it’s elements are, but then, you know, we’ll have time to talk about implementation and hopefully even some of your work dahna in at creating the future, so let’s, start with the first principal is about accountability. What is what is that principle? And what are we accountable for? The first of the principles is that we accomplished what we hold yourself accountable for, and and one of the one of the things that we have found in terms of, um, of accountability, when we think of accountability in a classic organization were really everybody knows accountability rests with the board, right? Always, yes, right, and and and we’ve got that drill down boards understand they’re accountable. They’re not entirely sure who they’re accountable to or what they’re accountable for, but they know they’re accountable, so what we teach them is that they are accountable for ah fiscal oversight for legal oversight. For operational oversight, which is all of this stuff that’s going on inside the organization, what we don’t keep them. And when i say we i mean, just about every governance that’s out there, you mean the commune, the community benefit organization, community, you don’t mean you’re consulting? No, no, no, you’re consulting different? Yeah, yeah, what, what? What we do as a sector? What if you were take a governance class at any of the governance institutions around the world? If you were to take a governance class at a university, if you were to take a governance class at a non-profit resource center or if you were learned governance from ninety nine point nine percent of all consultants, you would learn that governance is accountability and talk about fiscal accountability on dh legal oversight and operational oversight, and then you would look at what we sort of tend to call boardman can ix the stuff of being aboard, so you’re accountable for your own orientation and you’re accountable for recruitment and you’re accountable for policies what we found as we started to look at the question of what’s holding this sector back is that no one is talking. About how we be accountable as boards for creating significant improvement in our communities. Nobody talks about that accountability. No one teaches us how to be accountable for that and that’s leadership. That’s, really, what the heart of leadership is is holding ourselves accountable for creating for making the difference. We got onto the board in the first place to make. And so what we found as we started to really rip things apart and take a look at them is that we are taught to hold ourselves accountable for the means for the internal operations for legal. And you know, you look at the reports that boards get at the table. They talk about finance, they talk about human resource is those are all the means to accomplish the ends. But no one teaches boards howto hold themselves accountable for the end results. And so when we looked at what would a governance system look like if it were helping boards hold themselves accountable for creating the change they want to see in community? Because that’s where they got on the board in the first place, that would be a governance system that shows boards howto hold themselves accountable. For end results in the community not just tells them they’re accountable, but shows them how to do that and then shows them howto hold themselves accountable for the means within that s so what we’ve done as a sector is taken the means out of context focused everybody on the means. So what do we have? We have we have strong organizations focused on kapow city, building an organizational effectiveness internally without any focus externally and certainly not bored accountability focus externally guiding the organization towards creating the change we want community in our community, right? I wish we could spend more time on each of the principles, but we just don’t have that luxury. So of course i commend to your attention the polyana principles by hildy gottlieb second is that basically, each of us is creating the future. What do you want to say about that? Well, if we will bring that back again at the organizational level, organisations create the future by planning and we’re taught that strategic planning is you know, it’s it’s, our organizations that are best we plan so that we can we can be the best we can be. And yet when we looked at planning planning doesn’t ask the only question that matters, which is how is our community going to be an amazing place to live because of the work that we’re doing? What planning does instead is it looks out just a couple of years into the future and says, well, what do we think we can accomplish? Or there’s a problem we need to solve, but we could never solve the whole problem, so will will add ten percent more staff on the south side now what we wind up doing if we really look at what that means in terms of planning is our planning is reactive to what’s going on in the community, and it is incremental because we know we can’t solve the whole thing, and so when we look at holding ourselves accountable for creating the future of our communities, we create a planning process that ames first at the fuel teacher we want to create and then created a critical path towards that future, not just saying well, here’s our vision for what one hundred percent success would look like a food bank living in an equitable community where everyone has their their basic needs met. But now let’s get back to well. We have to react to what’s in front of us no it’s saying here’s what the future would look like and here’s the critical path that it’s going to take us to get there. What do you say to people who would react that this is lovely and utopian and naive thinking it works? Wei have been not only doing this work ourselves when we were doing consulting, but having stepped away from consulting to build creating the future, creating the future’s entire mission is to make the practical means that we have discovered which is mostly what the polyana principles is about. The book is three quarters of it is case studies showing that this is a practical, if nothing else, but we not only have have done it ourselves as consultants, but creating the future is all about teaching others to do this work and watching the consultants that we have trained in this and the incredible results they’re seeing in communities, you know, the only answer is it works, and then it happens faster then anybody can believe happens because we take the blinders off and we aim at it, hell, he’s been referring to creating the future, which i do hope we have a chance to talk about a lot more detail toward the end, but you’ll find that falik her, the organization that she co founded at creating the future dot org’s. Hildy, you’re the third principal, i’m going to read everyone and everything is interconnected and independent interdependent whether we acknowledge that or not. So we need to tear down some walls we have, we have the wonderful opportunity to tear down well, the thing that’s been interesting as we again looked at what goes on in this sector is if you left organizations to their own devices without any external stimuli, and i most by that i mean funding sources, they want to work together because they know innate lee that the only way we can accomplish something is if we all work together, but we’ve created funding systems that force organizations to compete with each other, and we can’t simultaneously build trust and compete with each other. And so when we have worked with thunders to look differently at funding there’s, some examples in the book where funders actually have found that it’s a misnomer to think that we can’t fund everyone we can indeed fundez everyone, even with the limited resources that we have when we look differently at the way we’re doing our work, and when we aim at taking advantage and building on what interconnectedness can do for bringing together organizations to ask, what can we accomplish together that we can’t accomplish on our own? Have you worked with public sector funders, government funders or you’re referring just to what hyre private funders, the flexibility that private funders have lead them to be more likely candidates? And so we have worked primarily with private funders, you know, as everyone knows, government is is certainly not the dog it’s the tail, and hopefully the dog could wag the tail rather than the other way. The the next principal is values based, and i’m going to read again from from hilda’s book when it comes to changing values. It is not just the mission that matters. It is the degree to which every part of our work can act as an example of what those values would look like in practice. Would you share with us the story of the disability? Care group on dh how that relates, tio polyana, principle number four you know, i i just had an example come up the other day, and if i can, so is it a better one than disability care group it’s one that way see these kinds of things all the time we see a domestic violence organization and, you know, i need to preface this with i couldn’t make this stuff up, so i have i need to start by saying i truly couldn’t make this stuff up a domestic violence organization whose board was so abusive to the staff that the staff unionized way i see i’ve i’ve worked with the leadership organization where the board was, so be rest of leadership. I mean, these are guys that teach leadership in the community that they needed someone to come in and help them, but basically they should have gone through their own programs, but the one that that just walked in heart our doors this week was a a community visioning group called on the phone, and when we round up talking to them at at length, we found that the problem they had was that this community visioning group did not have a vision for its own organization and how that organization fit into the community. The vision group was myopic. So? So, you know, it’s consistent you look at, you know, a domestic violence organization that that is being abusive to its staff. You look at the example that you quoted in the book, a disability organization that was not paying it people enough to provide the care they made it to provided an attentive level, they were paying minimum wage to folks that we’re going to go out and take care of the very basic needs of people who were in need. You go on and on, and you watch the disconnect. What we’ve found work no is if we ask the question, what behaviors if we’re to aim at the community we want, if we were to aim at a humane, vibrant, compassionate community, whatever our mission happens to b, what behaviors and values would we want to see in others in our community to reach towards that? So whether it is humanity towards folks with disabilities, whether it is a community that is respectful to others in terms of domestic violence, what behavior do? We want to see in others. And how will we model that to the community in the way we do our work? And how will we make our decisions in a way that adheres to the behaviors in the values we want to see in others that’s really being the change we want to see and being yes, and committed to what we say we believe in, right? Your next principle is that strength builds upon our strengths, not our weaknesses. And you say that you want to eliminate the assumption that scarcity is reality, why’s that because reality is what we look at. If we see scarcity, that will be our reality. And if we see sufficiency, that will be our reality. When we look at individuals who walked through our doors in many organizations, we can see them as weak in need of service, or we can see them as having a pile of strengths upon which to build my business partner. Dmitri likes to quote that we can see stephen hawking as a debilitated human being who can barely take care of himself. He could barely breathe on his own, or we can see him as the most brilliant physicist we’ve ever known and it’s all on how we look at things. So when we when we see the individuals who walk in our doors and not only ask them the list of what’s wrong, but ask them what they have to build on, we know that that strength builds on strength. Well, the other thing that we forget is that the same works for our organization. So we will watch an organization that may very well be building on the strength of the folks in their community. Some do some don’t even those who are building on the strength of their community. When we asked them, do you see your own organization as strong or weak? Oh, no, we don’t have enough money and we don’t have enough volunteers on, you know, we’re definitely not strong, and even the term capacity building makes the assumption that we need to build capacity. It doesn’t say we’re building upon our own capacities. It assumes that we need to bring in expertise and build capacity when in fact organizations have tremendous strengths and resources to build upon. Okay, yeah, assumes a vacuum we’re starting with with a void we’re gonna take a break with hildy gottlieb she’s, the author of the polyana principles. When we return principal number six and i will talk about some implementation and hopefully her work at creating the future. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio stay with us. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Are you feeling overwhelmed in the current chaos of our changing times? A deeper understanding of authentic astrology can uncover solutions in every area of life. After all, metaphysics is just quantum physics. Politically expressed buy-in, montgomery, taylor and i offer lectures, seminars and private consultations. For more information, contact me at monte m o nt y at r l j media. Dot com are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping conscious people. Be better business people. Dahna hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com dafs welcome back to the show, it’s, time for tony’s take two at roughly thirty two minutes into the hour this week based on ah block post that i did, the name of the post is planned, giving is a jealous mistress, and what i’m trying to bring out in that post is that when you pair planned giving fund-raising with any other fund-raising responsibility, the plan giving program in your non-profit or community benefit organization is going to suffer and that’s because of a few things and obviously lay them out on the block. One of them is that whatever you pair it with is going to have much shorter deadlines than planned e-giving i’ve seen director, i’ve seen the title director of annual giving and planned e-giving and say, you know, in the fourth quarter of the year, annual giving that annual fund those mailings and and checks coming in, those can sometimes have weekly production goals, andi even through the year, there are at least usually monthly production goals for for that type of fund-raising and planned giving is such a longer term transactional relationship building between the prospect or donor, and the and the professional fundraiser or the or the executive director who’s doing the fund-raising but it’s just not practical for planned giving to get the time or attention that it needs. And what that leads to then is sort of management deceiving itself, thinking that planned e-giving fund-raising is is covered. You hear that? A lot we could we have that covered it’s covered, really only nominally it’s in someone’s job title, but it’s not getting really time devoted to it. And there are other reasons that pairing plan giving is difficult to makes it difficult to achieve your playing giving goals and that’s all in my post planned giving is a jealous mistress and my blog’s that m p g a d v dot com, and that is tony’s take two for friday, april twenty second. I’m with hildy gottlieb, the author of the polyana principles we’re talking about innovation and transformative thinking and how every community benefit organization can can take this on and build themselves their community and the world well beyond what traditional thinking would would lead them to believe i said that. Okay, hildy, my capturing alt-right you’re doing great. Okay? All right. Um, so we ended with not building. On weakness, but our strength building on our strengths. But just what about fund-raising? I mean, you mentioned it, a cz, a typical, you know, mindset of scarcity, but but don’t. Community benefit organizations have to continually fund-raising mean, don’t. They have scarce dollars in their bank often. It depends on how you look at resource is depends on how you look at what we need. And again, it comes back to the heart of the polyana principles. What if i could just take a moment and share where they came from? I didn’t wake up one morning and come up with six principles. We spent approximately five, seven years really trying to change our work as consultants to be more effective. I wish i could say that we went out and we did a lot of research to find out. How do how do communities transform? But to be perfectly honest, when we look, there wasn’t a lot out there. And what? So what we did as you know, our background within business. Turn around. We went out and we just said, ok, if one thing’s not working, you try something else. And by experimentation, we found systems that when we put them into place, put organizational effectiveness, and especially their affecting community, it put it on steroids. I mean, it happened faster and more dramatically and more gracefully than anybody imagined it could happen. And what we found was that when you change how you see things things change, and so when we look back to say, okay, what? What are the seams undergirding what we found work? Because we found a lot of things that didn’t work quite honestly and stop doing them and then kept going in the direction of what works. What we found were these six principles are always all of them at play when we say dramatic change happening when we see some change happening, some of these principles art play, but not all of them, and in many organizations, none of these principles are at play, and so a big piece of the answer to your fund-raising question is it depends on what we’re looking at if we’re focused on scarce resource is as money than that reality will constantly reinforce itself when instead we ask, what are all the functions this programme needs to do? And who else in the community is doing any piece of those functions? How can we work together? So it builds that interconnectedness? It builds those strengths together, we think about our programs differently. We think about our resource is differently. We find a we need less money and b we have created in exgagement at a level that build more strength upon it’s, almost like, you know, interest that compound. When we, when we build on what we have, and, quite honestly, that’s the model of how wealthy people make their money, they don’t go out and constantly work for letting bill gates does not work for a living. He makes his money off of what he has. Well, organizations have so much to build on, and we just look right past all of that, and they know what we need. We’re going to spend time talking about your ideas for asset based resource development and also community engagement. Let’s, just look att principle. Number six. I’m just going to ask you to explain what it means that individuals will go where systems lead them. We all are reinforced with this thought that we have free will and we do have free will, but we all also know how difficult it is to buck the system, and we have got systemic issues within the way organizations do their work. Is that reinforced and make it almost impossible for an individual to buck that? So if, for example, a development director comes into a organization and says, you know what, i’ve got this this asset based way i read hildy gottlieb spoken, and i’ve taken some of her classes, and i got this asset based way. It is very likely that that one individual in an organization is going to face resistance at every turn, so it makes it difficult to buck that, and it happens with weight, with boards all the time where a boardmember will come on, and they immediately defer to the system that’s in place with that board, even if it doesn’t feel right, even if they’ve been on boards where it has worked better but that’s just yeah, that’s just it’s. Comfortable, it’s. Easier to go with the system that’s in place than to try to change it a human nature. Right, and what’s your advice for that boardmember we change the system? What what we have, and it is really the reason that creating the future has formed what, what creating the future is sort of, you know, one part organization, one part living laboratory, one part movement on dh what we’re really seeing is, is that a new kill? Zsystems that came at our potential are the norm in this sector that we’re going to be banging our heads against the wall every every individual organization is going to be banging their head against the wall, saying, i tried to get my board to go along with this, but they said, now we want to go the way it goes, and so what we’re looking at it creating the future is making this kind of work this strength based, interconnected, based work that ames us at our potential to create the future that that become the norm in this sector rather than the exception. And again, i hope we have time to talk more about creating the future. So let’s, spend little time with the your ideas of asset based resource development we touched on them we’re a few. Minutes ago, but i want to dive into little detail. What are the assets that you typically find? Community benefit organizations have but are ignoring. There is really four basic kinds of assets that every organization has in some part on dh. Those are physical assets, resources, which is the stuff they have. It could be desk. It could be a copy machine. It could be a parking lot their mission, assets and resources which are the things they do. They’re human assets and resources, which is everybody they know and their community assets and resources, which is the physical mission and human resources of everybody else in their community. Ok, on with those resource is what? What are we looking to do? If instead, if we were to break down normal resource development planning to it it’s to a bare minimum essence, we’d have three steps we would have. No, what our budget needs are identify what’s already coming in what we can count on and then step three filling the hole. And what we have found is if we look at our budget needs and then looking step to know what’s coming in and then identify what do? We have to build on, then look at filling the whole what we find is that we have a ton to build on that makes us stop reaching for what we call the if only if only we could get a big grant if only someone would come sprinkle fairy dust on our organization and we’d have lots of money. What you also called the culture of cans? Yeah, yeah, the culture of can’t really is is getting back to when when you suggested earlier is that people would suggest that our ability to create the future is sort of some sort of age of aquarius sort of i think the culture of can’t really talk to our assumption that we can’t create the world we want. And yet we say it happened all the time we see way i see the things that we think are impossible happen all the time, but we culturally believe that it can happen, and we can help them to happen by looking at the four types of different assets that you explain on dh their value, can you can you give an example of the the program resource is and how that can help with financial sustainability i think what i what i’ll do is share one of the stories that in the book, which really sort of combined several of these way, we’re working with an environmental group in mexico, and they had a mexican based a peso based budget of what would be the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars american annually. And they were a research station where students from the u s would fly in this little fishing village. Beautiful, beautiful place students from the u s would fly in. They would land land on this little airstrip. They would be bused over to the research facility. They would do their work. They would get back on the bus. They would go back out and fly back home. And so that was pretty much the it was primarily research, but people coming in students coming in from the u s and and leaving out and they were looking at developing mohr more funds. So we went down the list of everything that they had. We went through and ask them, tell us about your program. And they told us what i just told you that the students come in. And they come through on and they leave, and they stay for several days, we said, well, what do they do at night? What do they do so well, you know, they pretty much sit around on the beach and they play music and mean sounded absolutely wonderful. I wanted to go home and we said, well, tell us more of the mission, what else happens? Well, the other big pieces of the education that we do is tour buses come through here, and they’re looking at the fishing village and they’re really on their way to the next big town, but they take this as a detour, and they come through the community and they look at what’s going on in the community and the fishing villages, and they look at the boats, and then they come over to our facility and we tell them about the environment, they get back on the bus and they leave, okay? So now we understand a little bit about their mission and how it worked until the i’m gonna i’m gonna stop you. They’re just going to take a break. You laid the groundwork for that and when we return after the grayce then i’ll ask you to explain what the, how you looked at, what they have and how they could look at it very differently. I’m with hildy gottlieb. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio stay with us. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you love movies, then join me and share your pains about them on the radio. This is mike, a movie fan like you, starting may tenth. Join me every tuesday night at six pm for my new show movie time on talking alternative dot com. Call me live or email me at movie time radio. At gmail dot com. We’ll talk about all the blockbusters whose the best director and which movies air overrated, among many other topics. Join me for movie time. Tuesdays at six on talking alternative dot com. Duitz looking to meet mr and mrs wright but still haven’t found the one want to make your current relationship as fulfilling as possible? Then please join us starting monday, may second at ten am for love in the morning with morning alison as a professional matchmaker, i’ve seen it all. Please tune in and call as we discuss dating relationship and more. Start your week off with love in the morning with marnie alison on talking alternative dot com hyre this is tony martignetti aptly named host of tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent technology fund-raising compliance social media, small and medium non-profits have needs in all these areas. My guests are expert in all these areas and mohr. Tony martignetti non-profit radio friday’s one to two eastern on talking alternative broadcasting do you want to enhance your company’s web presence with an eye catching and unique website design? Would you like to incorporate professional video marketing mobile marketing into your organization’s marketing campaign? Mission one on one media offers a unique marketing experience that will set you apart from your competitors. Magnify your brand exposure and enhance your current marketing efforts. Their services include video production and editing, web design, graphic design, photography, social media management and now introducing mobile market. Their motto is. We do whatever it takes to make our clients happy. Contact them today. Admission. One one media. Dot com. Talking. Hyre welcome back before the break, hildy was laying the groundwork for on interesting story that’s related in her book the polyana principles about a research center and identifying what the assets are that they have and how they could look at them very differently to help the organization with its financial sustainability. Hildy, please continue the story about the research center. Absolutely well, we talked about what what their mission was that we looked at it looked at all of the pieces of their mission, we then looked at their physical assets, they showed us all around the plant, they showed us all the dorms, they showed us the research facility, and then we got to the gift shop and they said, oh, don’t talk to us about the gift shop a boardmember thought it was a good idea to sell t shirts and sell hats, but the tourists that come through, they want the authentic stuff that they can get in town. They don’t want our stuff and the kids, they can’t afford a thirty five dollars t shirt, so don’t even talk to us about the gift shop. Well, when we thought, kayman we’ve got all of these. Different facilities now we we looked at all their physical resource, is we’ve looked at their mission resource is and one of the things that we know about kids is they may not have money for a t shirt, but if anybody’s ever had teenagers, still they’ll kill themselves for food. Any of any kid will come up with money for food. And so what we suggested to them is building on what you have. You’ve got a gift shop. What if, instead of selling expensive t shirts, you sold bottled water to the tourists who sold in in those days? It was ten years ago. Disposable cameras? What if you sold snacks for the kids and here’s what they found out, they found out that a they could do that when it didn’t require having all of the work of a gala or a golf tournament or anything they could do this while they were at the warehouse store once a month getting supplies, they could just buy extra stuff, but here’s where the punchline comes in, they had when we asked them again their missions. How many people come through here? They had ten thousand people a year. Come through the organization. A tour bus alone has one hundred forty four people on it. And they were getting five. Six of those a day during season. You multiply that out. Well, ok, here’s, let’s. Just do the math in that economy again. It was a peso based economy, so their budget was only two hundred thousand dollars a year if they had ten thousand people come through and each of them just bought two, two, three dollars worth of stuff that would be ten percent of their budget. So again, it required no extra work on their part. It required just just picking up snacks and things when they were already buying supplies in town. And and yet it didn’t come from a scarcity place. It came from a place of well, we have all this to build on. We can take advantage of what we already have. Strength builds upon our strengths, not our weaknesses. Let’s, talk a little about community engagement in terms of around, you know, implementation of the principles. Would you share the story of the cancer support group and how they got doctors engaged? Absolutely. The cancer support group was an organization that did non-technical support for folks who have cancer? What they found is, as we all would know, that when we, when we have a debilitating disease like cancer, we almost start to be seen as our cancer, rather than as a human being that has this illness. And so people look at us and treats the illness and talk about the illness, but it’s really all the other things that make us thrive. And so this was an organization that not only did counseling, but they would do things like gardening and ballroom dancing, and really speaks to the soul of the person, which is the thing that would help them heal. All of their programs were free, and yet they could not get doctors to refer their pace. And so when they came to us, they said, you know, we have this great outreach program which is thie community benefit codeword for marketing. We go out, we tell you our story and we hope that you’ll come back and do what we want you to dio and they would go tell the doctors here’s our story and will you refer your patients and it’s not working? So what we worked with them in community engagement is how can you engage the doctors in conversation so that they see that you’re all on the same team and you’re engaged together in building this? And so they went on a programme of hundred station and asking questions of the doctor’s, asking them things like, if you were going to refer your patients, what would you want to know? What might stop you from referring your patient? And they engaged the doctor’s wisdom in building this together? The result within a very, very short period of time just months was not only that they had all the referrals i could ever, ever live with, but the doctors came to them and we’re so excited about the program and said, can we form an advisory council? Because we’d love to work more closely with you guys on a regular basis? It’s what we find is when we engage, we have this thing, you know, we’re told in this sector that we raised friends so that we can raise money if instead we look a friendship, the way we look, a friendship in our real lives, that this is a two way relationship because we both care about the same things, then we’re engaging in a very different level, and people will give up their wisdom, their ideas, their experience and yeah, oh, by the way, they’ll give you money. But it’s not what you’re asking for it. If i met you at a party and the first thing i did was get to know you peripherally enough so i could ask you for money. You find the restroom as fast as she could on. I love that story because the doctor’s engaged way beyond what the organization was asking. They were asking the doctors opinions and the doctors wanted to create the advisory board and spend even more time helping. But, you know, everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent, and we acknowledge that or not. Exactly, and we find that it happens consistently. I mean, the wonderful thing about doing work this way and again it becomes a system is when the systems are aligned behind the change. We want to create our line behind our interconnectedness and our core values. Change happens faster, more dramatically and more gracefully than we could ever imagine. And there’s an abundance of wonderful stuff like what happened with the doctors that comes from that? We have just about a minute left. Hildy, why don’t you explain creating the future? You talked a little about it being strength based on dh talking, focusing on interconnectedness. Share more about us with what we’ll find at creating the future, creating the future. We are looking seriously to make the norm in social change work dramatic social change rather than the exception, and have programs for executive directors for boards. We have programs for consultants to really just move the needle on what this sector’s the sectors potential doesn’t change. It moved the needle on our ability as sector two to reach that potential. Hildy gottlieb is the author of the polyana principles reinventing non-profit organizations to create the future of our world that’s published by renaissance press in tucson, arizona. Hildy, thank you very much for spending time with us. Tony. It has been a blast. Thank you. Thank you. Our pleasure. Next week, it’s going to be author richard slutzky and he’s going to be with me to discuss his book thriving in the comet’s tail and share his thoughts on non-profit investment management or community benefit. Organization investment management. I’ll also be with two organizers of a planned e-giving conference that will be that they will be hosting here in new york city, and i hope you’ll be with me for those conversations you can keep up with what’s coming up on the show. 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