What do you think? | By Dee Hinton Turner

Mystic Mountain via Wikimedia Commons

Will Meecham recently wrote a post on Mental Health Day: Should it be Spiritual Health Day?

I found this read to be quite interesting.  It seems to bring to point what I personally feel about “Spirituality” being such a vital part of mental health recovery, substance abuse recovery and even recovery from/through life in general.  What do you think?

Free workshop will help organizations plan for executive transition

Thanks to a partnership with the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund, CCSR has been working closely with Tom Adams of TransitionGuides in the last two years to deeply understand organizational succession planning – and to make it useful and relevant for Kansas organizations. For most nonprofit organizations, this is specifically about planning for the day when the current executive director leaves.

On October 18^th, 1-5pm, CCSR will offer a free Compassion Kansas workshop in Wichita for nonprofit organizations on succession planning. This workshop will provide an introduction to Succession Basics: Emergency Backup Plan and Succession Policy. Call 316-978-3843 to register.

In his book TheNonprofit Leadership Transition and Development Guide, Adams says there are six areas to explore when an organization wants to define what a successful transition would look like. These areas also illuminate how close the organization is to being ready.

1. Strategy readiness
   How current is our strategic and business plan?
   What has changed or is changing in the environment that will influence our strategy or business plan in the next few years?
    
2. Financial readiness
   Do we understand our current financial health: income, expenses, assets and liabilities?
   What is the trend in our income and expenses and capacity to sustain a balanced operating budget?
    
3. Systems readiness
   Do we have in place up-to-date policies and procedures to guide and protect our organization? Where are we vulnerable?
   Does our technology infrastructure support the work required to achieve our mission?
    
4. Management team/staff readiness
   Are there key managers or staff who are doing more than one person’s job?
   Is there a culture and morale among managers or staff that results in retention, growth and ongoing advances for the organization in a capacity to achieve its mission?
    
5. Board readiness
   Does the board have effective leaders as chair and treasurer and leaders of key committees?
   Does the board have systems to support board regeneration and succession?
    
6. Executive readiness
   Is the executive clear about her plans for departure or engaged in a personal process to become clear?
   Does the executive support this planning?

This workshop will provide language and tools to begin to answer these questions and prepare organizations for fulfilling their missions beyond the tenure of the current executive.

Collective Impact Follow Up | By Amy Delamaide and Seth Bate

About a million years ago—or maybe just a few months—I wrote a post about an article we at CCSR are reading, “Collective Impact” by John Kania and Mark Kramer. I promised a follow-up post once we had discussed it at staff meeting.

Your wait is over. Here is that promised follow-up post.

We talked about the article at our August 10th staff meeting. In no particular order and without attribution to the staff members who contributed, here are some things we discussed:

• Communication is important to keeping collective impact efforts going. When different organizations are working on the same issue, sharing what each organization is doing and the impact it is seeing would energize the other organizations and support mutually reinforcing activities.
• The idea of collective impact seems rather utopian. In real-life, it was suggested, change takes much longer than the article indicated. The work is never done and practitioners are constantly revising their approach.
• It is worth exploring what barriers exist that prevent us from moving towards collective impact. How do you reinvigorate organizations at a grassroots level when they are in crisis or under stress, such as many are in these economic times?
• When doing research, especially participatory or action research, it is worth engaging the people doing the work as co-researchers and co-evaluators. This could result in having several “layers” of researchers—the participants in an intervention, the direct service staff delivering an intervention, and those academics observing at a distance could all contribute as researchers.
• It is useful to us as an organization to continue sharing articles and periodically discussing them as a large group. This makes sense for us as a university-based center where continued learning is valued. This might be something that makes sense for your organization, too.

We’ve continued hearing “backbone support organization” and “collective impact” in meetings with partners, so the ideas from the Kania and Kramer article are definitely worth grappling with if you haven’t yet. There is also a blog where the authors and other contributors are continuing to develop their ideas: Collective Impact Blog. Check it out.