So we just got back from an incredibly successful trip to Boston to do the following:
1. Introduce ourselves to nonprofits interested in socialmarkets.org
2. Attend the Ethos Roundtable
Jeff, Brandy and me at the Body by Brandy gym
The first thing we did when we got to Roxbury, MA was visit Brandy Cruthird’s Body By Brandy gym. She is definitely a force to be reckoned with! And she is using her business acumen to start a nonprofit devoted to reducing childhood obesity rates in her community. From what we could see in our short visit, she has very good metrics on her program participants, tracking things like BMI every three months. Clearly, her program is a very good candidate for socialmarkets as she is not averse to publicizing both her successes and failures and has clear, definable outcomes for all her project participants. She has so many case listings that she should could easily swamp our ability to track them all so we decided to aggregate them into a program and at least one case listing. We’re very proud to be working with America’s next fitness star .
Jeff and I at the Ethos Roundtable
Right after meeting with Brandy, we high-tailed it over to Cambridge and the Charles Hotel to attend the Ethos Roundtable. There were representatives from Organizer’s Collaborative, firstgiving.net and others. We laid bare our corporate souls metaphorically speaking and discussed the problems inherent in an SROI metric and the attendant effects of a truly efficient market (i.e. there will be winners and losers). Deborah Finn discussed her version of events and I have to say ours is fairly similar. It’s true though there are parts of the socialmarkets model which are distasteful but we believe that a social market is inevitable in the United States. It’s best to try to ameliorate all the most difficult portions of a social market by discussing them with nonprofit sector stakeholders. If you know of any conferences where we can have a knock-down drag-out bull session with any and all comers, we’d love to have it. We’d like to keep groups small enough so that people can follow up with questions as we believe that deep and incisive analysis is the only way to really have a constructive dialogue.
We then moseyed on over to a dinner held by the TechFoundation. That’s Kathleen Sherwin addressing the 501tech Boston group. As a past attendee of the New York 501tech meetings, I have to say that Boston does it better. It’s not held at a bar so it’s much easier to mingle with both new and old attendees. Job announcements are clearly held as well. I think it’s time for the NY 501tech crew to step up and find a decent meeting place and have catered events. You know, like real adults.
Jeffrey Legros (fisheries), Joe Rogers (GIS), me, Jeff, Piotr, Raquel and Elena Listo
The next day, we traveled to Amherst and checked out Rushing Rivers which is run by Piotr Parasiewicz. Piotr is both an academic and an engineer. A unique combination of practice and theory is clearly his modus operandi. He constantly checks on the state of rivers in Massachusetts and uses that data to better inform his river simulations. Yes, that’s right. He can simulate the effects of water flow in rivers and their effects on fish in that river using long-standing data. SimStream — yes, like the Sims only it’s for rivers. This is clearly the kind of data that should be available to donors when they’re looking to find out whether or not their dollars are working to properly engineer a river. And Rushing Rivers will also be one of the nonprofits you’ll see in our alpha release. And like Brandy Cruthird, Piotr Parasiewicz has no problem showing the Web all his outcomes and coming up with SROI numbers for each case and project.
Ferry from Bridgeport, CT to Port Jefferson, NY
Afterwards, we were exhausted from the constant driving and decided to take a brief break from the driving and hopped on the Bridgeport ferry to Long Island. However, we just couldn’t stop marveling over the nonprofits that we visited. These are young and hungry nonprofits but very smart ones. They know that showing their outcomes to the world isn’t bad. For them, it shows that there is a strong commitment to results. Both Ms. Cruthird and Mr. Parasiewicz are clearly tinkerers with their projects.
Both of them have retooled projects despite a high level of success. For Ms. Cruthird, it’s a reason to fix her programs. After all, she works with obese children in the 85th percentile or above for their weight. It’s not supposed to be easy to work with her population. For Mr. Parasiewicz, as in all science, even failures are a success as it allows him to refine his models. And this is why we exhort nonprofits to show their outcomes and use outcome measurements as part of their process, it is not embarrassing to show adverse outcomes to donors. Indeed, it’s a reason to improve your program to better serve your clients, whether they’re underserved children or fish in your local river.
