Coaching Practices and Prospects: The Flexible Leadership Awards Program in Context

Reviews trends in coaching in leadership development and examines how Flexible Leadership Awards program participants are using coaching and to what effect. Outlines elements of success, including clear, measurable goals linking leaders and organizations

An Experiment in Scaling Impact: Assessing the Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot

This report presents an assessment of the Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot. It was commissioned by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, founder and lead investor of the grantmaking initiative.Starting in 2000, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (Clark) adopted an investment approach to grantmaking that focused on providing growth capital to youth-serving organizations with demonstrated commitments to evaluation and measurable outcomes. For grantees, the strategy meant larger, longer-term, unrestricted investments, complemented by extensive access to consulting and technical assistance to strengthen their organizations.This approach helped Clark grantees across the portfolio increase the numbers of youth they served (for example, by 18 percent between 2005 and 2006) and achieve annual revenue gains (averaging 19 percent over the four years prior to the founding of GCAP). At the same time, the Foundation concluded that more capital would be required if its grantees and other promising youth-serving organizations were to realize their ultimate scale and sustainability potential

A Framework for Analyzing Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Policies and Strategies

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the sprawling topic of nonprofit governance and accountability. It distinguishes various accountability-generating mechanisms and actors, including the unit-level governing board; government policies aimed at shaping the behavior of governing boards; and a broader, natural demand for accountability, generated by an organizations many stakeholders. The aims of these accountability mechanisms and actors also vary, and include the prevention of theft and fraud; the efficient use of resources; the choice of socially valuable goals; and the effective performance of an organization in service of those goals.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.3. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

A Study of Montana Bentonite

Research has been undertaken both under Government and private auspices in an endeavor to develop uses for bentonite. Perhaps, the work done to date has had only in consideration the possible industrial importance of bentonite. No simple, quick methods for the determination of the properties or qualities of any particular bentonite have been developed. In an attempt to establish whether or not there is a means of making rapid simple determinations of the quality of Montana bentonitic clays, and in particular, with regard to the uses to which the clays may be suited. The problem also involves a study of Montana bentonite, and a comparison of it with the standard accepted bentonites and fullers earth on the market today

Nonprofit Capital: A Review of Problems and Strategies

This book was commissioned by two major foundations to review challenges and opportunities that non-profit organisations face in attempting to meet their need for financial capital. Based on interviews and a literature review, the paper presents a summary of strategies and practices in fields such as: reforming the non-profit capital market; reforming philanthropy; and expanding access to private capital markets

5-year Evaluation of the Flexible Leadership Awards

This report presents findings and analysis from an evaluation of the Flexible Leadership Awards ("FLA") program ("the Program"). As the Program's sponsor, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund ("the Fund") commissioned the evaluation both to inform its own work and to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about how foundations can best support their grantees' leadership development.The report has three sections:??An overview of the Fund's approach to learning and evaluation, which provides context for this report.??A review of grantees' progress, which assesses how the organizations fared in meeting the leadership development and mission advancing goals they had set at the outsetof the Program; and explores how FLA contributed to grantees' gains.??An account of how the Program worked, which presents a detailed description of key elements of the Program's design, as well as lessons learned during implementation that may benefit other funders considering investing in leadership development

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's Youth Development Fund: Results and Lessons from the First Ten Years

In 1999, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF) began an experiment that would ultimately reinvent its grantmaking. Starting with three grantees, it tested an approach for improving the life prospects of disadvantaged young people by investing heavily in the capacity of nonprofits to "scale up" programs of proven effectiveness. For the past 10 years, conducting more than 150 confidential interviews with leaders of more than 40 grantees, we have provided the Foundation ongoing feedback about the effects -- intended and unintended -- of its grantmaking. For this paper, we returned to our archive of interviews and examined the Foundation's own performance data to consider two questions:Have the Foundation's grantees moved the needle -- with greater scale and impact -- in improving the life prospects of vulnerable youth? What lessons can be drawn from EMCF's experiences -- positive and negative -- to inform others in the field?This paper has three parts: 1 An overview of the grantmaking strategy the Foundation adopted in 1999; 2 A summary of grantee progress in achieving the scale and impact that are the goals of EMCF's grants; and 3 Lessons and reflections on key aspects of the Foundation's approach

Family Psychoeducation in Clinical High Risk and First- Episode Psychosis

Seventy percent of those who will have an episode of psychosis will have done so by age 25. Data from clinical trials of intervention during the clinical high risk period of psychosis have determined that the mean age is in mid-adolescence, 16-18 years of age. For those reasons, early intervention inherently involves adolescents, and by extension their parents and other family members and supports. Regarding the type of intervention, it is relevant that the current empirically-derived standard of treatment for schizophrenia, as concluded by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research survey of the treatment outcome literature, includes family psychoeducation, supported employment, assertive community treatment and antipsychotic medication,; i.e., a combination of psychosocial and pharmacologic interventions. Combinations of all four of these treatments, as in Family-aided Assertive Community Treatment (FACT), achieve very low rates of relapse, substantial reductions of symptoms and remarkable functional outcomes, particularly in the domain of competitive employment. Furthermore, a large comparative study of outcomes in community settings found that psychoeducational multifamily groups were more effective than single-family psychoeducation specifically in the first episode and in high-risk-for relapse cases, suggesting that particular psychosocial treatments may be especially effective in early phases of illness

Centreless governance for the management of a global R&D process: Public-Private Partnerships and Plant-Genetic Resource Management

Public-private partnership is one new model of centreless or networked governance that has emerged in recent years. This article examines the development and use of partnerships in the management and funding of public pulse breeding programs. The paper evaluates the theory of innovation and knowledge management and uses case study and social network analysis to examine the nature and strength of the international public pulse breeding system and analyzes in detail the three major national public pulse breeding systems in Australia, the US and Canada. Australia appears to have the most developed system of public-private partnerships, centred on the Grains Research Development Corporation and, CLIMA. Canada lacks a centralized national body such as the GRDC, but possesses a regional system centred on a university research centre (the Crop Development Centre) and a hybrid organization (the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers). The US is remarkable for the lack of any significant public-private partnerships in public pulse breeding