The Creative Activist

This post shall be the first of  a series on leadership, using ideas drawn from David Castro's book, Genership 1.0 . I'm reading it and deciding how to integrate Castro's thoughts on leadership into my thinking about creativity and problem solving in the nonprofit world. A 2011 report from the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance listed several competencies that survey respondents said nonprofit leaders would need to pay more attention to in the future: Building and leading teams Developing others Interpersonal skills Working as an effective team member In 2014, a new leadership competency might need to be cultivated as those challenges haven't completely gone away (and more on that in coming posts). The point is this: Castro talks about the need for a new form of leadership that fosters collective action rather than being about “leading” people to do something. Castro describes at length what genership is and how to do it. But he starts off by talking about le...

This is really a two-part post because I want to talk about yet another way to get fundraising ideas, a method that’s really too simple to need a whole post. You’ll need to spend some time evaluating and refining those ideas. You will almost always need to refine or modify the idea in some way before you can use it. A quick look may reveal that some ideas are illegal, ethically dubious, or not practical for some other reason. You may want to ignore the impractical ideas and look for something that seems more promising. Now, let’s get back to that simple fundraising idea generator. This technique takes only five or six minutes and is almost certain to produce something you can use. That “something” is probably an idea that can be refined rather than some fundraising event you could go and set up tomorrow. The technique is this: Simply decide to concentrate on a specific challenge for five minutes. You might not get anywhere by thinking about fundraising for example. Focus on somethi...