Vastly more people needing help, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in the slums of the world’s poorest cities. More climate crises, both slow-moving and abrupt. More military involvement in humanitarian work. More political crises of conscience for humanitarian organizations.

More of everything, really – except donors, as population growth stagnates in the wealthy countries that fund most of the world’s humanitarian efforts.

Such is the long-term forecast in Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners Guide to the Future. This was a project of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London.  It was commissioned by Catholic Relief Services, the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps and other leading NGOs in an attempt to identify trends that might help predict an otherwise unknowable future.

“We’re constantly focusing on the here and now, and delivering assistance today, and we very rarely look up from the workplace to see where we’re going,” says Peter Walker, director of Tufts’ Feinstein International Center and one of the creators of the Practitioners’ Guide.

Leaders of humanitarian organizations know “there’s huge change afoot, and they really do want to get a heads’ up,” Walker says. “The basic question people keep asking us is we want to know what it’s going to be like in 20 years’ time so we can plan for it.”

World-changing, one-off events of the future – the fateful next equivalent of 9/11 or the timing of the world’s next five global recessions – are of course unknowable, and unpredictable.

Instead, the Practitioners’ Guide to the Future stresses the impact of trends already underway, primarily in population growth and shifts, climate change, globalization, and evolving pressures and demands on humanitarian organizations.

Key demographic trends for the next 20 years and onward, according to the Practitioners’ Guide:

1. The developing world will experience unprecedented population growth, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
2. Unplanned growth on the fringes of the developing world’s cities will foster great clusters of populations in need.
3. Aging, stagnant or waning populations in the developed world mean wealthier governments and countries will have fewer resources to share for international humanitarian work.

For some of the world’s poorer countries, the future looks more than a little Malthusian, warns Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Washington, D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau, and author of the demographics section of the Practitioners’ Guide to the Future.
 
“Sub-Saharan Africa is going to be the demographic crisis area of the world for the next few decades,” Haub said. Infant mortality rates there have fallen far more sharply than fertility rates. As a result, absent an unforeseen change, “they’re going to have doubling and trebling of population,” Haub said.

Other predicted trends:

• Climate change will bring both sudden crises of weather and critical long-term degradation of land
• Reduced access to water and other resources will be the most complex result of climate change
• Globalization will aggravate inequalities of wealth within countries and among countries
• Military involvement in humanitarian work will increase
• Freedom of safe movement for humanitarian workers will decrease

For Walker, one take-away message from the look into the future is that humanitarian groups, increasingly tasked with keeping people alive in fragile or failed states, will face more and more challenges to their principles of independence and neutrality.

“The central message is you have to become much more nuanced to local environments,” Walker said. “You have to be programmed by context and not by standards… by evidence instead of anecdotes.”

And “a consequence of doing stuff locally is you have to understand the political consequence of your actions. It’s profoundly political just to service poverty so that people don’t die,” Walker said. “Some people say that lets a government off the hook. We have to truly understand the consequences.”

Ellen Knickmeyer is in the Master of Public Affairs/Mid-Career program at Harvard Kennedy School. She was formerly Bureau Chief for The Washington Post in Cairo and Baghdad, and West Africa Bureau Chief for The Associated Press.

In response to this blog’s March 7 invitation of a variety of views on Charity Navigator’s decision to change its rating system (to reflect accountability and outcomes measures in addition to financial metrics like overhead), George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz share their perspective.

George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz

Charity Navigator, the most popular online NGO watchdog agency, is moving ahead with plans to overhaul how it evaluates nonprofits, following  persistent criticism of its exclusive reliance on financial ratios like overhead to rate organizations.

Since websites like Charity Navigator influence billions of dollars in charitable giving annually, this will have a significant impact on the not-for profit sector in the United States. While Charity Navigator claims on its website that it is “shining lights on truly effective organizations,” the focus on overhead ratios provides little insight into the actual impact of organizations and creates incentives for nonprofits to misreport financial information rather than improve the effectiveness of their programs. 

Research published by the Urban Institute and the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University have shown how rating agencies create incentives for nonprofits to lower and hide overhead costs, which may actually reduce organizational effectiveness by starving organizations of the infrastructure they need to effectively deliver services.

In comes Ken Berger, the CEO of Charity Navigator, who has been listening attentively to his critics over the past two years. While he says financial measures will play a significant role in a revised ratings system, he also proposes to include measurements of actual outcomes as well as transparency and accountability.

Our own research at Syracuse University’s Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs confirms the need to shift away from financial measures. Based on interviews with more than 150 leaders of international nonprofits rated by Charity Navigator, we find that a majority of those leaders define effectiveness as demonstrating achievement of the goals they promised they would accomplish. In other words, effectiveness is outcome accountability.

This sounds like common sense, but if organizational effectiveness is outcome accountability, any meaningful ratings system used to evaluate nonprofits must somehow measure the extent to which organizations achieve their goals.

As Lowell, Trelstad, and Meehan put it, a more meaningful rating system would provide, in addition to financial data, a qualitative evaluation of an organization’s transparency and governance: (1) an assessment of program effectiveness; (2) and an evaluation of feedback mechanisms designed for donors and beneficiaries; and (3) such a rating system would also allow rated organizations to respond to an evaluation done by a rating agency. More generally, the popular discourse of nonprofit evaluation should move away from financial notions of organizational effectiveness and toward more substantive understandings of programmatic impact.

Charity Navigator is unquestionably heading in the right direction, but they may not be able to go far enough. A crucial piece currently missing is reliable information about outcomes provided by nonprofits themselves. This kind of information is currently hard to come by.

According to Ken Berger, fewer than 10 percent of nonprofits actually monitor whether they are achieving anything in a meaningful way. If nonprofits resent being held accountable to financial measures, then they need to step up and provide the information that the public really needs to know to make good giving decisions. Nonprofits need to evaluate their programs and credibly disclose the results in a simple and standardized format.

Nonprofit organizations need to take more responsibility for demonstrating results to stakeholders. If a nonprofit is really accomplishing something, it should be able to show it - and to the extent that it can show it, the nonprofit can be understood to be effective.

Kudos to Ken Berger for making a bold decision to move Charity Navigator in the right direction.

Now we just need the same boldness of vision among nonprofits.

Nonprofits need to implement serious program evaluations on a continuous basis and, like the evaluators they often criticize, to publically admit when they get it wrong, such as when a program fails to deliver the promised results. Donors also need to understand that achieving progress often requires experimentation. Part of finding out what works is identifying what doesn’t and innovative nonprofits shouldn’t be punished for attempting a new approach that doesn’t pan out - as long as they learn from their mistakes.

Only then will nonprofits be able to stop responding to irrelevant criticisms based on financial ratios and instead start educating stakeholders about what it really takes to achieve meaningful impact.

George E. Mitchell is a PhD candidate in political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Hans Peter Schmitz is associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School and Director for Research in the Transnational NGO Initiative at Syracuse University.

In response to this blog’s invitation of a variety of views on Charity Navigator’s decision to change its rating system (to reflect accountability and outcomes measures in addition to financial metrics like overhead),Steven Lawry provides his perspective on where this move might lead.

Charity Navigator is one of the best known and widely used charity rating services available in the US today.  Its current rating system is based on the simple notion that charities committing a greater portion of their budgets to program activities as opposed to fund-raising and administrative costs are likely to have greater impact than those that don’t. As such these charities are judged more deserving of donor support and rated accordingly.

On December 1, 2009, Charity Navigator’s CEO Ken Berger announced plans to expand Charity Navigator’s ratings system to include two additional measures of organizational performance:  accountability and outcomes. Is this cause for celebration?  Creation of a fair and meaningful ratings system for accountability strikes me as achievable and desirable.  But a simple system for rating outcomes is not, in my view, achievable.  I worry that Charity Navigator is about to embark on an endeavor that has the potential to over-simplify complex questions of outcome assessment.  Questions of financial management and accountability, though they present their own measurement and assessment difficulties, speak more directly to what can realistically be known about the prospects for a charity to be effective and successful.

Put simply, strong organizations do good work.  To insist that, as a condition of funding, a well-led and managed charity also show particular kinds of outcomes, often of inherently doubtful methodological foundation, suggests a lack of understanding of the complexity of the environments in which charities work and the very nature and purposes of charitable endeavor itself. 

Many good charities strive mightily to measure outcomes for their own management purposes.  But even charities engaged in what appear to be simple, direct and easily measured activities find it difficult to accurately assess impact.  And rarely do they claim exclusive credit for good outcomes.  

Let’s take the example of a charity working in a low-income country to reduce child malnutrition by delivering food and nutrition training to mothers with children under five-years of age (a particularly vulnerable age group.)  The charity may be well-managed and can demonstrate that a high proportion of their budget goes directly to program activities.  But improvements in child nutrition, to be fair, are the result of the work of many, including other charities, public agencies and families and communities themselves.  How do we isolate a single charity’s contribution from those of others?  Experienced managers don’t try, because they know it’s not possible and not a very good use of their time.

In many settings, the food distributed by the charity might not be paid for by private donations at all but by USAID or the UN World Food Program.  Here private donations augment a large core budget provided by government donors.  The charity would be required to work to USAID’s or WFP’s fairly rigorous and sometimes constraining guidelines.  The charity is principally a contractor with very few degrees of freedom to manage innovatively.  Any claims about its impact may be as much a reflection of management controls imposed by government donors than internally-generated policies and practices.

Getting a fine or even rough measure of the distinctive contribution of one charity isolated from the work of others is difficult, to say the least.  Many social scientists would argue that only randomized-control trials could possibly isolate the effects of the charity’s contribution from that of other influences.  These are expensive to carry out but may not offer better insight to a charity’s performance than its experienced manager can provide by monitoring changes in children’s weight and collecting feedback from various partners.  This is what well-run, accountable charities do routinely.  But in doing so, charitable managers know that improvements or setbacks are due only partially to their efforts.

The problem of attribution of impact becomes even more complicated as the number of variables affecting problems a charity addresses but which are beyond its direct influence increase.  I’ve spent time recently with the leaders of a charity working with young people at risk (aged 13-23) in a poor neighborhood in Boston.   The charity provides a multitude of services:  education, counseling, sports facilities, drug rehabilitation, hot lunches, job placement, referral services, and temporary refuge from abusive homes.  Individual kids drop in and out and back into the center’s programs as their personal needs and circumstances change.  The charity has worked in the area for 30 years.  The city manager and the local police chief will tell you that the presence of the charity explains, in their minds at least, why their community has the lowest level of youth encounters with the police of any community with comparable levels of income in Massachusetts. 

Yet this charity struggles mightily to generate the kind of quantitative indices demonstrating the impacts of its work, isolated somehow from the influences of schools, families, the job market and the police, that federal funding agencies increasingly insist upon.  Not only is this unfair; it belies an ignorance of the uncertain and hardly measurable nature of the many influences that shape and touch our lives, whatever our social or economic status. This is a morass that Charity Navigator should strive to avoid. Will it rely on the overly narrow federal government’s assessment of our Boston-based charity and other charities like it or will they check in with local police chiefs and city managers also?

My two examples above speak to the difficulties of assessing the impact of charities dedicated to direct delivery of services.  Many other nonprofit organizations don’t provide client services at all, but advocate for social change (or the status quo), promote human rights and better governance, and call for government policies and funding that benefit the communities they care about.   Donors give to these organizations because they share a commitment to their missions.  But donors usually understand that positive outcomes are uncertain, the road is long, and that change, if it comes, will be the result of many influences, including sometimes unexpected changes in the larger political and social environment.  Here, donors want to be assured that the charities they support are working as effectively as they possibly can.  But wise donors often rightly have modest expectations about near-term positive outcomes.

Outcomes assessment is a highly complicated, uncertain and increasingly contentious undertaking.   Charities work on difficult, complex and sometimes intractable problems.  Let’s not reduce their appetite or ambition for working on the really hard problems in deference to easier problems that are more susceptible to quick impact and simple measurement.  I would rather that Charity Navigator retain (and improve) its financial performance rating, add a measure for accountability, and drop any pretense that they can credibly score outcomes.  Well-run, transparent and accountable organizations are making the most of their talent and funding to bring about positive outcomes.  Charity Navigator will be doing service enough by drawing our attention to organizations that are well-run and well-governed.

Steven Lawry, Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, is currently based in Juba, Southern Sudan, where he heads a USAID-funded project assisting the Government of Southern Sudan to develop a new land policy.

For the past year or so, Charity Navigator (the major US charity rating agency which rates nonprofit organizations on a scale of zero to four stars) has been in the process of overhauling their rating system. After Ken Berger became CEO of Charity Navigator in 2008, he took to heart the criticism that the organization’s rating system did not provide a full and meaningful measure of the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. 

Charity Navigator’s rating system was heavily weighted toward financial measures like overhead and program-to-fundraising expenditures, and it provided no assessment of an organization’s accountability or effectiveness.  Especially when it came to nonprofit organizations working in international development and humanitarian relief, this rating system was seriously flawed.  However, NGOs realized how much private donors had come to be influenced by the four-star rating system.  So most NGOs worked hard - sometimes begrudgingly - to obtain a good rating.  NGOs often displayed Charity Navigator’s rating in prominent places on their marketing and fundraising material. 

Under Ken Berger’s leadership, Charity Navigator has undertaken a process by which this narrow rating system will be expanded to include measures that seek to provide an assessment of each nonprofit organizaiton’s accountability and transparency systems as well as their effectiveness in terms of program outcomes.  The changes underway are explained in this interesting podcast.

On the face of it, providing a fuller assessment of nonprofit organizations seems to be an unambiguously good thing.  However, evaluating the increasingly complex work of nonprofit organizations is no easy task.  The combination of the opportunity presented by the spirit of these changes - and the complexity of making such a new system work without creating perverse incentives - makes this a very interesting moment.

I would like to explore this issue from different perspectives on this blog and would welcome guest posts with a variety of opinions on the merits of Charity Navigator’s proposed approach and how a better system can be made to work effectively.  Please join the discussion!

Thinking of starting an NGO? Grappling with sustaining an NGO? A discussion with five fellow Kennedy School students who have started NGOs across countries explores lessons learned.

“Ask what you can do…” is the Harvard Kennedy School motto, and most of us at this school have chosen the path of public service after asking ourselves this soul-searching question at some stage in our personal or professional lives.

A handful of us have had the determination, gut and passion to start social initiatives ourselves while some of us have been deliberating the same path. On February 25, I had an opportunity to meet five such passionate Kennedy School students who have started NGOs in countries including India, Brazil, Uganda and Zimbabwe. These five students led the discussion at the NGOs & Development Study Group session on “Establishing and Sustaining an NGO: Successes, Dilemmas and Lessons Learned.”

The four NGOs were in different stages of maturity and had different missions which gave broader perspectives on the topic. Ramaswami Balasubramaniam, a physician who founded the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM) as a young medical student 25 years ago, was President and CEO of SVYM which now reaches nearly 5 million people through health, education and community development projects in Karnataka, India. By starting Forgotten Voices International, Ryan Keith helps church leaders in southern Africa to meet physical and spiritual needs of HIV/AIDS orphans through education, home-based care and skill development. Carolina Larriera started up and ran the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI) in Rio de Janeiro which did drug research & development to develop new treatments for neglected diseases. The young Paul Wang and Esther Hsu helped establish TamTam, an NGO that distributes free bednets to help prevent malaria in a cost-effective, evidence-based manner, and conducts operational research to improve the use of bednets worldwide.

So what can a soon-to-be NGO initiator learn from their experiences?

While insatiable passion and a clear mission are critical, there were four highlights that emerged from these diverse experiences:

• Effective internal management is a must. As a founder, you might end up delving into everything from making photo-copies to developing strategic relationships in addition to serving your beneficiaries.  Be prepared for that.
• Hiring the right people is vital. Investing time for this process is what all the speakers felt was a must, especially when what you require is a balance of technical skills and human skills. Having the right people is what will give continuity to your organization, in addition to scale.
• You will get better at managing donors with time. Almost all the panelists agreed that when you are starting up, the power imbalances with donors are quite high. On the bright side, as your organization expands, your work speaks for itself, leading to an equal partnership. After all, even the donors want to associate themselves with a credible organization!
• Relationships with other NGOs is essential for larger societal good. Other NGOs with similar missions might seem like competitors for the funding space. However, it is important to keep the passion alive, and develop strong partnerships to avoid duplication of services and promote collaboration to achieve similar goals.

The interactive discussion gave a real picture of what it takes to start and sustain an NGO. It was not only inspiring for those of us who have been thinking of starting NGOs to solve social problems, but also gave us a reality check.

Lakshmi Iyer is a first-year Masters in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Eric Dupree-Walker has led strategy and organizational development at Plan USA for two years, and coordinated strategic planning at CARE USA for the previous ten years.  She has also served in leadership roles for Habitat for Humanity as well as the Harvard Law School.

George Veth has worked in the corporate performance management field for sixteen years, advising Fortune 500 corporations on management processes and business intelligence tools to support, enhance, and measure the execution of corporate strategy.  He is currently pursuing his Mid-career Masters of Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School.

More About the Study Group

The Study Group on NGOs and Development meets biweekly to consider, discuss and debate issues related to emerging paradigms in development, evolving roles of NGOs, and specific management, leadership and governance challenges.  The study group brings together interested students, practitioners dealing with these questions in real time, and academics investigating similar questions.  The goal is to create a climate for genuine discussion and lively exchange, in which all participants come to the table with a commitment to share, listen and reflect.  The study group is a space for building relationships, exchanging ideas and connecting real-world challenges to scholarly study of NGOs and their role in development.  Guests will serve as resource people and catalysts of discussion.

To join the study group, contact Balu at ramaswami_balasubramaniam@hks10.harvard.edu .

Peter Eigen, Founder of Transparency International from Hauser Center at Harvard on Vimeo.

Interviewed by Balu Balasubramaniam, Mid-Career Fellow at the Hauser Center
for the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center

The session will be an open conversation with five Harvard Kennedy School students who have started up NGOs in countries including India, Brazil, Uganda and Zimbabwe. 

Ramaswami Balasubramaniam is a physician who founded the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM) as a young medical student and became its President and CEO.  Twenty five years later, SVYM implements some 60 projects in health, education and community development and reaches nearly 5 million people in the state of Karnataka.

Ryan Keith established Forgotten Voices International to help church leaders in southern Africa to meet the physical and spiritual needs of HIV/AIDS orphans in their communities.  Ryan serves as the President of the organization, which focuses on education, home-based care and skill development.  

Carolina Larriera started up and ran the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI) in Rio de Janeiro.  DNDI is a Swiss-registered NGO which is an offspring of Medicins San Frontieres; it is a nonprofit drug research & development organization focused on developing new treatments for neglected diseases.

Paul Wang and Esther Hsu helped establish TamTam, an NGO that distributes free bednets to help prevent malaria in a cost-effective, evidence-based manner, and conducts operational research to improve the use of bednets worldwide.

This will be a moderated session that will provide each study group attendee a chance to ask about or share their views on: the experience of starting up an NGO and what it takes to sustain different types of NGOs.  The study group will focus on discussion and exchange, rather than presentation.

On February 9, Professor L. David Brown joined the NGOs & Development study group, convened by the Hauser Center, where he led a discussion on “NGOs and the Puzzle of Legitimacy and Accountability”.

To tee up the discussion, he started by pointing out the recent failure of several supposed bastions of trustworthiness in our world.  Among others, he noted the controversial hanging chads in U.S. elections and the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals.  I would add the UN Oil for Food Programme as another well publicized example of abuse in the world of transnational institutions.  Each of these controversies has provoked increased skepticism of the trustworthiness of traditional public institutions (findings supported by Globescan surveys).  And NGOs, with their “do good” missions, have not escaped the scrutiny.  The question was then posed, “How do NGOs reestablish their place of legitimacy?  How do they reinforce a sterling standard of public accountability?”  These key questions were the focus of the study group discussion.

Without belaboring the point, a simple definition of both legitimacy and accountability were shared by Professor Brown.  He supplied the following basic definitions as a backdrop for the discussion.

Legitimacy - existence and activities recognized as justified and appropriate by wider publics
Accountability – answering for performance results to specific stakeholders

It was an interesting presentation and good questions were posed and discussed.  Several thoughts might serve as key takeaways for further online discussion.  First, NGOs need to answer to multiple constituencies: donors, Boards, customers, employees, partners, etc  Each of these stakeholders demands the organization’s consideration and a negotiated set of performance expectations.  Second, a key source of legitimacy comes from shared and upheld values.  In addition, civil society organizations get their energy from their stated values and mission.  Somehow, these standards need to become a source of accountability between NGOs and their constituents.  The idea of industry wide coalitions with common charters and shared accountability measures were highlighted by Professor Brown via a couple of case studies.  Third, and not discussed very much because our time ran short, performance measurement systems need to be put in place to bring transparency and dialogue to shared performance expectations.  If organizations want legitimacy, they need to maintain an evidence-based dialogue with their constituents.  The narrative is vital so that context remains intact to complement quantitative information.

It was a good group meeting but, honestly, it only scratched the surface of a topic that warrants a weeklong conference!  Feel free to join the dialogue by responding to this blog or by joining the next study group discussion on Thursday, February 25 at 4.00 pm.

George Veth is a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MPA) candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations hosted alumna Jo Luck HKSEE 1979, President of Heifer International, and her senior leadership team, at an event on February 4^th where they engaged with students and faculty on issues ranging from climate change, to agriculture, to nonprofit management.

Heifer International, which is dedicated to relieving global hunger and poverty through livestock and training, aims to empower communities by giving families a hand-up, and not just a hand-out. With special attention paid to gender, Heifer primarily focuses on women, who produce 70 percent of the food in the third world. Accompanying Luck was Vice President of Advocacy Constance Neely; Director of Gender Equity Advocacy Martha Hirpa; and Senior Director of Heifer Village Jim Rollings.

The group discussed the evolution of Heifer International and the scaling up of their impact, moving from a replication and growth model to impact through policy change.

“Until you affect the decision-makers of the world, you’re not going to make a significant difference, thus you must engage in advocacy,” emphasized Luck. “We don’t have the privilege of burying our heads in the sand. We know things that work, and it’s our responsibility to share that, and that’s why we’re pushing for more formalized advocacy. Our interest is to affect those decision-makers and to educate them with the realization that you can’t show results in a year, not in education nor in development.”

In a strategic set of partnerships formed at the Clinton Global Initiative last fall, Heifer is ramping up its analytic capabilities and harnessing the programs it already operates around the world to capture the wealth of knowledge within these systems.  In a global nonprofit such as Heifer International, Luck said balancing advocacy, fundraising and staying true to your core principles is no easy task.

“When you take a stand on an issue, you sometimes lose donors, but we’re about our mission and we’re not donor-driven,” she said.

A number of other issues were discussed by the group, including Heifer International’s response to a report issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2006 titled Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. Neely argued that the report failed to disaggregate data among different kinds of livestock in different parts of the world, and thus mischaracterizes the livestock industry at large as one damaging to the environment.  According to the FAO, livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.  The report also noted that the livestock sector’s potential contribution to solving environmental problems is equally large. 

With climate change in mind, and given that Heifer International’s entire enterprise is designed around the use of livestock and the donation of offspring from one family to another, such analysis requires a closer look.

“Agriculture is going to be one of the keys in both mitigation and adaption to the effects of climate change, and farmers and livestock keepers are going to help us lead the way towards solutions,” said Neely. “We’ve got a fight on our hands, and we really have to help people understand the benefits of agriculture.”

Responding to the FAO report, Heifer International, in collaboration with farmers and researchers, carried out a study on farming systems that combine livestock, agriculture, and better grazing practices. In a report issued in 2009, they identified farming systems that contributed to enhanced livelihoods and productivity, biodiversity, carbon sequestration and adaptation capacity.  Indeed, studies showed that such practices produced a net sequestration of carbon. 

When discussions moved to leadership and growth, Luck had no shortage of insight to share.  Her advice to nonprofit leaders and the watchdogs who measure their performance centered around two themes: risk and impact. Joining Heifer International with a budget of $7 million some 20 years ago, Luck transformed the organization to one with a budget of $130 million, although that has slightly declined as a consequence of the economic crisis.

According to Luck, one of the keys to the organization’s success was the way in which, in the early years, they reinvested monies raised from fundraising efforts back into fundraising itself, rather than into programmatic efforts. Understanding development as a process, Luck recognized that the organization’s local capacities needed to be built in order to successfully absorb a large injection of funding, and therefore decided to continue raising capital while local programs developed enough to effectively use more resources. With regard to measuring impact, Luck was eager to see watchdogs understand how to evaluate true impact, rather than use measures like overhead ratios as proxies for efficiency.

Rahim Kanani is a Research Associate at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University and a graduate student in religion, ethics and politics at Harvard Divinity School.