Editor’s Note: Our foundation helped International Partners in Mission (IPM) create its “international immersion experience” program as a way to generate unrestricted revenue in order to sustain and expand its mission impact – a great example of a nonprofit being market-driven and “finding a need and filling it.” Our Managing Director, Bill Leamon, is taking a group of students from Notre Dame College to Nicaragua (the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere) with IPM next spring, and he recommended this book to me. I found the explanation of dependent economies (where most of the effort goes into goods for export rather than goods for local consumption) very enlightening, along with gaining a better understanding of how much our foreign policy towards Nicaragua (an American, William Walker, was even its President from 1856-57) has shaped the country’s governance, as well as contributed to its dismal impoverishment.

Editor’s Note: I never “got” the Grateful Dead as so many of my friends did. But since the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is opening a new exhibit to them this month, I’ll share my favorite of their many songs. Maybe it has more meaning but to me it’s just a light, good melody and harmony and fun lyrics.

The voice for creating better measurements continues to grow in the non-profit world. And that’s certainly a good thing. But my experience in business says much depends on what, and how much, you measure.

Editor’s Note: Our foundation only dreams of becoming as effective as Center for Community Self-Help, whose mission is “Creating and protecting ownership and economic opportunity for all.”

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"What gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done well, what gets rewarded gets repeated." John E. Jones

Editor’s Note: It’s hard to be reminded of the Holocaust, especially when I think I was born only seven years after it ended. It’s not like so many things–ancient history. And so I was glad when my daughter-in-law suggested that I read it. Hitler and Himmler and their “human experiment” are not as distant as we’d like to think.

Editor’s Note: I recently saw to my surprise that 71 year old Baez is still performing and very active in rights movements and so I dedicate this, one of her most famous early performances from 1963, as this month’s song.

I’ve written before about my favorite leadership book “On Becoming a Leader” by John Bennis because his primary point in the book is that we are always “becoming” leaders. The same holds true for focusing the foundation I began in 1997. We like to say that we are “twice as good as we were last year but only half as good as we could be next year.” Our first iteration was “serving the poor.” We formed an outreach center, stumbled into a near-downtown Cleveland neighborhood and started our work… rather clumsily, I might add. A few years into it we realized that Northeast Ohio had over 2,500 non-profit organizations. That told us we’d do better to help make existing organizations better instead of building another very average one.

Editor’s Note: Our foundation continuously seeks to narrow its focus, keeping a constant diligence to avoid the natural tendency towards “mission creep.” This case study demonstrates the benefit of being single-mindedly devoted to a focused mission by telling the story of Rural Development Institute. The organization has helped 400 million poor farmers around the world take ownership of some 270 million acres of land – all on a modest budget.