[The following is an excerpt from a keynote I gave to the Southern Minnesota Nonprofit Summit.]
Fifteen years ago this week was when I arrived in Minnesota to become the Executive Director of The Playwrights’ Center. My wife and I were newly married. We drove 900 miles from Dallas to Minnesota with most our belongings in tow. I was very excited about taking this position. At 27, I would have a staff of 12, a budget of just under a million dollars, financial reserves in the bank, and a strong national reputation to build on. What I didn’t know, it was all a house of cards.
I remember feeling something was up during the interview process and after I took the job it became quickly apparent that the organization was not great shape. The first sign was how out of step the staff and board were with one another, and the second sign, was how disconnected the board was with the organization as a whole. Most troubling, was how the organization’s main participants, playwrights, universally felt the organization was past its prime.
After a week on the job, I was on an airplane going to a national conference and I had brought my calculator along. I was working through next year’s budget on some scratch paper. It might of have been some turbulence or a change in altitude, but I remember my eyes rolling up inside my head and falling against the window, thinking to myself: “What the hell have I done? Why did I take this job?” I was staring out the window at the clouds, but what I was really staring at was an organization that only had half the income needed to balance next years budget with all of its reserves spent on paying off the current year’s expenses.
Cutting half of your expenses is not trimming the fat, it’s not even just cutting into the bone, it’s all out amputation. Not to sound too graphic, but what followed was a blood bath. We cut programs, staff, anything and everything. After we were done (besides the fact that no one on staff would talk to me) we bought ourselves a little time, but we did not solve the intrinsic issue—we had become irrelevant.
Soon after I was having lunch with a board member, who had been on the board for about four years, and she asked me: “What is that we do?” After staring blankly at her, I launched into my spiel and quickly realized she wasn’t listening. She stopped me and said: “Why should I care?”
As you can imagine, this was a very dark moment for me, but also a very illuminating one.
A client of mine, whose organization was in a similar situation, once said to me: “We are not who we are.” This struck me because if you do not know who you are, then no one else knows who you are. Your organization lives on the edge of relevancy. It does not own a place in the community. It’s peripheral.
Overtime, I have come to learn that answering the question “who are we?” is not solved by just developing a well-worded mission statement. Knowing your purpose is important, but it is only an inward view. Leading healthy and impactful organizations requires both an inward and outward view of your work. Knowing “who are we?” is also about the value you choose to create, and more importantly, who you create this value for. The value you choose to create is ultimately what determines who you are in relationship with and allows you to shine a light on your place in the community.
Please take out a sheet of paper.
1. In the middle of the sheet of paper create a box large enough to write inside of it. Like this.
2. Now, in the middle of the box, write down the specific meaningful value your organization creates and delivers to the communities you serve. This is different than your mission. This is actually what gets delivered—as tangible as food for the hungry or intangible as food for the soul. Be specific as possible.
3. Now, at the top of the box describe the people who directly receive the value you have created and delivered. These are your participants or clients or audiences.
4. Identify the people who are investing in the value you create, again be as specific as possible. These could be foundations, individual donors, and government agencies.
5. The next step is a little more difficult. Identify the people who benefit from the value you create but not directly. This could be a neighbor living on a street where gang violence has declined due to your youth program.
6. Now, identify the people who create this value. This is you, your board and staff, and volunteers as well as partners you work with.
7. Finally, look at your work and answer the following questions:
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How relevant is the value you create to the people around the box?
If you change the value you create, how would the people around this box change? Who would join and who would go away?
Is there audience or constituency you always wanted a relationship with, what kind of change in value would you need to make in order to be relevant enough to attract them?
How can we accelerate pursuit of our mission by creating value that brings the people we need to succeed together?
Keeping an eye on the value you create, needs to be a strategic governance and operational priority. Not only to sustain your organizations, but to also take your work to new heights. This is not something you check in on every three years, it’s something you do in real time. You also must do it in ways that reaches out beyond your own notions and embraces multiple points of view.
Turkish author, Elif Shafak summed this up nicely in a TED Talk that she did a few years ago, she said: “We all live in a social and cultural circle… If we have no connection what so ever with the world’s beyond the ones we take for granted then we run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink, our hearts may dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long in our cultural cocoons.”
Inherent to the value we create for the communities we serve is keeping the impulse and inspiration to create alive. We do this by reaching both into and beyond the world “we take for granted” and engaging communities in a creative process.
This is how we saved the Playwrights’ Center from extinction. It didn’t happen overnight, it actually became an ongoing process, one that started with lots of listening that led to many ideas, that led to defining a strategy, that led to taking action, that led to a change in the value we created. In fact, over a six year period, we moved from being a “club house for playwrights” that was no longer relevant into a conduit for playwrights and other artists, playwrights and audiences, playwrights and theatres, playwrights and businesses, etc. to forge deep connections.
Through this rich collaboration with artists, funders, businesses, educators, neighborhood residents, etc.—we came alive. They helped us rediscover the meaning in our work and find our place in the community. And as soon as we did, we started again.
Here are a few principles I would like you to take a way from this talk:
1. Know the value you create. Work with board and staff members to define it.
2. Create an open invitation to explore. Reach beyond your inner circles and welcome others into the process.
3. Instigate and lead the inquiry. We are experts and we should take on the responsibility to ignite these conversations out in the communities we serve.
4. Be passionate not opinionated. Do not create a competition among ideas, welcome differing point of views as well as not lose sight in what you believe.
5. Own the Direction. Once you choose a course of action, take ownership of it and nurture it.
That board member who I had lunch with, got caught up in this rich creative collaboration we forged. She ended up leading our capital campaign to build a place where we could deliver all this value. She raised a lot of money for a cause that she truly believe in.
This post is part three of a three-part series on board/staff collaboration. Go here to read 
Creation In Common
Carlo Cuesta
