Category: Non-Profits

Knowing your unknowns: Part 2, organization and governance

17 December, 2009 (13:21) | Housing, MEEs, Non-Profits, Theory, ULI, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Halfway through our list of tips from Helen Dunlap presented at the San Francisco ULI fall meeting, we’ve made it through the real-estate-related points.  Now come those that make the MEE thrive or wither.
 
8. Trust your board/governance structure. They are your partner. Keep them informed. Encourage them [...]

Knowing your unknowns: Part 1, real estate

16 December, 2009 (10:18) | Housing, MEEs, Non-Profits, Theory, ULI, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
At the fall ULI meeting in San Francisco, the Affordable and Workforce Housing Council heard an interesting and wise presentation from Helen Dunlap. 
 

Sorry, Helen, it was the only picture I could find
 
Helen, whom I’ve known for a decade and a half, has had a peripatetic career.  Starting at the California Housing [...]

Donors as scaffolding: Part 2, the value of coaching

1 August, 2008 (09:12) | Innovations, MEEs, Non-Profits, Speculation, Theory | No comments

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s speculation on the incubation and development of successful mission entrepreneurial entities (MEEs) put forth the thesis that MEEs as businesses as mature when they can operate their business continuously, making money through each iteration of their mission activity. 
 
This makes the MEE itself – the machine that manufactures new mission [...]

Donors as scaffolding: Part 1, need for startup capital

31 July, 2008 (09:26) | Innovations, MEEs, Non-Profits, Speculation, Theory | No comments

What with AHI’s Gates Foundation grant, AHI will be spending a fair bit of time developing and expounding the theories and practice of how mission entrepreneurial entities (MEEs) make change with bottom-up pressure and pilot projects and schemes.  One element, for which I have a new sensitivity by virtue of our work as financial advisor [...]

Hermit crab housing: Part 3, fringe benefits and essential principles

11 July, 2008 (08:16) | Finance, Innovations, Non-Profits, Tenure, US News | No comments

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
 
Two days ago we introduced Builders Of Hope in Raleigh, North Carolina, which (as profiled in the Wall Street Journal) lifts up solid but economically obsolescent houses from their ample and now-too-valuable sites, and relocates them elsewhere on smaller, less valuable sites, along the way converting what [...]