What values did you learn?
Are there ways you would like to help the next generation of students?
Your questions move to the next leveclass="underline" how can you work together? They seek genuine engagement, and Osborne insists that engagement is the key to philanthropy. She cited a Bank of America study of wealthy people who were philanthropic. The more they were involved in an initiative, the more they gave to it. If their children were involved, they gave even more.
Connect passion to mission and you can generate excitement and meaningful involvement.
“Now I’m excited about the outcome and I start seeing myself as a donor,” Osborne instructed me. “And [it’s] not just my money, but my interests, my intellectual capital, my human capital, my network capital, and how I might leverage all of those things to help solve this problem together with you, in partnership with you. We’re asking for so much more than money.” You have defined and are pursuing a common goal.
Change the World
Once you have established the mission and concluded that your goals coincide, you can start thinking about the next step: actually doing something.
What will your partnership look like?
How far will you reach?
Who will do what?
What can you accomplish?
My friend Rick Leach has asked these questions his entire career, dealing with some of the most difficult challenges in the world. He helped lead child immunization efforts, antismoking campaigns, and programs to crack down on counterfeit drug trafficking. In 1997, he started the World Food Program USA, which supports the global World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian program to combat hunger.
The organization’s goal would make Karen Osborne proud for its boldness, clarity, and big question.
Imagine a world without hunger … what would it take?
Leach rallies support, raises money, and finds partners in business and government to support efforts to get desperately needed food to victims of drought, poverty, war, and natural disaster. For such a daunting and urgent job—there are more than 700 million people who face food insecurity in the world, including more than 60 million people displaced by war—Leach is one of the most optimistic guys I’ve ever meet. He often greets friends with a loud, “Sweetheart!” from half a room away. He wears a steady smile under his thick mustache. He believes passionately in humanity’s capacity for good even though he has stared into its darkest, most desolate places.
Leach has rallied some of the biggest companies, government agencies, NGOs, and hundreds of thousands of citizens to his cause. To attract people to social movements, he believes, you must engage their curiosity and connect passion with mission. He focuses on turning commitment into concrete action. “It’s about earnestly asking questions and learning to more fully hone the need in search of the opportunity to address the need,” he told me. Leach is an organizer.
His template for partnerships is built on four questions.
How do we define the problem?
What are the strategies to solving the problem?
What’s the goal?
How can we all play a role in achieving the goal?
Leach is especially interested in answers to that last question. That’s how he and his team know whom to ask for money, time, logistics, and support when a crisis erupts.
“It all gets back to ‘What’s the problem?’” Leach explained. “What do we need to address it? What’s your role?”
He offers the 2015 Ebola crisis as an example. When Ebola hit, food and nutrition quickly became one of the big problems as whole areas of some countries shut down. Business stopped. Leach turned to his longtime sponsor, UPS, knowing its capacity in logistics. With staging areas around the world, the company delivers 18 million packages every day. Leach asked if UPS would help distribute food, medical supplies, generators, and equipment. UPS agreed. The company provided invaluable logistical support, using its Cologne-based facility to assemble material, equipment, and relief supplies and fly them into West Africa for use by the humanitarian community. World Food Program distributed food to more than 3 million people in the year and a half after the Ebola outbreak.
Leach’s approach to mobilizing people and defining roles can be applied at virtually any level—whether you are trying to change the world or the town where you live. You may want to organize your friends at work and launch a high school mentoring program or engage your neighbors to give up a few weekends and clean the riverfront. Maybe you’d like to raise money for the agency that provides housing for the disabled. Get good people together and use Leach’s questions to define the challenge, consider strategies, and set roles.
Thousands of ordinary people—25,786 to be exact—contributed to his organization in 2015. Commitment like that is what inspires him to go to work each day and maintain his optimism.
“Hunger is a solvable problem,” he says in his completely confident way. “We can do this.”
Sharing Works
Discovering shared purpose can be about changing the world. Or it can be about changing your life and partnering with someone who shares your sense of adventure.
For Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, finding their shared values was easy; figuring out how to act on them was the harder part.
What would we really like to do?
Their story is well known. They met in seventh-grade gym class, where, by their own admission, they were the “slowest, fattest kids in the class.” In high school they became best buds. Jerry attended Oberlin College. Ben started out at Colgate, before dropping out. Jerry thought about medical school but went into pottery. Both liked to eat. They considered going into the bagel business but the equipment cost far more than they had, which was just about nothing. So they decided to make ice cream. And with that, Ben & Jerry’s was born.
With only a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making under their belts, they weren’t exactly in line for the Forbes 100. What they did have, however, were deeply shared values and goals. Pretty simple ones. In their book, Ben & Jerry’s Double-Dip, they wrote, “We wanted to have fun, we wanted to earn a living, and we wanted to give something back to the community.”
What values do we bring to the enterprise?
They opened their first store in Shelburne, Vermont, in 1978. By 1990 they had grown into an iconic brand known for quality products and a distinctive voice. They built the company around values. They sought ideas from employees through companywide surveys. They asked about the product, the workplace, and their causes.
How do we incorporate values into our work and activities?
Ben and Jerry translated their values into public actions. They launched a foundation to support community causes and devised a compensation model that initially capped the bosses’ pay at no more than five times the lowest employees’. They championed a string of public causes, emblazoned on every pint of ice cream: 1% for Peace (1988); Take a Stand for Children (1992); Rock the Vote (2004); GMO? Thanks, but NO (2013), to name a few. Though the company has changed since Ben and Jerry actually owned and ran the place, it has retained a good bit of its DNA. The company still asks its employees those survey questions.
If you want to launch an enterprise, go into partnership, or start a values-driven business, ask mission questions to test commitment and direction.
How does the idea reflect your values?
Will others find this worthy?
What’s the bumper sticker higher calling?