Mission

When it comes to social sector organizations, everything starts with mission. Because nonprofits are by definition mission driven, it is essential that they have a mission that is clear and tightly focused. This mission must be conveyed in a concise statement that is easy to remember and understand, and that can serve as a guide to all major decisions the organization makes. By contrast, the leaders of a typical corporation can assert that its purpose is to “maximize shareholder value.” From that core purpose, any stakeholder can infer how the corporation’s performance will be measured and how its leaders will frame strategic decisions and trade-offs.³ Lacking this inherent clarity of purpose and fully aligned stakeholders, nonprofits need a clear and focused mission statement to guide decision-making and weigh inevitable trade-offs.

Consider the example of Last Mile Health (LMH), which we at King Philanthropies have funded since 2018. It was cofounded in 2007 by Raj Panjabi, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, together with a group of Liberian civil war survivors and American health workers who wanted to bring primary health-care services to remote communities in Liberia. Despite their best intentions, considerable skills, and the great need for their services, they found it hard to find a focused mission. As Panjabi told me in a 2016 interview:

During our first five years, we faced our fair share of failures. It took our team time to hone our impact model. Our early mission statement was “Advance health care and the fundamental rights of the poor,” which was far too broad and unfocused. We eventually refined our mission considerably, evolving it to a statement that is much more targeted: “Save lives in the world’s most remote communities.” This led Last Mile Health to our focus on building networks of community health workers, which are a most critical lever in saving lives in the world’s most remote communities.⁴

Strategy

Mission is achieved through strategy—which is simply a planned set of actions that are designed to achieve a given objective. In Engine of Impact’s chapter on strategy, we provide useful tools, frameworks, and examples as a guide for ensuring that an organization’s overall strategy is sound, including Oster’s six forces model, which enables analysis of a nonprofit’s strategic position within the landscape in which it “competes.”⁵

Both mission and strategy should embody and reflect a nonprofit’s core competency, but this is overlooked far too frequently in the social sector. In a seminal 1990 Harvard Business Review article, C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel put forward the insightful, powerful, and simple argument that an organization’s strategy must be built on its distinctive skills. In practice, this means that nonprofit leaders must regularly ask, “Does our organization have the core competency (or skill) required to achieve its mission?”⁶

Once LMH established a focused mission, Panjabi and his colleagues worked hard to adhere to it. To be sure, the courage of their conviction was sometimes tested. When the Ebola virus broke out in Liberia in 2014, for example, they found themselves facing existential questions about how to respond meaningfully to the crisis while also staying true to their mission and core competencies. This challenge came to a head when LMH was offered the opportunity to pursue a multimillion-dollar grant to build treatment centers to help stop the outbreak. It was a vital undertaking that would help many people. But, said Panjabi, “[H]ad we said yes, we could have hurt instead of helped, because building treatment centers for Ebola was not a core competency of our organization. If we had taken this on, we would have been managing projects that others could have done much better. Instead, we stayed disciplined and committed to our core competencies.”⁷ Last Mile Health thus resisted the temptation of substantial funding that would have led to mission creep and instead focused on building a network of community health workers who could help identify patients at risk for Ebola while continuing to provide access to primary health services. In this way, it continued to leverage its core competencies while still helping to halt the spread of the deadly virus.

Landesa, another King Philanthropies grantee, faced a similar situation in the late 1990s. Its mission clearly states that it “champions and works to secure land rights for millions of the world’s poorest, mostly rural, women and men to provide opportunity and promote social justice.”⁸ But, in 1998, it had the opportunity to undertake a major urban land rights project in the former Soviet Union, where it was already working under a grant that would soon expire. Accepting the project would have provided a reliable new funding source and allowed the organization to keep using its hard-earned expertise in Russian land law. The problem was that the project did not focus on the “mostly rural” population that Landesa had explicitly been established to serve and with which it had deep expertise. “In the end, we turned down the urban opportunity because we felt that it was outside of our mission,” said Tim Hanstad, who was then Landesa’s executive director, “And we felt very strongly that on principle we shouldn’t chase after funding that was not mission-focused.”⁹

Impact Evaluation

High-performing social sector leaders understand that it is essential to measure the impact of their chosen intervention; only in this way can they know whether they are indeed successfully pursuing their organization’s mission with a strategy that works. Although there are numerous methods for conducting rigorous impact evaluation, many otherwise strong social sector leaders fail to pursue them.

Pratham CEO Rukmini Banerji is one social sector leader who does not make this mistake. Pratham, a King Philanthropies grantee—which was founded in 1994 in Mumbai, India, with the mission “Every Child in School and Learning Well”—develops all its programs on the basis of innovation and rigorous evaluation. As a result, it has successfully reconfigured teaching methodologies, challenged traditional learning mechanisms, and delivered substantive and measurable results that directly benefit children in twenty-one of India’s twenty-nine states. Its model currently helps shape the education of more than sixty million schoolchildren across India. For more than fifteen years, Pratham has worked with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to design and execute randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to determine whether its high-quality, low-cost, replicable interventions are achieving their intended outcomes. The data provided by J-PAL studies has helped Pratham refine programs to improve outcomes, and this evidence base has fueled Pratham’s ability to scale and influence the Indian government’s approach to educational programming and social policy.

Funding

Funding provides essential fuel to any nonprofit and is critical to the smooth functioning of its engine of impact. Ironically, leaders and board members of nonprofits often put more time and effort into financial matters than their counterparts in business do. Indeed, many spend half their working hours—or more—on fundraising efforts. While many nonprofit leaders have a hard time with fundraising, some charismatic individuals excel at it. Success with fundraising often lies in the recognition that nonprofits have to spend money to raise money, which typically means hiring experienced fundraising and development staff. In any event, every outstanding nonprofit leader must be committed to fundraising, generally through earned income, donations, or a combination thereof.

Earned income is not an option for all nonprofits, but for those able to monetize some aspect of their operations—such as program content, goods produced by participants, or data—it can be an excellent source of funding. In addition, it can often directly serve the mission of an organization. BRAC, a global nongovernmental organization that is another high-performing grantee of King Philanthropies, funds much of its antipoverty work in Bangladesh through earned revenue. In 2018, 79 percent of its income came from its microfinance activities and social enterprises.¹⁰ Both these efforts are key parts of its impact model, helping people become self-sufficient even as they generate revenue for the organization—with mission-aligned impact always in the driver’s seat. Importantly, some BRAC enterprises cover their own costs, while others generate net income to support other BRAC projects; 15 percent of profits from its microfinance arm, for example, are contributed to its core budget.¹¹ Another King Philanthropies grantee, One Acre Fund, has a similar funding structure. Earned revenue from farmers makes up nearly three-quarters of its total income, and this reliance on paying clients ensures that the organization remains keenly attuned to their needs.

CAMFED, a King Philanthropies grantee that provides educational opportunities to girls in Africa, stands out for the creative way that its founders—Ann Cotton, Lucy Lake, and Angeline Murimirwa—approach funding their organization. They have fostered a loyal and successful alumnae network that has effectively created a virtuous cycle of philanthropy to support its mission. On average, every girl who receives a CAMFED bursary goes on to financially support (and mentor) three other girls. At King Philanthropies, we look for organizations with models that are financially sustainable over time, and CAMFED exemplifies one that I call “pay-it-forward scaling.”¹² The success of CAMFED demonstrates what I hope will become a future trend: What if we assessed nonprofits not only by their impact on beneficiaries but also by the extent to which those beneficiaries later become donors and leaders who multiply an organization’s impact through direct engagement?

Organization and Talent

Money is important to the success of a social sector organization, but people are even more important. That is why outstanding social sector leaders understand that talent is absolutely critical to the organization’s success and implement tightly managed talent processes that will attract and retain the best people. As Jim Collins wrote in his book Good to Great and the Social Sectors, “Those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think first about ‘who’ and then about what.”¹³

Pratham is an organization that gets the right people on the bus and keeps them there. It also excels at looking inside the bus to see if it might seat its people in different ways. Each year, Pratham produces the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), an essential document that provides reliable estimates of children’s learning outcomes in every Indian state and rural district. Its findings are used to propel action and create demand for better education services at the ground level. Producing ASER is a massive undertaking that entails surveying 600,000 children each year in 300,000 sampled households.

The ASER Centre, based in New Delhi, oversees thirty thousand volunteers who go door-to-door each year to conduct the survey—an approach that supports Pratham’s low-cost delivery model. Some of these volunteers are Pratham staff who work in other areas of the organization. As Banerji, the CEO, explained to me in a 2016 interview, one goal of starting ASER was to build capacity among Pratham staff “with respect to the nuts and bolts of measurement, evidence, and analysis.” She elaborated:

We realized that a time-based project like ASER teaches people a lot in a very short time.… ASER is an excellent short boot camp in which you either perform well or perish. The survey is run like a course in which participants acquire skills that are applicable in other parts of Pratham as well. In fact, the skill acquisition is so strong that … within Pratham the next generation of leaders often come from ASER.¹⁴

Friends of the Children, a nonprofit that has received funding from King Philanthropies through our Founders’ Projects grants, is another organization that gets its talent equation right. Friends of the Children empowers youth across the United States who face tremendous obstacles. In contrast to Pratham, it has adopted a model that favors paid professional staff over volunteers as a means for responding to the unique circumstances facing its beneficiaries (troubled youths who need a consistent long-term “friend” in their lives versus volunteers, who tend to come and go). The juxtaposition of these two models demonstrates that there is no strict formula but rather a need to develop a talent model to respond to unique programmatic needs and opportunities.

Also fundamental to the success of Friends of the Children is its recognition that a diverse workforce, an equitable workplace, and an inclusive culture enable a nonprofit to have maximum impact. According to CEO Terri Sorensen, 88 percent of the youths in its program identify as people of color (with 60 percent identifying as Black or African American, or as multiracial), and 68 percent of its program staff identify as people of color. Several years ago, the organization made a deliberate decision to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of its board. “It was incredibly important that we bring more diverse voices to the table who represent the youth we serve,” Sorensen told me.¹⁵ In 2020, following the tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Friends of the Children created a racial equity working group that includes nearly half its board members. It also created a staff-led racial equity working group and a new position (director of equity, diversity, and inclusion) to help make decisions, align chapters, and communicate with stakeholders on racial equity issues.

High-performing social sector leaders recognize that having the right talent onboard is necessary but not sufficient; how people are organized matters immensely. There is an emerging organizational model called “team of teams” that is demonstrating early success (see also Bill Meehan’s discussion of the concept in chapter 3 of this volume). Meehan and I discussed the team-of-teams model in Engine of Impact and in a subsequent article in Forbes;¹⁶ we believe that it has the potential to reinvent the way that nonprofits and foundations build and develop their organizations. This model emphasizes decentralized autonomy, meritocracy, and a sense of partnership. Teams come together around specific goals, with a single coordinating executive team at the center, and the composition of each team shifts as needed over time. The team-of-teams model reflects fundamental changes in the world—driven in part by technology, globalization, and workflows that are increasingly project based—on which nonprofits hope to have an impact.

One Acre Fund has had early success in piloting the team-of-teams model. Andrew Youn, its talented founder and CEO, reflected:

How we approach people is the most important thing behind our success so far. We create very high-autonomy teams.… We find the nerds who are really passionate, who are able to reason through new problems, and who have a lot of growth potential. They have the humility to want to grow. And then we put them on teams and give them as much autonomy as possible. I really want them to feel like they’re basically running their own NGO.¹⁷

One advantage of the team-of-teams model is that it provides terrific opportunities for professional development. Youn explained:

Team-of-teams is most effective when it is very much embedded with the hiring strategy. For example, if we are hiring a bunch of people externally, it can be hard to keep cohesion, but if we’re bringing people and helping them rise from the bottom and develop, then we inherently have the values, culture, vision, and cohesion that are very important to making the strategy effective.¹⁸

Board Governance

Strong board governance, though rare in practice, is essential for any nonprofit to truly excel. Invariably, a great nonprofit leader is guided by a great board. There tends to be a self-reinforcing process in which an organization’s leaders and its board strengthen each other and fuel high performance. In fact, in many of the best nonprofits, there is a healthy tension in which both the CEO and the board believe that they are “in charge.”

Engine of Impact contains an entire chapter with tips for good governance. Here, however, I hone in on my observation that strong nonprofit leaders know how to manage their boards and, most importantly, are able to extract maximum helpful guidance from them. The strongest nonprofit leaders work proactively to cultivate a board that is engaged, provocative, critical, and willing to ask hard questions. They shun the typical “rubber stamping yes board” and summon the courage to compose their board with people with hardheaded expertise who discuss, wrestle with, and provide guidance on the most important choices facing the organization—including bringing a willingness to push back and say “no” to plans that would cause mission creep or detour the organization from its core competencies. At King Philanthropies, I consider our best board meetings those that aren’t necessarily smooth but rather the ones in which the board engages in lively discussion of the most important strategic questions facing our organization, often beginning with disagreements and concluding with alignment that takes us to the next level. Similarly, J-PAL’s executive director, Iqbal Dhaliwal, reflects that J-PAL’s board members “challenge each other’s assumptions. Healthy respect for each other’s skills is balanced by a very open environment of questioning, very similar to an academic seminar.”¹⁹

Disciplined Goal Setting

The social sector is characterized by inspiring language and lofty visions. “We are going to end global poverty” is the sort of statement we hear far too often from social sector leaders speaking about their organizations—which typically have the capability to make, at best, a small difference in a few villages in a single region of one country. Social sector leaders default to such language because it ostensibly has the power to inspire and motivate. In the short run, this may be true, but in the long run, trumpeting overly ambitious goals is counterproductive because it can breed disillusionment and frustration if those goals are not achieved. Indeed, a pie-in-the-sky vision can create barriers to innovation and impact if not accompanied by the ability to set the right goals in the right way.

That explains why the highest-performing social sector leaders tend to view goal setting as a science—one that requires discipline and precision. However, while goal setting is pervasive in our culture, goal achievement is rare; just look at New Year’s resolutions, which fewer than 2 percent of those who set them manage to fulfill. That’s because, like “end global poverty,” these resolutions tend to be vague and amorphous, lacking specificity, urgency, and context: Lose weight! Exercise more! Be a better person! The right goal, by contrast, is one that focuses on improvement over time—on achieving what athletes call their “personal best”—rather than comparison with other people or organizations.

High-performing athletes cite two common themes in their specific approaches to goal setting. First, they rely on the incredible power of incremental goals—the power of focusing proactively and explicitly on short-term (even daily) objectives. Second, they ensure they will achieve these goals by setting reasonable expectations—an especially critical point for beginners or novices. So, while the ultimate goal may be an Olympic gold medal or an end to poverty in a particular place, the incremental goals are clear, measurable, and down-to-earth. High-performing people, be they athletes or social sector leaders, set goals that are:

• Specific. The more specific the goal, the more effective it will be as a mechanism to improve performance. A useful goal is binary in outcome, with no room for ambiguity—either it was achieved or it wasn’t.
• Feedback driven. Feedback is crucial to the goal-setting process. A goal that is theoretically measurable is better than a goal that is impossible to measure. An easily measurable goal that works with immediate or near-immediate feedback is even better. Cultivating a voracious appetite for feedback helps ensure that all existing feedback mechanisms are utilized and that better, more accurate mechanisms are developed when needed.
• Self-referential. A self-referential goal is one that depends on your own actions or those of your organization, and not on comparisons with others. “Control the controllables” is a common refrain in sports that also applies to nonathletic contexts. Indeed, the underlying concept forms the essence of the “serenity prayer” used in twelve-step programs.²¹ Controlling things that you can control is essential to effective goal setting.
• Chunkable. Even the best, most specific goals need to be broken down into digestible chunks. The more complex the task, the more important “proximal,” or near-term, goals become to maintaining motivation. In dynamic situations (read: almost everything in life), performance errors are often caused by an inadequate breakdown of a complex task into intermediate or short-term goals.

BRAC’s founder, the late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, used rigorous goal setting to transform BRAC into one of the largest, most effective nonprofits in the world. Born into a comfortable family in what is now Bangladesh, Abed held a plum job as head of finance for Shell Oil in 1970—the year that the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded hit his country and killed nearly half a million people. Struck by the suffering he saw, Abed loaded supplies onto a boat and went to help people on the country’s worst-hit offshore islands. What he saw forever changed his life, as he said in a 2014 interview conducted at Harvard Business School: “The scene was just horrendous—bodies strewn everywhere—humans, animals, everything. That shocked me to an extent that I felt that the kind of life I led hardly had any meaning in a kind of context in which these people lived—the fragility of life of poor people.”²² Abed immediately started organizing to help cyclone survivors. Just a short time later, the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out; hundreds of thousands of people died, and ten million refugees fled to India. When the war ended in December 1971, the refugees began returning to a newly independent Bangladesh that was in a shambles. Once again, Abed set out to help. Having already quit his job at Shell, he sold a small flat he owned in London and created BRAC. His goal was always large. “Everything we did in Bangladesh we did with one focus: getting poor people out of poverty because we feel that poverty is dehumanizing,” Abed told The Guardian in 2015.²³

But Abed and his colleagues always broke down the large goal of liberating people from poverty into specific, measurable chunks. In the aftermath of the war, for example, he targeted two hundred villages in one region and set a very clear, self-referential goal that he hoped donors would support. “I told them, the first year, we’ll just build homes, keep the children alive, if we can, by distributing high-protein food, and help the farmers till their land,” Abed recalled. In just nine months, BRAC built sixteen thousand homes. It then went on to help people in this same region with agriculture, water, sanitation, hygiene, and more, adopting an integrated approach to poverty alleviation that was always driven by feedback and measurement. When Abed retired from BRAC in 2019, executive director Asif Saleh wrote a tribute that noted his ability to set and achieve goals:

“Small is beautiful, large is essential”—that was a mantra, that became part of BRAC DNA. He set targets that required a lot of courage and … he delivered on all of them! From going to every single household in Bangladesh to teach mothers how to make oral rehydration saline, to covering half the country with latrines, to ensuring social protection for millions of ultra-poor, he was very clear in setting lofty targets in solving social problems. But there was also a clarity that he could convey in how to achieve those targets which made it look easier and much simpler than it actually was. He wanted to dream big and pushed everyone out of their comfort zone and such is his enigmatic personality that we all wanted to give our all to achieve those dreams.²⁴

Continuous Adjustment

Work in the social sector is relentless. The unmet needs that social sector organizations strive to address are tremendous and never-ending, while essential resources always fall short of meeting those needs. Success is so difficult to attain that when it does happen it can be hard to resist the temptation to sit back, rest on hard-earned laurels, and succumb to complacency. Nonprofit leaders also face the temptation to simply do more of the same because they assume that early success on a “proof of concept” initiative affirms their approach.

But truly extraordinary leaders never stop the process of continuous improvement. Indeed, they adjust fearlessly even after proven successes. They adhere to an ethos of never settling for “success,” much like top athletes who look beyond wins and losses and are neither fully satisfied by the chance to wear a championship ring nor deterred by watching their championship dream slip away. To these star performers, a given triumph or defeat is simply one step in a lifelong process of pushing toward their absolute limits. Being “great,” in their view, is never enough; for them, greatness lies not in achieving an end state but in the process of striving for more. This orientation leads people who are at the top of their game to keep adjusting their performance and to do so without fear that such changes will hinder their forward progress.

Two extraordinary nonprofits illustrate this mindset. CAMFED, as noted previously, enables educational opportunities that have demonstrably improved learning outcomes for more than four million girls in rural African communities. But leaders and alumnae of the organization were not satisfied with that remarkable level of impact. Recognizing that CAMFED’s ability to reach more girls would always be limited by its level of fundraising, alumnae came together to form a network that organically supports the CAMFED approach and spreads CAMFED values. Supported by CAMFED leadership, this initiative further “moves the needle” by turning beneficiaries into future leaders and donors. CAMFED’s commitment to continuous improvement has allowed it to pursue the “pay-it-forward scaling” model that I discussed earlier.

Similarly, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, leaders of J-PAL and recipients of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, could easily rest on their laurels and do “more of the same” extraordinary poverty alleviation work for which they were awarded the Nobel. Instead, they decided to leverage the prize by creating “J-PAL 2.0,” which led them to launch a bold initiative that focuses on climate change. This new initiative, called the King Climate Action Initiative and supported by King Philanthropies, seeks to address the damaging effects of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable, who will be the most severely and disproportionately affected. Even though the majority of J-PAL’s work to date has been in the nonclimate space, Duflo and Banerjee regard this as a very important growth area given that issues of poverty and climate change are increasingly interlinked.

A Well-Developed “Stress Muscle”

We all know that working in the social sector can be stressful. Many social sector workers spend their days providing emergency assistance to children suffering from acute malnutrition, helping those who have been displaced by fires, or addressing other social crises and natural disasters. Even those whose programmatic work isn’t oriented toward addressing crises, such as symphony orchestra members or providers of preventive health-care services, nonetheless face organizational challenges and other obstacles that cause stress.

Research that underscores the high stress levels in the sector has been appearing for years. A 2015 survey of nonprofit leaders in Philadelphia found that nearly 59 percent of the 231 executive directors surveyed felt “stressed,” “exhausted,” or “anxious and worried.”²⁵ In 2016, The Atlantic magazine ran an article (“The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee”) that cited pressure from funders to tighten budgets, cut costs, and generally “perform like businesses,” which led many nonprofit leaders to work ever-longer hours—and expect the same of their staffs—but without increased compensation.²⁶

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent economic challenges only increased the stress levels experienced by nonprofit leaders. As reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a spring 2020 survey conducted by La Piana Consulting found that nonprofits had lost significant revenue and faced unexpected expenses, causing more than half of them to expect to make cuts in compensation and staffing. Nonprofit leaders who responded to the survey acknowledged feeling guilt and stress as they struggled to grapple with pandemic conditions and economic contraction.²⁷

Even so, not all stress is bad stress. In recent years, researchers have demonstrated what elite athletes and other high-level performers have long known: acute stress is often the prelude to excellence.²⁸ In the right circumstances, being “keyed up” or “on edge” comes with a burst of energy and a keener ability to focus. Just like the rest of us, high-performing social sector leaders feel pressure and get nervous as they prepare for a big event or address a new crisis. But, unlike many of us, they have developed the ability to harness stress for their benefit. As the stakes get higher, true leaders use the pressure of the moment to summon their peak performance. They do so by treating stress, in effect, as another muscle that they can build up and then use. Findings from physiology and brain science demonstrate the beneficial effects of acute stress, and high-performing social sector leaders seem innately inclined to strengthen their “stress muscle.”²⁹

Sakena Yacoobi, founder of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), built an organization that—like Yacoobi herself—thrived amid wartime stress. I first met Yacoobi in 2009, when she received the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership, which I oversaw at the time. As she explained when I subsequently interviewed her in 2016, she became accustomed to hard work and pressure from an early age:

After completing twelfth grade in Afghanistan, I had the opportunity to go to university in the U.S. It was an extraordinary but difficult experience. My English was weak, which made the studies very challenging, and I had to do odd jobs at night to pay for my studies. Consequently, I could never sleep more than four hours per night. Many times I considered giving up. But my father taught me to never give up.³⁰

Yacoobi’s persistence enabled her to build a comfortable life in the United States as a professor, but in 1992 she left that life behind to help Afghan civil war refugees who had fled to Pakistan and were housed in camps. During this period, the Taliban rose to power and began implementing ruthless policies that, among many other things, almost entirely denied girls and women access to education. In 1995, Yacoobi founded AIL to help educate girls who were deprived of this basic right. “At any moment, the Taliban could come after me,” she recalled, “I knew I could be killed, and that they would torture me before they killed me.… But I continued, quite simply, because I believe in education. It had changed my own life. And I believe that education has the power to help change the lives of the people of Afghanistan.” To avoid being targeted, Yacoobi traveled constantly among AIL sites, first in Pakistan and later in Afghanistan. “No one could know my whereabouts, and fear was always there with me,” she said. “I had to summon courage on a daily basis. I did so by allowing my passion for the cause to prevail.”

Yacoobi’s stress muscle was so well developed that it arguably saved her life one day in 1992 when a group of nineteen gun-toting young men blocked the rutted country road on which she was being driven to an AIL center. Yacoobi’s driver asked the men what they wanted and they pointed to her, demanding that she exit the vehicle. Terrified though she was, Yacoobi activated the stress muscle she had built up over the years. She explained:

I knew that if I didn’t do what the young men asked, then my staff workers and driver could very well be killed. So I focused on my staff workers and driver and what they needed me to do. I got out of the car. I did not act like I was afraid, even though I was terrified. That is always very important. Never, ever act like you are afraid. As I stood in front of the men, I held on to the car door so that they wouldn’t see me shaking and I wouldn’t collapse. I looked them directly in the eye. I took deep breaths, which helped me to muster a strong voice so they wouldn’t hear my fear. And then I began to negotiate with them.³¹

The young men, it turned out, wanted an opportunity to study—just like the one enjoyed by girls who attended the nearby AIL center. Much as Yacoobi disagreed with their approach, she decided that she could not deny their request. So, after extricating herself from that terrifying encounter, she worked to obtain funding for a boys’ education center. The men who accosted her all went on to graduate from high school, and some even went to college. Yacoobi, for her part, continues to hone her “stress muscle” to this day.

Perseverance across Long Time Horizons

The timescale in the social sector tends to be incredibly long. Indeed, many people join the sector fueled by enthusiasm and are determined to make a difference through their contributions, only to find themselves dismayed by how long it takes to achieve deep and transformative impact. As Bill Gates is said to have observed, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year but underestimate what they can do in ten.” In the social sector, this problem is compounded by the fact that the journey toward impact is generally measured not in days, weeks, or even years but decades.

Consequently, the highest-performing social sector leaders demonstrate incredible perseverance. In an age when many people are drawn to quick fixes and instant gratification, these leaders remind us that the road to excellence is long and that it winds through lengthy stretches of trial and error, of mediocrity and failure. Extraordinary social sector leaders are in it for the long haul. Those who are young recognize the importance of surrounding themselves with experienced and wise colleagues who have learned the value of tenacity.

Roy Prosterman, whose work I first encountered when he received the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership in 2006, began his career in the 1960s as a lawyer for an elite Wall Street firm. Client work took him to Liberia (which then had no functioning currency, road system, or telephone service) and Puerto Rico for extended periods and gave him the opportunity to observe the impact of generational poverty and economic inequity. “This violated my sense of justice and fairness,” said Prosterman, “This just should not be.”³² After a few years, Prosterman left private practice to teach at the University of Washington Law School. One day in the mid-1960s, he came across a law review article that posited a radical approach to land reform in Latin America. This spurred him to write a critique in which he suggested a more equitable approach that involved buying land at a fair price and then redistributing it to the landless rural poor. His idea came to the attention of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Prosterman soon found himself doing fieldwork in South Vietnam to understand farmers’ plight and aspirations, based on which he formulated a land-to-the-tiller law (which was subsequently adopted) in the middle of the Vietnam War, with a million tenant-farmer families becoming owners of the land they tilled and rice production subsequently increasing by 30 percent.³³

This experience sparked a determination to do more. Prosterman went on to work with several other governments on land reform and eventually, with Hanstad, founded the nonprofit now called Landesa, with the aim of helping to secure land rights for the rural poor around the world. For many years, he worked out of his modest one-bedroom apartment near the University of Washington together with a small handful of staffers, many of them law students, who huddled at the desks that filled the living room; half the organization’s files were kept in the bathtub and the other half on the stove! The organization’s annual budget was under $200,000 for many years and did not surpass $1 million until two decades later. But Prosterman persisted, determined to promote social justice and help tenant farmers obtain property rights that would provide them with security and opportunity. Step by step, the organization grew and achieved its goals. By 2019, it had a budget of over $13 million and had helped reduce poverty, hunger, and conflict for more than 180 million families in more than fifty countries.³⁴ Through dogged tenacity over the course of more than five decades, Prosterman and his Landesa colleagues made a positive and enduring impact on some of the world’s most persistent challenges. Since 2017, funding from King Philanthropies has enabled Landesa to strengthen and secure land rights for more than 3 million people in Asia and Africa.

For another inspiring example of perseverance, I look to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and specifically to its cofounder Melinda Gates and its president of gender equality, Anita Zaidi, MD, who led a discussion in which I participated at a 2020 Giving Pledge session on gender equality. Both women have demonstrated remarkable perseverance in their personal leadership journeys and professional careers.

Gates noted in her book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World that as a lifelong Catholic—but one who firmly believes that giving women access to contraceptives improves lives—it was difficult for her to cosponsor and address an international summit on family planning in 2012. She nonetheless forced herself to overcome her reluctance, and the summit helped raise billions of dollars for family planning in low-income countries. After the conference, Gates went out to dinner with friends who told her that family planning was just the first step and urged her to do even more for women. At the time, she did not feel equal to that task. Indeed, she wanted instead to “quit” and let others take up the work—but she didn’t. As she explained in her book, “I suspect most of us, at one time or another, say ‘I quit.’ And we often find that ‘quitting’ is just a painful step on the way to a deeper commitment.”³⁵

Instead, Gates became increasingly focused on the importance of investing in women and in 2014 wrote an article for the journal Science called “Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development.”³⁶ By 2020, she had committed $1 billion to gender equality in the United States, well aware that the impact of this investment would be measured in years or decades. “We can expect to see change on behalf of women with measurable objectives and data over 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years,” said Gates.³⁷

Meanwhile, to support its gender equality efforts, the Gates Foundation had promoted Zaidi from her position as director of vaccine development to the executive leadership team. Zaidi, a medical doctor, studied at Aga Khan University, Duke, and Harvard, and in 2013 she became the first recipient of the $1 million Caplow Children’s Prize for her work with children in a poverty-stricken community in Karachi, Pakistan. Throughout her life, she has persevered by always focusing on the work. “For me it has always been about the work that needs to be done,” she said in a 2016 interview, “and then leading from that changing the way we think about a problem.”³⁸ Zaidi pushed herself through challenging periods by remaining relentlessly optimistic and taking the long view. “I always look for the good that can come out of things even when something really bad happens,” she said. “There can be opportunity in disaster and sometimes disaster is what it takes to change things.”³⁹

The social sector is a demanding environment—marked by inherent structural challenges, a chronic shortage of funding, and a never-ending surfeit of need—and it requires much of its leaders. Yet, the qualities of a high-performing social sector leader that I have elucidated here are, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, attainable by all of us. The process of pursuing big goals and achieving life-changing impact will never be easy, but all of us can benefit by learning from the best leaders in the sector and by striving to join their ranks.

FOR FURTHER READING

For a deeper dive into the chapter’s content, you can read the book that Bill Meehan and I coauthored in 2017, Engine of Impact: Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector (Stanford Business Books). Many of the example leaders and organizations featured in this chapter are discussed in greater depth on the King Philanthropies website, www.kingphilanthropies.org.