From Surviving to Thriving: A Collaborative Summit for Nonprofit Leaders
Capacity Building and Collaboration Process

Initial Situation—February 2005

The idea for offering this collaborative summit came from our creating and chairing the Nonprofit Roundtable at the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. We realized how much nonprofits valued the opportunity to share resources and learn from each others’ experience. We also saw members’ commitment to enabling their organizations to thrive rather than merely survive. It seemed valuable to offer a more extended opportunity to collaborate than a two-hour monthly meeting.

Inspiring Results' Response

We convened and facilitated this full-day collaborative summit for leaders in nonprofits to learn from each others’ successes in overcoming challenges and moving their agencies from surviving to thriving. Participants shared success stories, extracted best practices, and developed plans for implementing changes in their own organizations. The day included working through the AI 4-D cycle as follows:

• Participants conducted appreciative interviews to share highpoint stories about times when they’d successfully led an organization through a challenging time, and to envision a time in the future when their organization was thriving “beyond their wildest dreams.” These interviews created strong bonds between partners and generated tremendous energy for the rest of the day (Discovery phase).
• Interview partners joined together to create small groups where participants shared highlights of their interviews, identified best practices for moving from surviving to thriving, and developed a creative presentation to share with the whole group (Discovery phase).
• The whole group generated a map of all the best practices they’d heard in the creative presentations (Discovery phase).
• Participants generated topics they wanted to focus on for the rest of the day and divided into small groups working on one topic.
• In these small groups, they used a prepared worksheet to create an image of the future they most wanted (related to their topic) (Dream phase).
• In the same small groups, participants used prepared worksheets to identify the social architecture they would need to move toward their dream (Design phase) and to generate innovative strategies for implementation (Destiny phase).
• Each small group prepared a chart summarizing their work and the whole group exchanged ideas and suggestions.
• We had a formal closing and evaluation.

Results

Participants particularly valued two aspects of the day: it renewed their energy for the challenges they face in leading their organizations, and it gave them practical tools and strategies to apply to their own operations. Many people also commented on the value of the appreciative interviews in creating much deeper relationships than usual, and their resulting desire to listen more carefully and empathetically to their staffs. All participants said they would attend another summit and would recommend the summit to colleagues (presuming the topic was of interest to them).

In a phone survey about 3 months after the collaborative summit, participants indicated they were still referring frequently to their workbooks and using many of the tools they had learned. For example, one participant was excited with the results she’d gotten from using one particular tool in budget planning with her staff; another had gotten new publicity for her agency using ideas from the summit. And all of them indicated they were continuing to shift their focus to building on the strengths of their organizations, making their organizations more positive places to work.