Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) discusses how nonprofits can strengthen their organizations and avoid scandals like the one that plagued Oxfam Great Britain. One big takeaway: Listen to team members.

• The phrase "value alignment" is used a lot in this piece, but that just means your org should make sure everyone's on the same page and that you're living up to your mission. Sounds easy enough, but it can be difficult in practice.

• One other thing we should learn from the Oxfam scandal: We need to take into account women's experiences.

As myriad nonprofit misconduct scandals make headlines, and Oxfam Great Britain — one of the world’s largest charities — seems to stagger from one disgrace to another, it is an important moment for the larger community of innovators and leaders working toward social change to reflect on our own organizations. To what degree are we building organizations in which our internal operations are in strict and careful alignment with our external mission? And to what degree do we invest time, human resources, care, and funding to comprehensively assure alignment?

Researcher Joanna Cea and I have been interviewing high-achieving community and organizational leaders across sectors to seek greater understanding of the internal processes behind their unparalleled impact. Our findings suggest that the way in which nonprofits work internally is powerfully linked to the quality and reach of their impact. Inspired by these learnings, and informed by my own experience and discussion with others, I’ve compiled five suggestions for ensuring greater internal alignment with external values to achieve high impact.

1. Seek out and retain people who challenge your way of “doing.”
2. Listen deeply to team members who belong to communities that are often marginalized.
3. Look out for unexamined privilege masked as work ethic.
4. Sync external messaging with the reality of internal practice.
5. Make values alignment habitual.

Read the full article about how to avoid a scandal like Oxfam's by Jess Rimington at Stanford Social Innovation Review