Giving Compass' Take:

• Andrew Wolk, writing for Medium, reflects on the impact of Root Cause, a project in collaboration with the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. 

• Wolk mentions that while the project is helping individuals, he is unsure if it is contributing to a broader population and systemic change. How can donors help fill gaps for smaller organizations to make large-scale impact? 

• Read more about how nonprofit professionals can participate in the "nonprofit game".

Back in 2011, Root Cause — the organization I founded, began a major project with the Campaign for Black Male Achievement (CBMA). If you’re not familiar, CBMA is the only national membership network solely committed to improving the life outcomes of Black men and boys, a systemic challenge that I hope all of us can agree deserves continuous attention if we are to see sustained results.

Part of that work involved building a “Life Outcomes Dashboard” that could be used to communicate and compare life outcomes in cities across the country across several common indicators such as reading proficiency and high school graduation rates. It was a useful tool with which to paint a picture of the current state of things. It also made me begin to see things differently.

Sure, I was confident we were genuinely helping the organizations with which we worked to build their capacity to effect change, and I knew there was no question that our projects contributed to making positive changes in the lives of individuals — but what about moving the dial in the aggregate? How could we create population-level change?

As I began to wrestle with this question, I found myself wondering about how I had spent my time leading Root Cause over all those years. If your work is anything like mine, this description will ring true. Sometimes I felt as though I was running on a hamster wheel.

I began to feel more and more as if our work was simply adding bricks in the wall of what might be called the “nonprofit industrial complex.” This compelled me to take a step back, to take some time to reimagine Root Cause and our ultimate purpose.

Read the full article about nonprofit organizations by Andrew Wolk at Medium.