LEAP UPDATES
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes. 
--Peter Drucker
Welcome to the archive of monthly Leap Updates from Mario Morino and Lowell Weiss. The final Leap Update was published in March of 2022.
Virtual Works
In 2019, the Leap Ambassadors Community began planning a May 2021 in-person conference for its nearly 300 social-sector doers, thinkers, and funders. When that became impossible, they pivoted to a virtual convening and discovered that rich, personal interaction is feasible at a distance. In this post, we’ll share what the community learned about making the…
Momentum
We can’t help but start with a few words about the Chauvin case. The jury’s verdict doesn’t indicate we have true justice in America. As our colleague Janeen Comenote remarked, “True justice would include George Floyd still being alive.” It doesn’t even mean that we can feel true relief. As another colleague confided and then…
The Wisdom of WINS Leaders
We have a term for foundation professionals who previously ran nonprofits: WINS leaders. WINS stands for “Walked In Nonprofit Shoes.” We believe WINS leaders have a big and important role to play in helping peer funders understand how they can better set their grantees up for success. As a case in point, please take a…
What Funders and Surgeons Have in Common
It’s rare that a single piece of writing can profoundly alter your mindset. It happened to us in 2013 when the Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article “Slow Ideas,” gave us a novel way of thinking about the unsexy cause we had been struggling to advance for decades: encouraging grantmakers to dispense with conventional…
Ask Not
Joe Biden is no Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, so we were genuinely surprised that we felt so inspired by his Inaugural Address. At several moments, Biden set aside lofty oratory and stopped trying to emulate the muscular delivery of previous Presidents. In those quieter moments, we felt the true empathy and compassion Biden brings…
Quotes From Leaders Like You
“Managing to outcomes is not about simply counting things or gathering information. And it is not about satisfying funders. It is an internal effort aimed at figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so that the organization can provide the best possible services to its clients”
“You have to have undying passion for the population you’re serving. We can spend time patting ourselves on the back for the 85 percent of the kids who are doing really well in our program. But we need to be as concerned about the 15 percent who aren’t succeeding and learn how we can improve for them.”
“Through a process of self-reflection, our board members asked themselves fundamental questions: How can we improve? How can we make a greater impact?”
“Every day, you have to say, ’How can we do this more efficiently and more effectively?’ It’s in our DNA.”
“Any school in the country can do this. And it breaks my heart that we’re not [all] doing this!”
“Stories substituting for facts is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me!”
“You’re taking someone else’s money to get into somebody else’s life to try to make a difference. You better be showing you can make a difference!”