Having spent the week throwing grenades at that notion, today’s is the last argument I will make before wrapping up this subject tomorrow.

(If you have not read the posts leading up to this one, you can start at the beginning here.)

Accountability for “The Money”
Now we’re at the heart of the matter. If organizations are to be held accountable to their donors, the only logical thing they could be accountable for is “The Money.” And if you ask a room full of nonprofit board members what they are primarily accountable for, that is the response you will get from many, if not most of them. “The Money.”

We know this because we have asked board after board. And almost always, that is their first reply – “The Money” – as if “The Money” were some special deity deserving of capital letters and quotation marks.

And as you have probably guessed by now, that is just not true.

As we saw in yesterday’s post, the corporate model actually points away from nonprofit accountability for “The Money.” So, then where does the logic behind “Accountability for The Money” come from?

Perhaps it comes from the law. Aren’t community organizations LEGALLY accountable to donors and funders? Aren’t they LEGALLY accountable for the money?

Well, no. Legally, community organizations are accountable for upholding the law. That’s it.

Now in some cases, the laws they must uphold may include contract law. For example, if there is a contract between an organization and a donor / funder / government contracting office, the organization must legally uphold its end of that contract, just as it would be legally bound to uphold any contract. But in those cases, it is not because the other party is a donor, but because there is a contract involved.

And so, short of ensuring that money is not used for an illegal purpose, the “legal accountability for the money” argument doesn’t hold any more water than the corporate argument.

Well what about tax exemption? In exchange for their tax exemption, community organizations must be accountable for the money, right?

Sorry – wrong again. Organizations receive their tax exemption for one reason: to provide community benefit. The prime example of that is tax exempt hospitals in the U.S., who often find themselves scrambling to put a cash value to the benefit they provide to the community. The IRS wants to know that the community is receiving at least as much in “community benefit” as the hospital is saving by not paying taxes.

Again – not the money; Community Benefit.

But just because it is fun to do, let’s take the tax exemption argument one step further.

If the reason an organization would be accountable to its donors has anything to do with the tax exemption the organization enjoys, then it stands to reason that the reverse is true as well – that donors are accountable to the organization.

Why? Because the organization is not the only one getting a tax advantage; the donor will receive a tax deduction for his/her gifts. And depending on the net worth and sophistication of the donor, he/she may get tremendous personal tax advantages for giving a particular gift in a particular way. So perhaps we should just leave the “tax exemption” issue alone…

Which all combines to leave us here:

IF accountability for the money is not an issue of legal accountability or the tax code; and
IF corporate accountability actually proves that organizations are accountable primarily to the community, rather than primarily to donors; and
IF it is almost impossible to discern to whom an organization would owe its accountability for a government grant; and
IF we have to think hard to determine why a cash donor should be the object of accountability over an in-kind donor or volunteer; and
IF we have to think just as hard, if not harder, to determine cut-off donation levels for varying degrees of accountability – and again determine what exactly that means;
And if we cannot for the life of us figure out to whom an organization would be accountable if it was fully endowed and did not have to raise money through donations or grants…

Well then maybe it is time to put to rest the notion that our primary accountability is for the money, and that we are primarily accountable to our donors.

Perhaps it is time to start looking not at the issue of accountability for the means – the money – but for the end results: community change. And perhaps it is time to start considering what could be accomplished if boards held themselves first and foremost accountable to their communities, rather than to their donors.

Tune in tomorrow, when I will wrap up this thread, by considering what is possible when we start governing for our potential to do amazing things in our communities, and stop aiming our boards’ accountability myopically at dollars and donors.

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/05/15/debunking-%e2%80%9caccountability-to-donors%e2%80%9d-part-6/feed/ 0 http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/03/09/republicans-and-debt/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/03/09/republicans-and-debt/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:05:21 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/03/09/republicans-and-debt/ Ben Stein is no liberal. A speechwriter and attorney for Nixon and Ford, a devout believer in the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Stein writes a column in the Business Section of the NY Times as a Republican economist.

And that is why you will absolutely want to read this column, and send it to everyone you know.

Here is just a smidge of his amazing advice to John McCain re: tax cuts:

To put it even more starkly, the government – which is us – needs the money to keep old people alive, to pay for their dialysis, to build fighter jets and to pay our troops and pay interest on the debt. We can get it by indenturing our children, selling ourselves into peonage to foreigners, making ourselves a colony again, generating inflation – or we can have some integrity and levy taxes equal to what we spend.

Thank you, Mr. Stein, for sharing what no candidate will ever share – the Tax Cut Emperor has no clothes.

Part 1 of this Stop Sign addressed the first of these related questions: How can we develop a community-wide spirit of cooperation, rather than merely the window dressing of collaboration? And to encourage real cooperation, how can funders provide grants that don’t require competition?

This week, we will tackle Part 2 of that question. (To see other Stop Signs along the Road to Changing the World, just click here.)

STOP Sign: Competition and Collaboration (Part 2)
Are funders actually causing competition? And if so, how can funders provide funds in ways that do not encourage competition?

Picture this:
A funder wants to address a particular issue and create as much impact in the community as possible regarding that issue. The funder announces the following:

During this grant round, we have $150,000 to address X issue in our community. We will have another $150,000 next year, and another $150,000 the year after, for a total of $450,000 over 3 years.

If you are interested in addressing X issue, please attend a meeting on June 5. We will fund absolutely everyone who is interested in participating. Everyone. No kidding.

There is just one condition: You must all work together as a team, to comprehensively address the issue.

We will offer facilitation, conference space, and other types of support to assist this effort. And we will learn along with you, to be part of the solution.

Think that is outrageous? It happens. We have seen it. We have seen it create incredible results, faster than anyone thought possible.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Community Health Endowment did it with 3 area hospitals. One of those hospitals had applied for funding, to address an issue common in hospitals around the U.S. – use of their Emergency Room as primary care for folks with no other healthcare support. CHE knew that if they helped only one hospital fix its own ER problems, that solution would likely cause the other 2 local hospitals to absorb the overflow.

So CHE said, “We will fund you and support the effort with facilitation and other assistance. But we will only do so if the effort includes all 3 hospitals.”

The result? All 3 hospitals jointly created solutions. And within one year of instituting those solutions, there has been a 65% reduction in the number of non-emergency visits to those emergency rooms, and a 63% reduction in the costs related to those visits – a savings of more than $600,000 in one year. Best of all, 100% of all individuals who arrived at the hospital seeking non-emergency care now have a primary care provider. And 100% of those individuals now have prescription assistance. (For more info, check out CHE’s annual reports for 2005 and 2006.)

A win win win – for the hospitals, for the funder, but mostly for the patients, who can now receive more attentive care. And those results occurred in just the first year of the program!

Lincoln’s hospital scenario is not the only example. We have seen other instances of truly collaborative funding, where everyone who shows up gets funded. And we have even seen it in the seemingly proprietary area of capacity building. (Click here for a look at the subject of Shared Capacity Building from the provider perspective).

If funders are going to make collaboration a condition of funding, this is real collaboration. This is not just the mechanics of collaboration, but collaboration in spirit. It is collaboration that creates something stronger, and involves everyone. It is collaboration that builds trust and leads to other collaborations (which is exactly what is happening in Lincoln, BTW – those hospitals are now getting together on other projects, to address other issues – together!) And best of all, this is collaboration that will make our communities far better places to live.

Funders and Community Results
Part 1 of this post talked about the funder roundtables we host, facilitating funders in discussions about what it will take to create more significant impact in their communities. During those sessions, most of those funders walk into the room blaming the organizations they fund for the lack of more visionary, comprehensive impact in their communities.

By the end of those sessions, in part through the reasoning shared in these posts, they begin to see that blame doesn’t get us anywhere. And that funders can be creating significantly more impact, if they change the way they see things, and make small changes in the way they do their own work.

So what might be different if funders held themselves accountable for results in their communities? What might be different if funders dedicated themselves to learning along with the organizations they fund?

And what might be different if we ran over this Stop Sign of competitive funding once and for all, and dedicated ourselves to working together – all of us together, funders and providers side-by-side? What if instead of letting competitive funding stop us, we worked together to build an amazing community?

Click here for 11 Ways to Encourage Noncompetitive funding!

Post-SICKO America is feeling a combination of rage and despair and the desire to do something. While the story of events at a Texas movie theater is more dramatic than most, SICKO has clearly raised the decades-old battle cry of another movie: We are mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

As SICKO raises this issue to a fever pitch, my greatest fear is that we will try to address America’s healthcare woes with the same problem-solving approaches that have failed in the past. I fear our Healthcare Battle will become the next War on Drugs – loud, ineffective, and causing serious unintended consequences.

So what can be effective? Our only hope is to seize the opportunity to create a truly healthy nation, in a truly healthy world. That will take a different approach – a Vision-Based approach, aimed at creating the future we do want, rather than escaping the present we do not want.

The following is the beginning of a Vision-Based approach to building a healthy place to live. I hope you will add your thoughts, to turn this into a plan that we can all turn into action.

FIRST: What would it look like if we got exactly what we want?
A Vision-Based approach anchors the planning in the future we want to create, (rather than rooting our planning in what we do not like about today). What do we Americans want for our families and our communities (and our world) when it comes to health? The answer might look something like this:

We want to live in the healthiest place possible, where all our citizens are healthy, and our communities are healthy overall. We want to live in a place that does not see health as an absence of sickness, but as a positive, energetic force – a comprehensively healthy place to live, in all aspects of the word.

THEN: What conditions would lead to our achieving that level of health? Today’s realities are the result of decisions made and actions taken in the past. And the future will be comprised of the causes and effects we are creating right now.

We therefore have the opportunity to put into place conditions that are most likely to lead to comprehensive health. What conditions would create the ripple of cause & effect that will create a comprehensively healthy place to live?

Here are some of my own thoughts:

Pre-Condition #1- Healthcare for All
One pre-condition to building a healthy nation would be a healthy level of healthcare (not a minimum level, but a HEALTHY level), provided to every living human being, regardless of ability to pay. If we can readily understand that “publicly funded education for all” is a pre-condition to building a strong country, we should have no problem understanding that “publicly funded healthcare for all” leads to strength as well. And if we can put people in rockets and send them safely to the moon and back, we can figure out how to accomplish Healthcare for All.

Pre-Condition #2 – Healthcare for My Whole Body
Universal healthcare must apply to all my body parts, and not just some of those parts. Last I looked, my teeth were part of my body, as were my gums. Last I looked, my mind was part of my body. If both my dental health and my mental health clearly affect my overall health, then one of the conditions for having a healthy nation would be that all our various body parts be healthy, and not just some of those parts.

Pre-Condition #3 – Healthcare as a Sale at the Mall
This is America, where we are used to buying what we want. Therefore, another pre-condition to building a healthy nation would be that we realize we are currently paying a lot of money to be not-so-healthy. It might be a real bargain to pay a bit more in taxes and actually be healthy! When we add up what each of us currently pays for health insurance and co-pays and uncovered expenses and medications, I will bet that raising taxes for universal healthcare will save us money AND buy us more health. That’s almost better than a Buy-One-Get-One-Free sale!

Pre-Condition #4 – Broad Community Planning for REAL Community Health
Another pre-condition to building a comprehensively healthy nation would be broad community discussion of what it means to have a “healthy community.” That would mean community planning (and implementation of those plans) for creating healthy communities, as distinct from not sick communities. What’s the difference? A diabetes prevention program does not create a healthy community. It creates a not sick community. A healthy community is one that doesn’t need a diabetes prevention program! Creating community-wide definitions of what “healthy” means, and planning to create such health in our communities, would move us closer to that goal.

Pre-Condition #4a – Broad Community Planning as a Community Role
It is important to note that while some of this type of planning is being done in communities around the country, much of it is being done by local and regional hospitals. Yes, that is both noble and necessary on their parts. But it is also both unrealistic and unfair on the part of community leaders to dump responsibility for community health planning at the feet of hospitals, as if hospitals do not already have more than enough on their plates (like, for instance, running a hospital!). Therefore, another pre-condition to building healthy places to live is that our local, regional and state governments take a more proactive role in facilitating both the discussion and the work of building those comprehensively healthy places to live. And that each of us demands that at the voting booth.

Pre-Condition #5 – Everyone at the Table
An important pre-condition to #4 is that people who are not normally involved in such discussions be engaged and present. Building healthy communities, a healthy nation, a healthy world is not a “medical professionals only” activity. And while there are few communities that are actually tackling the broader vision of a comprehensively healthy community, there are even fewer that are inviting the widest possible cross-section of the community into those discussions. (Is the arts community about health? You betcha!)

Pre-Condition #6 – Individual Responsibility
Another pre-condition to building a healthy nation would be that individuals take better care of themselves. Ironically, some of the people who scream loudest about “personal responsibility” are overweight, smoke, and/or drink too much themselves. (Did someone say “Rush Limbaugh?”) So a big pre-condition to creating a healthy nation is that we become more realistic and less judgmental about the fact that most of us are lousy at taking care of ourselves.

Pre-Condition #6a – Individual Responsibility (again)
If personal responsibility is as serious a political issue as it tends to be in this ridiculously pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps nation, one pre-condition for creating a healthy nation would be the need to find what would inspire individuals to live healthy lifestyles. Just because the threat of illness and death is not enough incentive for most of us, doesn’t mean we cannot somehow be encouraged to do what is best for us. Perhaps, as has been suggested by Roger Hughes at his blog for St. Luke’s Health Initiatives, we need to structure financial incentives. Or perhaps we need to create DIS-incentives. But regardless of whether our incentives are financial, spiritual, or what-have-you, a precondition to our having a healthy nation would be that we stop judgmentally bemoaning the lack of personal responsibility, and instead find what will inspire each of us to take better care of ourselves.

Pre-Condition #7 – Government Responsibility
If we are each going to take care of ourselves, another pre-condition to building a comprehensively healthy nation would be that our government stop talking out both sides of its mouth. It is one thing for health insurance companies to penalize us for smoking. It is quite another to simultaneously use my tax dollars to subsidize the tobacco industry.

Pre-Condition #8 – Ban Drug Ads
The single step of banning advertising of pharmaceuticals could help reduce the cost of drugs immediately. That’s certainly another pre-condition to more comprehensive health.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. What other conditions would need to be in place, for our nation to be truly healthy, in all aspects of the word? Unless we consider all those conditions, and not merely pick and choose one or two, we will be destined to endure the endless task of sticking more and more fingers in the holes in the dam.

The Arguments
There are always arguments. In vision-based planning, those arguments are not considered ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ but instead become additional cause & effect conditions to be addressed on the road to reaching our goal.

Here are a few arguments that occur to me, that are not addressed in the conditions above.

Argument: Doctors would have less freedom to practice medicine / the government would be telling them what to do
Talk to doctors. Right now, they have zero freedom. They can only perform the tests the insurance companies approve of. In many cases, they are told how many patients they will see. Just to get through the paperwork of the various insurers (payors), they must staff their offices with an army of bookkeepers and other non-medical personnel. The government would have to work really really hard to give docs LESS freedom than they have now.

But that does bring up an important condition that must change if we are to create a truly healthy nation: Doctors would need to have real honest-to-goodness freedom to practice medicine, and incentives to keep us healthy.

Argument: Eliminating drug ads would reduce Americans’ ability to make an informed choice
Let’s not even address whether the argument is spurious – that somehow advertising equals informed choice. Let’s instead ask America: Which would you prefer?

1. Pay less for your medications, but spend time learning about the variety of drugs available or simply trust your doctor to prescribe what you need, or
2. Pay more for your medications, but have advertising so you THINK you know more about those drugs (but really you do not).

And so perhaps another pre-condition to creating a healthy nation is that people would be truly informed, and not simply by those who want us to buy something.

Argument: It will put the healthcare industry out of business
Ok, now we’re talking. But not to worry – this would not be the first time fixing something that was hazardously broken has put people out of business. Anyone who was around for the Savings and Loan debacle in the late 1980′s knows that can happen. Prior to 1986, government action (deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry) allowed S&L’s to invest in risky ventures such as speculative real estate. The result of that government action was that many individuals and corporations made a lot of money (Recognize a pattern re: healthcare?). Then in 1986, Reagan’s tax reform act took away many of the tax incentives that had motivated those investors. What resulted was a recession, a real estate crash, the “S&L Crisis.”

In the end, the nation recovered, and all those people are now making money at something else (if God has a sense of irony, they are now making money in healthcare!) And the end result was that something that never should have been permitted and that had caused harm (the dangerous aspects of the S&L deregulation) was reversed.

Perhaps, then, another pre-condition to creating a healthy nation is that we will have to determine what to do re: the economic bumps that will be created as we make those changes.

Next Steps
Using a vision-based approach, the next step is to find all the pre-conditions to THOSE pre-conditions, to work our way backwards to figure out what we need to do NOW, to make these changes reality. It is an inclusive process, rather than a narrowly focused process, as the more inclusive the work, the less likely we are to insert the Law of Unintended Consequences into the future we are creating.

The whole process, from the rosy future we want to create, working backwards to the things we need to do today to make those happen, is all based on cause and effect. It is the cause and effect that says, “We are creating the future anyway. Let’s create the future we want!”

Now It’s Your Turn
It is my profound wish that the discussion of Healthcare in America does not devolve into problem-solving, but focuses on establishing positive conditions that would lead to our becoming a nation of strong, healthy people. If we want a better world, we cannot satisfy ourselves with just one or two of those conditions being put into place. It will take all those conditions and then some if we are to create a comprehensively healthy place to live.

That is the difference between problem-solving approaches and a vision-based approach. Problem-solving approaches choose which holes in the dam to plug. Vision-based approaches aim at the bigger question: How do we keep the town dry?

So please, add to the list of conditions we will need to put in place if we are to build healthy communities filled with healthy people. From there, it should not be hard to turn all that into a plan for making this a truly healthy nation, on a comprehensively healthy planet.

First, of course, we saw SICKO, Michael Moore’s new movie about healthcare (or the lack thereof) in the U.S. One cannot leave the theater without the overwhelming sense that we are all so interconnected and interdependent, and that it is stupid stupid stupid to think otherwise.

One also cannot leave the theater without realizing that a strong nation and a strong world can only be built upon our collective strength. When a handful of individuals preys upon everyone else, we replace our world’s potential with spiraling, debilitating weakness.

These thoughts have been all the more poignant because of where Dimitri and I have been this weekend. We have been spending an extended weekend visiting two people we love. She is 50; her life mate and soulmate is considerably older. She is at the top of her profession, a powerhouse, a true life force. He is suffering from the rapid advance of Lewy Body dementia. Our friend is watching the man she adores deteriorate before her eyes.

Dimitri and I also adore him. We came to visit because we do not know how many more chances we will have to play with this incredibly playful man. We came because we want his wife, our dear friend, to know that we are just a few hours drive away if she needs us. And mostly, we came because we love them both.

And here is what we found when we arrived.

He needs treatment, but they are not sure how they will afford it. She wants to take the time she needs to be with him, to nurse him, but that cannot happen. She must work, not just to pay their regular bills, but to pay his medical bills. And when the dementia gets to the point where he will need more care than she can provide, it is likely they will have to sell the home he designed and furnished, each room a loving work of art – they will have to sell that home, to provide him with the care he will need to make his last months livable.

My friend is at the top of her professional game. She has health insurance. He is on Medicare. And they are worried about losing their home and their life.

I wish this were the only story we knew like this. I wish every American didn’t have a handful of such tales, just in each immediate family alone.

But there is hope. And the hope came for me after seeing another movie this weekend: Ocean’s Thirteen. As the Oceans movies all are, this is happy, funny, sweet. We laughed out loud, and left smiling.

And that is when it hit me. It wasn’t the heist or the con that made Ocean’s Thirteen so enjoyable. It wasn’t the over-the-top precision of the plan, or the comeuppance of the various bad guys.

It was the love. That’s why we left Ocean’s Thirteen so happy. It’s because they all look out for each other and are demonstrative in showing that they care about each other. Don Cheadle’s character writes letters of pure platonic love to the character played by Elliott Gould, and those letters heal him. Each and every one of characters shows real affection to the others in scene after scene. You know these tough guys love each other.

The bad guys were not overpowered simply by smarts; they were overpowered by smarts motivated by love.

Love made us drive across the desert in the middle of summer, to be there for our friends. Love makes us smile in the movies, and love makes us smile in real life.

We are all interconnected. We are all interdependent.

As we left the theater after Ocean’s Thirteen, I realized that was how Michael Moore had ended his own movie – talking about the fact that we do indeed all care about each other. We are a decent, caring, compassionate people. And we are certainly no less caring and compassionate than people in any other country, anywhere else in the world.

And then I saw the parallels so clearly. In the end, the gang in Ocean’s Thirteen did not just win because they were the good guys. The good guys won because the bad guys held the seeds of their own undoing – ego, greed, hubris.

So here are my recommendations for this U.S. holiday week:
Go see SICKO.
And go see Ocean’s Thirteen.
Then go see a friend you have not seen in a long time.

And when you get back to work, instead of thinking of others doing the same work as you as your “competition,” try instead to focus on the things that connect you to each other.

Because that interconnectedness is where our strength is.

And because strength builds upon strength.

And because when our strength is built upon our interconnectedness – that is where all our potential lies.

For other posts on healthcare, CLICK here.

In the U.S. alone, we have seen 40 years of “wars” on drugs, on poverty, on terror, on illegal immigration. But with all the dollars and time and effort we have spent trying to end this or that, the world is still filled with problems.

Around the globe, people have spent billions and trillions of dollars, trying once and for all to end many of our planet’s problems. Smart, caring people have dedicated their lives to figuring out every approach imaginable for ending the pain in our world. We have created prevention programs (the ultimate in problem-solving), and we have lately seen a whole slew of “blueprints to end” this or that – hunger, homelessness. And so we now have “blueprints” to end what the “wars” could not end. We are trying, desperately trying, working so hard, so long, so ceaselessly, to end the bad things that cause pain.

And despite our well-intentioned and well-thought-out efforts, we keep feeling like we are not getting anywhere.

And the reason we feel like we are not getting anywhere is because we are, in fact, not getting anywhere.

But then, we have not been aiming at getting anywhere. We have instead been setting our sights directly at our problems. And as happens when we give that much energy to anything, it grows. Yes, it grows.

We have aimed all our energy at our problems, and they are thriving under our attention.

So what is a caring citizen of the world to do?

Ending Something Bad vs. Beginning Something Incredible
The answer is, caring citizens, to stop aiming all our efforts at ending our problems. Seriously.

Instead of aiming all our attention and energy at what we DON’T want, let’s instead aim at building incredible, building amazing.

Let’s stop aiming our work at ending something bad, and let’s start aiming that work at building something good. Let’s aim at building an incredible place to live – an amazing community, an amazing world.

Think about it. We certainly cannot create an amazing place to live without addressing in some way the problems we have today. But unlike the “then what?” of problem-solving, aiming at amazing IS the “then what”!

A community that is compassionate, wise, healthy, vibrant – a community that nurtures artistic expression, that brings out the best in us rather than simply trying to suppress the worst in us.

A world full of people who react from our human potential for wisdom and compassion, before reacting from our animal instincts for survival.

No need to aim at ending anything at all. All we need to do is aim at beginning something incredible.

Start with your own organization’s planning. Are your plans reacting to your community’s increasing demands and needs, trying to end something bad? Or are they aiming at a great beginning – building an amazing place to live? If you plan for building an amazing community, you will address your community’s needs on the way to building “amazing.”

Are you creating a prevention program, aimed at preventing something bad – ending it once and for all – perhaps preventing / ending diabetes, heart disease, obesity? Or perhaps preventing / ending teen pregnancy, high school drop rates, gang violence? Or are you instead aiming at a great beginning – building a healthy community in all ways, a vibrant, resilient, nurturing place to live, where diabetes and heart disease and teen pregnancy and gang violence are addressed as one of many “to do” items on the road to building that healthy place to live?

Now look inside your organization. Are you reacting to internal problems, perhaps considering a Capacity Building initiative? Are you hoping you can get enough funding to address the area that happens to be on fire this year? Or are you aiming those plans at a great beginning – planning for overall health and strength for all your organization’s efforts? If you plan to make all your efforts healthy and strong in every way, you will address those problems on the way to building “amazing.”

And what about your board? Are you aiming your board development efforts at problem-solving, to finally put a stop to those nagging issues of recruitment and fundraising, succession planning and financial planning? Or are you aiming your board at a great beginning – tapping its immense potential to move forward not only the organization, but your mission and your vision for a better community / a better world? If you are encouraging and inspiring your board to its very highest potential, the board will address its problems along the way to building “amazing.”

And don’t get me started on world events! Are we aiming at ending a war, or are we aiming at the greatest beginning of all – building peace? Those two scenarios could not look more different. If we end the war on the way to building a peaceful region, a peaceful world – now that would be aiming at building “amazing” in every way we could dream of.

It all comes down to this question:

• Are we aiming at an ending or a beginning?
• Are we aiming all our energies and resources at ending something bad,
or at creating something incredible?

If you want your work to be inspired, if you want to encourage and inspire others to that work, and if you want to tap on the highest potential we all have to accomplish incredible things, my money is on aiming at beginning something incredible – aiming at building “amazing.”

But more importantly, if you want to address your community’s problems, once and for all, stop trying to solve those problems. Stop aiming all your energies at an ending. Start aiming instead at a beginning – the beginning of building an amazing, vibrant, energized, nurturing, caring and compassionate place to live.
We are creating the future, every minute of every day, whether we do so consciously or not. What amazing tomorrow will you begin building today?

You’ll find Case Studies for planning to create an amazing future for our world in The Pollyanna Principles

Anymore, news stories all seem to run into each other in my mind, all sporting the same theme: We accomplish what we focus on, what we hold ourselves accountable for.

We can focus on building a healthy, vibrant world, and all that would bring in the long term and the short term.

Or we can focus on making ourselves comfortable today, ignoring the fact that everything we do now is indeed creating the future, even as we ignore that fact!

Reading the newspaper is therefore never a quiet time in my house. No matter the issue, my musings all tend to circle back to the same thoughts: Why must we always weigh the future against the present as an either/or? And in that preposterous battle, why must the present always win?

For me, the issue never stays on global warming (or the war, or whichever topic is above the fold that day). Because we are spending most of our professional time these days in the fields of Healthcare and Education, usually that is where my thoughts end up.

Healthcare and Education: Problem-Solving Today or Creating the Future?
The same questions that haunt me as I read the newspaper also drive our work with leaders in both the Healthcare and Education arenas. Whose future are we creating? And how can we stop focusing solely on today’s issues, and begin to instead focus today’s efforts on the tomorrow we want to create for our communities?

As a species, wherever we live on this globe, humans tend to dismiss the fact that the present is merely the sum of all the causes and effects that have come before us, both manmade and natural. And from that, we dismiss the power that gives us to create the future. It is an immense power. If we can dream it, we can create it.

That is the difference between problem-solving approaches and approaches that aim at creating an incredible future. Problem-solving approaches assume that the best future we can aim for is “today minus our problems.” Approaches that aim at creating the future, however, assume that the best future we can aim for is the best future we can imagine.

And when it comes to looking at the future we want to create for our communities, what better places to focus that thinking than in Healthcare and Education?

Our work in these two arenas has been far more encouraging / exhilarating / exciting than the gloom and doom of the newspapers. That is because that work has moved away from problem-solving questions, and on towards the questions of the future these groups want to create.

Changing the Question Changes Everything
What would it look like if our communities were really healthy? What would a strong, vibrant, resilient, alive community look like? And how do we begin to create that future?

What would the world look like if our education system were 100% effective? If we were 100% successful at educating people, young and old, what future might that create? And how do we begin to create that future?

These are not the questions Healthcare and Education leaders are used to asking – or answering!

In Healthcare, one foundation we worked with realized they had not been funding healthcare at all – they had been funding “sick” care. And our ongoing conversations with hospital leaders bear this out. While the IRS’s emphasis on nonprofit hospitals living up to their Community Benefit missions has certainly struck a chord, few hospitals are asking questions beyond the problem-solving “sick care” questions in their Community Benefit deliberations. And while many of those hospitals are seeing this as a great opportunity to develop large-scale prevention programs, even those prevention efforts are problem-solving in nature, rather than vision-reaching.

There is a vast difference between the question, “What might an effective diabetes prevention program look like?” and the question, “What would it take to create such a healthy community that we don’t have to consider a diabetes prevention program? What would such a community look like, and what might our role be in creating that?”

We find the same sorts of stories in the Education arena. We have stopped being stunned in our conversations with education leaders – stunned at their answers when we ask, “What would success look like?”

The answers we repeatedly receive have nothing to do with the world, the community, the students – the real end result for successful education efforts. The answers instead relate to increased attendance, decreased drop-out rates, increased funding. Colleges tell us success equals enrollment, the quality of students they are able to attract. Me me me. Success is about our school, our enrollment, our status.

YET, with both Healthcare groups and Education groups, when we open up the discussion to, “What is our highest potential? And how can we reach for that?” it is amazing how the conversation changes. The room lights up. The energy is palpable, because those questions are at the heart of why we all got into this work in the first place!

Healthy communities, where everyone is participating actively in their own well-being, and all the infrastructure to support that.

Bright, curious, capable communities, where students are excited about learning, not just while they are in school, but engaged in learning after they graduate, becoming lifelong learners and teachers and leaders.

Through these conversations, people start talking about all the “non-health” and “non education” factors that indeed contribute to both Health and Education – topics they typically don’t have time to discuss when they are narrowly focusing on today’s bottom line issues. They talk about all the contributing factors; they talk about the reality of cause and effect, and how perhaps we can influence some of those causes, to aim at the future we want to create for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

What these Healthcare and Education groups quickly realize is that aiming at creating the future does not in any way limit their ability to do today’s work in a conscious, practical, effective and yes, even efficient way – quite the contrary. What they find instead is that a larger, more visionary context actually enhances the effectiveness of today’s work! They see that it is, in fact, infinitely practical to put today’s work in the context of that bigger future we are all part of, and that yes, it is also infinitely impractical to do that work in any other way.

So when I read about the report from the UN Panel on Climate Change, and I see that the Bush administration is asking us to focus NOT on the future we are creating, but on the micro-focus of today’s economy, I come back to the watchword that is at the very top of this blog page: We are creating the future, every day, whether we do so consciously or not.

How silly we are to think we can ignore the future we are creating for our heirs. How self-centered we are, when we are shown two paths, and we deliberately choose the one that makes me ok at the expense of my children and their children.

But more to the point, how depressing. Creating a brilliant, healthy, inquisitive, compassionate, resilient, vibrant world is entirely possible, simply because it is not impossible. How very sad and frustrated and scared we must be to choose to do anything but that!

“Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” I never much cared for Led Zeppelin, but the answer is right there. And we get to make that choice every minute of every day.

What future are you creating right now? Which path will you choose?