Q: What grantmaking principles did you learn at the Greater New Orleans Foundation that remained with you at Ford?

A: I learned to listen. When I came to Ford, I spent the first year listening to people in various communities around the country and the world. By listening, you learn to acknowledge the life experiences of all kinds of people and what
their core opportunities and challenges are. Grantmakers may have the resources, but not always the answers. It begins with listening.

Q: What are your thoughts in regards to the local recovery efforts?

A: What New Orleanians have done in the past five years is equivalent to 10 to 15 years of work. You’ve had to re-create community, not just infrastructure, and no U.S. city has had to do that before. It is crucial to work toward a shared community vision, to bring together a community that works for everyone. There were many people who left New Orleans angry. It’s time to create the environment that says, “Welcome home.”

Q: What is the role that the Greater New Orleans Foundation serves?

A: New Orleans, the state, and the region have functioned with inequities for hundreds of years. Now is the time for everyone to begin looking at what we can become if we put our minds together for the good of all its people. The Foundation is poised to be the engine that enables New Orleans residents and those of the region to imagine a
different and brighter future.

Q: Everything you touch seems to last. What does an organization need most to keep it going?

A: It takes leadership. Organizations need leaders who are committed to their mission, imagine the future, and manage relationships and resources. At Ford, we invest in building individual leaders and institutional leadership within organizations as we invest in social impact.

Q: If you created a bumper sticker, what would it say?

A: Invest in People. Invest in Hope.

Q: Is it true you are leaving Ford at the end of the year?

A: Yes, I will be retiring from Ford, but not from my profession. I am considering the next leadership move to culminate my career.

When you traveled throughout Orleans parish campaigning for mayor, what made you the most hopeful?

What made me the most hopeful was the will and energy of the people. In every neighborhood you find people engaged and who care. The level of active engagement and the number of people giving their time and energy is inspiring-from fighting blight to revitalizing NORD to helping small businesses succeed to efforts to help the elderly-you name it, and there are folks in the city working to fix it or make it better.

And caused you the most despair?

We deserve better from city government. Working mothers have no safe place for their kids to go after school or on holidays because NORD doesn’t function properly. A homeowner can’t get the city to cut the grass on the vacant lot next door- one that the city owns. It shouldn’t take a year to get a streetlight fixed. It can take a business owner one week to get a permit, when it should only take an hour. Many neighborhoods can compete for the worst roads. I could go on.

As a passionate voice for education reform, what advice will you give to the next mayor?

Historically, the mayor has had little engagement with public education and has no direct role in running schools. While our schools need to get better, they are much improved since Katrina and there is a lot of good momentum. City services, on the other hand, need major improvement. Given the challenges facing the city, my advice to the next mayor is that the city is really broken – go fix it! Reducing violent crime, creating good jobs, working with the neighborhoods on code enforcement and blight reduction, developing a functioning city hall and balancing the budget will take leadership and focus from the next mayor.

On education, the mayor can use the bully pulpit to help children and schools. In the annual state of the city address, include a report card on the state of our children: In education, what percentage of our fourth graders are reading on grade level? What percentage of our freshman graduated from high school four years later and how prepared are they for college or to join the workforce? If these indicators are not improving, the mayor could be a powerful voice in demanding change. The annual report should also include crime indicators: what percentage of our youth are victims or perpetrators of violent crimes? And I would have a measurement to capture the mental and physical health of our young people as well.

I also see the mayor engaging with the school facility master plan to make certain all schools are in good facilities and that we find ways to partner with NORD in rebuilding, so we can co-locate NORD facilities on school campuses.

What role is the nonprofit community playing in our city?

Our nonprofits are playing a critical and inspirational role in almost every issue or problem confronting the city. You will find people with energy and deep knowledge who can help New Orleans address our problems. Examples are everywhere. The Afterschool Partnership has focused on out-of-school programming and the redevelopment of NORD. Beacon of Hope, the Broadmoor Civic Association and the Neighborhood Partnership Network have worked long and hard on neighborhood recovery issues and combating blight. The Crime Coalition has invested tremendous energy in understanding key reforms needed for a more effective policy department and criminal justice system. The nonprofit community has been stepping up to both understand the issues and work on solutions . The next mayor needs to tap this energy and expertise and find a way to leverage it in making New Orleans a much better city.

Looking back over 2009, what were the highlights for the Urban League?

In 2009, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans completed an internal review and adopted a Strategic Framework that calls for the Urban League to be an Architect of Change. For the Urban League, being an Architect of Change means becoming an expert on how to effect change on economic, educational, and policy issues that adversely affect African-Americans and other disadvantaged populations.

What achievements are you proud of?

Our Parent Information Center reached over 980 parents, and we conducted 37 parent workshops teaching parents, teachers, and school leaders how to engage as partners in the delivery of excellent public and private education. We conducted a schools fair with over 70 schools participating serving 600 families. We also developed a Parent Leadership Academy and graduated an inaugural class.  Our Urban League College Track program supported 100 students weekly in our college preparatory program. Our Financial Connections program provided financial literacy classes to over 200 participants and our Women’s and Business resource centers counseled over 400 entrepreneurs and supported over 900 in total.

With numbers like those the Urban League has put on the scoreboard in 2009, we are sure to run up the score by thoroughly beating back the disparities that plague our most vulnerable individuals.

Where is the Urban League headed over the next couple of years?

Over the next couple of years the Urban League will be focused making success possible for every individual who is willing to work hard.

What does the Urban League do freakishly well?

I think the Urban League is freakishly good at being the voice of reason. Our voice comes through in a recognizable manner for all to digest equally, and more importantly our voice rings with a sweet and melodic solution that closes gaps of disparity, unites communities around commonalities, and paints a picture that includes the dreams of all New Orleanians in every brush stroke.

While Cassidy is proud of many of her 700 Good Work Network members, she has special praise for Brown, who came to her with a harrowing story.

“For eight years, I was a driver at a waste management company,” explained Brown. “I told my supervisor that I wanted to move up in the company. He pointed to a six foot ladder and he told me to climb the ladder and he said, that’s as far as you’ll go.”

Brown’s next step would take him further than he thought possible.

Through word of mouth, Brown found his way to Good Work Network, a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 by Phyllis Cassidy, a CPA by training who worked for years in a family business until it was sold. Good Work Network coaches, supports, and educates small business owners and gives them the business skills they need to reach their full potential.

“I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it,” said Brown. What Brown wanted was to start his own flooring company. “I knew I could do the work-the stripping, waxing, buffing and carpet cleaning-but I didn’t know how to do the business part.”

Cassidy’s team helped him with back office support, to file with the Secretary of State’s office, and to craft a business plan with action steps. Today, Thomas Floor Care, LLC is contracting with numerous businesses and is listed as a preferred provider for Catholic Charities.

“Success comes to those who want it,” Brown said. “I’ve been chasing this success ever since I climbed that ladder and I don’t plan on stopping.”

Good Work Network recently received a grant from the Community IMPACT Program to provide business development services for small community-based businesses.

Recent scandals

Over the past twenty years or so, I’ve visited hundreds of community-based nonprofits and examined their financial statements and audits (this is what people who work at foundations do). In my experience, most of these organizations are scrupulously honest. Their staffs work very long hours for very short pay. They know the communities they serve and serve them effectively using very modest means. They multiply the value of your donation by enlisting the help of volunteers who donate countless hours of their time for charitable work.

High profile scandals in the charitable sector undermine the public’s trust. But this isn’t the whole story. America’s charities—especially smaller community-based organizations—sometimes do a poor job of communicating how effective they are at feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and healing the sick. Generally overworked and overwhelmed by the demand for their organizations’ services, nonprofit leaders underinvest in their organizations’ communications capacity. Perhaps if they invested more, they’d draw fresh criticism for spending donated funds on public relations rather than on direct charitable work—who knows?

In our region in particular, we need to acknowledge and celebrate the key role that our nonprofit sector has had in our recovery and in helping us to create something even better than before. Now’s not the time for us to retreat from our commitment to them.

But how often do we remember that small can also be beautiful and effective?

Small, community-based nonprofit organizations have a kind of loveliness that their larger, better-established cousins don’t often share.  When these small organizations are effective, and when they’re run by dedicated leaders, their loveliness borders on the sublime.

What these organizations lack in scale, they more than make up for in their knowledge of their communities and their responsiveness to client needs.  The staff members of these nonprofits—often overworked and underpaid—rely not on surveys conducted from a distance, but on the direct evidence of their senses to gauge their communities’ challenges and strengths.  Because they have no other choice, their executive directors will often stretch their organizations’ dollars ’til they holler.

Over the years I’ve visited hundreds of these smaller charities.  I remember a free clinic in which the receptionist quickly shifted between four languages as she spoke with people in a waiting room, sometimes pausing to translate electric bills or other correspondence.  On a site visit to another organization serving the homeless, a staff member opened a door to show me the work station he had tucked carefully into a broom closet.

I believe we very much underestimate the roles these small, gritty, frontline organizations play in our communities.  After a natural or man-made disaster, it’s often these small, community-based agencies that do the lion’s share of the work in helping families get back on their feet.  For years since the advent of the levee failures, these organizations have been helping people return to their homes, acquire new job skills, and find healing.

They’ve been lovingly tending the flame of our social conscience.

There’s a tendency in nonprofit work to be a little too uncritical of the concepts we import from the business world.  We sometimes get fetishistic about matters of “scale” and “replicability.”  But there’s a kind of nonprofit beauty that doesn’t scale well.  And there are people whose extraordinary vision and passion we’ll never be able to replicate.