How did a free eye clinic that started in a house in south India in 1976 grow to become Asia's first international training facility for blindness prevention workers? In this audio interview, host Sheela Sethuraman speaks with Thulasiraj Ravilla from the Aravind Eye Care System. Ravilla concentrates on the innovative approaches that Aravind has developed to become a model for high-quality, low-cost health care.
When Dr. Vera Cordeiro Rio worked at Hospital da Lagoa in Rio de Janeiro, she witnessed a constant admission/re-admission cycle in childcare treatment. To break that cycle, she gathered medical community volunteers to form Renascer, addressing root causes that prevent families from providing adequate care. In this audio interview, join host Sheela Sethuraman as she learns how Cordeiro Rio translated her passion translated into a methodology that is quickly sweeping through Brazil and the world.
How did Room to Read create more than 5,000 libraries in less than eight years? The media have largely focused on founder John Wood as the catalytic figure in the organization's success story. Of equal importance, however, is Room to Read's solid and replicable operational choices.
In the frenzy over accountability, funders, donors, and the general public are calling for more program evaluation. Yet few understand how expensive and complex good evaluation is. Speaking at the 2006 Nonprofit Management Institute at Stanford, Alana Conner, senior editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review illustrates how half-hearted evaluation can do more harm than good. Rick Aubry and Victor Kuo join her to give nonprofit and foundation perspectives.
AIDS, malaria, and maternal mortality are some of the chronic public health issues that plague Africa. Invited to Stanford, Paul Farmer talks about how his Boston-based organization, Partners In Health, is spending donor dollars to bring the lessons garnered from its work in Haiti to scale up healthcare services in war-torn Rwanda. As dicussed in this audio lecture, his organization seeks to fill the gap that exists between medical R&D and healthcare delivery so preventions and cures can be brought to more of the people who need them.
Funders are calling for more program evaluation, but nonprofits are often collecting dubious data, at great cost to themselves and ultimately to the people they serve.
Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, not the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
For NGOs, impact comes in different forms and to track the cycles of social change work, we must think across the tangibility and the speed of emergence of change.
With an understanding of these 10 funding models, nonprofit leaders can use the for-profit world's valuable practice of engaging in succinct and clear conversations about long-term financial strategy.
Fair Trade-certified coffee is growing in sales, but strict certification requirements are resulting in uneven economic advantages for coffee growers and lower quality coffee for consumers.
