September 14, 2012 | Groupaya

Our First Year

by Eugene Eric Kim

Laughing together, a frequent occurrence on our team. Photo taken by our friend, Eugene Chan.

Tomorrow, on September 15, 2012, Groupaya celebrates its one year anniversary.

It completely snuck up on all of us. We’ve had our noses to the grindstone this whole year, focusing on doing great, meaningful work, on learning as much as we can, on exploring innovative ways to make a greater impact on the world, and on living our values. It’s been incredibly intense and an absolute joy. We all feel very lucky to have had this experience together this first year.

We’re doing this work, because we want to help create a world that is more alive. That journey has to start with each of us, individually. For me personally, doing this challenging, meaningful work in collaboration with amazing people has brought me alive every day.

Here’s a sampling of what we accomplished in our first year:

We’ve been spending the bulk of our time and energy facilitating a multi-stakeholder dialogue in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta around water issues for the Delta Conservancy. We’re calling it the Delta Dialogues. This is one of the most critical issues California is currently grappling with, and it’s without question the hardest problem I’ve ever tackled (which also makes it one of the most enjoyable).
We designed and facilitated a participatory visioning process for the Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership. Over 120 people representing over 50 organizations participated in self-organized conversations over a four month period to develop a 10-year roadmap for the Bay Area arts education community.
We facilitated leadership team meetings for IntraHealth, Hawaii Community Foundation, and Amyris, and strategy workshops for Code for America and The Hub.
We provided leadership coaching for Amyris, LinkedIn, and eSilicon.
We shared what we’ve been learning and thinking about, both informally through this blog and through brown bags, and formally at conferences. This past spring, I gave a talk at the GEO National Conference on leading change. This past week, my friend, business partner, and Groupaya co-founder, Kristin Cobble, returned to her hometown of Tulsa to speak to local grantmakers about learning organizations.
We applied our own frameworks for becoming a high-performance, learning organization to ourselves. For me, this has been the most gratifying and humbling part of this past year. It’s much easier to help others with this than to do it yourself!

We had the pleasure of doing all this work with many of our friends, including Jeff Conklin (CogNexus), Joe Mathews, Heather McLeod Grant (Monitor Institute), Vanda Marlow, Thomas Souza-Buckup, Mariposa Leadership, Pete Forsyth (Wiki Strategies), Shiree Teng, CompassPoint, Stanley Jones (Diligent Creative), and Matt Sengbusch.

We also added two new members to our team: Natalie DeJarlais and Dana Reynolds. Along with our original core of Kristin, Rebecca Petzel, Amy Wu Wong, and Betty Marcon, these wonderful people make up the Groupaya family. I am humble and grateful to get to do such meaningful work with such a caring, passionate, brilliant group.

This past week, our friend, Mariah Howard, sent us this delightful one-year anniversary gift.

Amy (our Director of Delight) suggested that we share Mariah’s wonderful gift more broadly, and so she decided to make it our official logo for the next week.

Thanks to Mariah, to all the friends we got to work with this past year, and to all of you for being a part of our first year! Can’t wait to kick-off Year 2!

July 23, 2012 | Insights

Measuring Impact: How You Feel Also Matters

by Eugene Eric Kim

I love playing sports and being in the outdoors, but I don’t have what you might call an active lifestyle. I go through spurts where my daily physical activity amounts to walking from my bed to my desk. I was mired in one of those phases a few months ago, when my younger sister, concerned about my sedentary ways, suggested that I enroll in a fitness bootcamp.

I was reluctant (it required waking up at 5:30am) and skeptical (5:30am? Really?!), but somehow, she convinced me. So for six weeks, I found myself rolling out of bed at a god-forsaken hour (did I mention I had to wake up at 5:30am?) and driving to Golden Gate Park, where I spent an hour running and doing calisthenics.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. It felt good to get back into shape, to be in the park in good weather when no one else was around, and to finish a workout with the whole day still ahead.

We did an assessment at the beginning and at the end of the six weeks to track our progress. I was a bit frustrated by the final assessment, because I didn’t complete it as easily as I thought I would. But when I looked at the numbers, I saw that I had made significant, tangible improvements. The trainer said, “People always feel like they didn’t make progress, but when they check the numbers, they see that they always do.”

I thought that this was a wonderful metaphor on the importance of measuring impact. If you try to go entirely by gut feel, you won’t get a real sense of whether or not you’re making improvement. I sometimes feel dissatisfied with the pace of our learning here at Groupaya, but when I check our benchmarks, I usually find that my impatience has masked the reality.

A few weeks ago, I had a great conversation with Hawaii Community Foundation’s Christine van Bergeijk about impact, and I related this story to her. Chris, no stranger to sports or to measuring impact, retorted, “Yes, but it’s also important to assess how you feel. If you’re hitting your numbers, but you feel terrible, that’s not good either.”

I found her point to be extremely important. You need to look at your data, but you also need to remember what your data is supposed to represent and to assess whether it’s actually doing that. Doing one without the other is only slightly better than doing neither.

October 19, 2011 | Insights

Growing Social Impact in a Networked World

by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of participating in the GEO / Monitor Institute conference, “Growing Social Impact in a Networked World.” This was a gathering of philanthropic foundations who are interested in networks: what they mean to their work and how best they can leverage them.

This meeting was the culmination of a process that started about four years ago with the Packard Foundation‘s first explorations into networks and with the establishment of a formal community of practice for “network funders” two years later, instigated by the Hawaii Community Foundation.

I had the good fortune of being exposed to this community very early on, as I was involved with one of Packard’s early experiments in funding network capacity building. Diana Scearce, a consultant at the Monitor Institute, who’s been driving this effort from the beginning, has continued to pull me into their world over the years.

It’s been amazing to see how far this group has progressed over the years. Foundations move notoriously slowly, and I had very low expectations after my first few interactions with this group. However, at the convening last April, I noticed a huge leap forward in the collective understanding of the group. Several people were doing cutting edge work, and I was hungry to learn from them.

Still, I have to admit that I had low expectations for this gathering. I had just spent two days at the Code for America Summit with passionate innovators and doers. I knew that this meeting was going to be much larger than usual, and I was worried about how that would affect the tenor of the conversations. I didn’t want to spend two days with a bunch of program officers who didn’t know what a network was.

Once again, I was stunned by how far this group has come. I loved listening to some of the veterans in the group talk. In a few short years, they’ve become leading-edge thinkers in the entire field of networks, not just networks and philanthropy. I was consistently stumped by the questions and challenges raised, and I found myself reconsidering some of my own frameworks for how I think about networks.

The conference was well documented, thanks to an active Twitter feed (#netfunders) and Beth Kanter‘s heroic herding of a bunch of guest bloggers, myself included. Here are some of my quick takeaways:

Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner and I led a few breakout groups on the Wikimedia open strategy process. Discussion was feisty, and it was fun talking about the project with Sue now that we’ve had a year to see the plan in action. Several people blogged about our discussion, including Paul Connolly, Anna Muoio, and Carole Martin. (I put my intro slides up on Slideshare.)
I wrote a guest blog for Beth entitled, “The Elephant in the Room: ‘Funders’ and Power.” I especially enjoyed posts from Stephen Downs and Sande Smith. I was also moved by Mary Manuel’s first foray into social media. It takes courage to put yourself out there like that, and the first step is always the hardest. Folks, post a note of encouragement on Mary’s post, and for the rest of you who are still wary of taking that first step, be inspired!
June Holley noted the sad irony that consultants who do network-oriented work (like us) are not themselves very networked. She’s cooking something up to change that. If you’re in this space and want in, let her know!
As far as this community has come, I still want to see more action. My partner-in-crime, Kristin Cobble, always says that learning hasn’t truly happened until it’s embodied in action. You can’t learn to play a violin from reading a book or by listening to Joshua Bell expound on the topic. There were a lot of hard, unanswered questions at the end of the day, and they will remain unanswered unless more foundations start practicing this stuff.
I am constantly inspired by the work and words of Bill Traynor, who constantly reminds us that ultimately, the real challenge to all of this work is creating spaces that bring a smile to people’s faces when they first walk in. He and Frankie Blackburn are in the process of cooking up the next best thing to move this space forward. Bill and Frankie, please sign me up!

There’s always great content at these gatherings, but my greatest learnings about networks always comes from watching Diana Scearce in action. She knows the content as well as anyone, but what sets her apart is her ability to put it into practice. I love watching her create space, I love being in that space, and I’m constantly studying what she does so that I can apply it to my own practice. I really love the people in this community, and that’s a testament both to their warmth and passion and also to Diana’s network weaving abilities.