Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

The CVO Network: An Innovative Approach To Leveraging Resources In The NGO Sector, Part 2

This is a continuation of a series of posts. Previously we explored the value provided by CVO as a network of NGO's operating in Haifa, Israel. Now, we will explore how CVO operates to provide this value.

Inclusion, Participation and Commitment

CVO recruits members to become part of CVO. There is a core of members that continue from year to year. There are other organizations that belong depending on their particular organizational needs or what their finances allow. CVO started with 32 organizations. Last year, there were 100 out of 300 organizations in Haifa that were members. An organization could be a member one year and not in another year. CVO thinks about other approaches to tie together these Haifa organizations including the use of technology. The result is that a single NGO can leverage the knowledge of many other NGO's in performing its work.

CVO recruits members by locating all the organizations that may be interested in a given subject and following up with them. CVO recruits actively by advertising in newspapers, using mailing lists, their own Internet site or by meeting with administrators of these organizations.

In the recruiting process, CVO will go to organizations to see what they do. This can lead to an invitation to the organization to participate in CVO.

Economic or political interests are not part of the CVO network. Yael Abada said, "we had a very big discussion on, should we add to the network businesses and political parties?" In the end, CVO "decided not to let political interests or economic interests be part of the network or the decision making process. This is in keeping with the idea of civil society as a space between the government and business sector.

Arab citizens are included in all of the activities of CVO. Yael stated, "We make efforts that in every cluster (working group of CVO) or course the Arab organizations will be part. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't." She continued, "Special needs organizations are involved, feminist Arab organizations, communications organizations are involved."

Organizations may want to participate in CVO in different ways. They might want to come to the General Assembly which is one of the major discussion and decision making forums of CVO. They might want to come to training or attend a course. They might want to be a board member.

What CVO expects from organization members according to Yael is "to pay member fees, to come to gatherings, to take part in a week of volunteerism, to come to courses, to use us if they want to send a message to other organizations, to use our data base."

Operating Model, Governance, Funding

CVO is an official entity according to Israeli law. CVO has a board that meets once a month and a chair of the board. The board has 14 members most of whom are representatives of other organizations. One creative tension in the board is between thinking about their own organization and CVO. Which organization do they want to promote more? It is helpful when the board members think more about CVO and work for the benefit of CVO. The assumption here is that when CVO as a whole benefits then all the individual NGO's that are a part of it benefit as well.

 CVO has a director, Yael Abada, five staff plus part time jobs. There is a General Assembly which meets once a year, chooses the board and approves official documents. The General Assembly provides for general awareness of the members. The work of CVO is done in what are called clusters. CVO is funded mainly by the Haifa-Boston Connection, plus the Joint Distribution Committee. It is also funded by municipalities and provided with in-kind contributions by the University of Haifa. Members pay 200 sheckles a year. CVO also writes proposals to American foundations with representatives in Israel.

Convening Structures

Members are convened via the General Assembly. Email lists and a Facebook page also serve as convening vehicles or at least communication vehicles. Courses offered by CVO also serve as forums in which members convene.

The main convening vehicle of CVO is the clusters. Clusters are groups of member organizations that are convened in order to do the work of CVO. Clusters are composed of representatives of member organizations who are interested in a particular area. For example, one such area is Employment. Member organizations are connected together while also maintaining their specialness.

Clusters and the sub-teams within them are the key vehicles for doing work in CVO. Sub-teams work on specific action areas within the main focus of the cluster. Organizational members bring in a lot of ideas. Clusters learn together, discuss issues and share knowledge. Small teams work on issues that the clusters want to work on. Teams are set up and people choose which the team they want to work on.

Members in the clusters choose how they want to be organized. In each cluster, CVO gives them time to define what they want to do and how they want to do it. The Special Needs cluster finished the whole process in two days, Each cluster has a facilitator to help them organize the cluster.

 

 

 

The CVO Network: An Innovative Approach To Leveraging Resources In The NGO Sector, Part 1

This begins a several part series.

Introduction

The CVO Network in Haifa, Israel is an innovative approach to leveraging the limited resources that exist in the NGO sector. CVO succeeds in providing services to NGO's that are often not in a financial or resource-rich position to provide these services for themselves. CVO, by aggregating individual NGO's within its umbrella of organizations is able to actively support the growth and development of individual NGO's and their members. By doing so, CVO provides benefits to the individual NGO's as well as to the municipality of Haifa and funders that support these individual NGO's. CVO lessens the financial burden on funders who need to support the individual NGO's as well as on the NGO's themselves.

CVO is a voluntary affiliation of individual organizations into a network. The individual organizations retain their own legal and organizational entity. However, they participate together with other organizations in the Haifa area to engage in specific activities. In carrying out these activities, the individual organizational members of CVO work collaboratively together to develop and implement new approaches to their work.

This article will explain how CVO succeeds in doing this. This article will explain the details of how CVO operates as a network. It is hoped that other sectors of NGO's defined by geography or professional orientation can profit by the example of CVO.

Brief History and Purpose of CVO.

 CVO was founded in 1983 by several well-established organizations. It was originally operated by volunteers. The second phase of CVO began when CVO started hiring staff. The Director of CVO is Yael Abada.

The purpose of CVO is to coordinate between organizations working in similar or parallel fields and in developing thinking and activities among these organizations. CVO focuses on community organizing, developing collaborations and arranging forums. It is especially interested in professional training. Overall, CVO seeks to promote community and civil society.

Value Provided by CVO

CVO provides value to its member organizations, to individuals who are a part of these member organizations and to itself as a network. By virtue of these efforts, it enables its member organizations to provide enhanced value to the surrounding community.

There are many ways that CVO provides value to its member organizations. There are many things that small organizations cannot do on their own. CVO identifies common issues that most organizations are interested in. Examples of this are lobbying and working on employment issues for people with special needs. CVO works on issues that single organizations cannot work on by themselves. According to CVO Director, Yael Abada, "Even organizations have little knowledge about rights and services they can get around issues of employment." CVO helps provide a fuller picture on these topics.

CVO collects and provides data for the benefit of its member organizations. CVO provides workshops and training in specific skills that benefit member organizations and individual members of these organizations. Smaller organizations do not usually have the time or money to obtain training. CVO has also provided a consultant to these organizations.

CVO helps individuals develop competencies in areas of value to their own organizations. Training is provided in specific skill areas such as project development, public relations, communications, facilitation and how to be a team leader. CVO tries ot instill a willingness in its members to share with others and to take responsibility to do things.

Interacting with others, making connections and building relationships is important to the members of CVO. CVO meets the need of people to feel more connected. Members develop social connections and become friends. This increases the job satisfaction of members of the individual NGO's. They continue to grow and learn. One assumes that this helps the individual NGO's retain their staff.

In the next post, we will begin to look at how CVO operates in order to attain these accomplishments.

Getting To Seamless

In my last post, I set out a comment from a speaker at a recent event held at NASA. The quote was:

"The future of Open Government is allowing seamless conversations to occur between thousands of government employees and thousands of others."

I think this is what we are now calling a network. In this post, I would like to explore the ideas in the quote a bit further and also ask for your input.

"Knowledge Is The Beginning"

 

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to witness an extraordinary program at Lincoln Center in New York City. This program illustrated how having a commonality in music and the shared experience of performing music can act as a bridge across differing cultures and political orientations. The Lincoln Center program was focused on an effort that has been going on to build understanding across Israeli and Palestinian cultures through the vehicle of a joint Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra. During the movie, I felt that I was immersed in the experience along with all of the participants in the orchestra.

Open Government IS Cultural Change

I recently delivered a training program for the U.S. Intelligence Community on how to effectively transfer knowledge. This program was delivered during the period of time when the Intelligence Community was migrating from the Cold War mentality of "need to know" to the 21st century mentality of "need to share." 

Government as a whole is about to embark upon a similar change to that which the Intelligence Community encountered. This is as a result of the President's Memorandum on Open Government. The President's Memorandum calls for openness, participation and collaboration in government organizations. The culture of government organizations will have to change. This cultural change includes the behaviors, attitudes, assumptions, values and norms of these organizations. The President's Memorandum on Open government makes tangible what will be required for government to succeed in the future.

5 Helpful Tips: To Avoid Searching For Knowledge In The Same Old Places

How can you ensure that the knowledge you are getting is enabling you to successfully respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow?

A dilemma that I imagine many of us deal with is how to avoid coming up with yesterday's solutions to deal with today's challenges. There is certainly a tendency to build our solution to today's challenges on knowledge and approaches developed to deal with past situations. How can we position ourselves to take a forward-looking view of challenges and seek out contemporary knowledge?

People, Cultures and Context

Every once in a while, I stumble across something which appears to be just a simple part of daily life but which turns out to still be quite profound. What I "stumbled" across most recently was a group conversation which again showed me the power of a cross-cultural group to arrive at and understand the deeper meaning of knowledge.

All of this occurred when I recently delivered a presentation to an interesting group of Knowledge Management professionals. My topic was the transfer and absorption of knowledge across cultures. As I usually like to do when dealing with this topic, I showed up with several examples of music designed to be familiar to some and quite unfamiliar or even strange to others. For me, music is a form of knowledge and also knowledge which strongly reflects its cultural context. I like to say that the content knowledge of music is integrated with its cultural context.

Behaviors of Cultural Mindfulness

Encountering knowledge of someone from another culture can be exciting as well as challenging. We often don't know what we don't know and as a result the knowledge that we "hear" can be a distortion of the knowledge that the other intended to share. When interacting with a person from another culture or visiting another culture (even if it is only in the next neighborhood), it is easy to miss the nuances and meaning of the behavior of others. When someone is inviting you to stay for dinner, are they just being "polite" expecting you to say "no" or are they offering you the gift of their hospitality in which case a refusal could be seen as an insult.

Collaboration Then And Now

Is the practice of collaboration the same today as it was ten years ago? Will it be the same next year or the year after? I am coming to the conclusion that "yes," in fact, collaboration is different today and will be different next year as well. How it is different and how to make explicit that difference is the challenging part.

Collaboration remains a major key to our existence as a living and working society. It has become more a part of daily life. What is different is the path to collaboration.

Transparency and Openness in Government

In my work with a variety of Federal Government clients over the last several years, I have noticed the desire for more transparency and openness at many organizational levels. Organization leaders and members have become aware of the negative impact to organizational operations and morale when important decisions impacting the organization are handed down without setting out cogent reasons or made without some forum for input, clarification and feedback.

I am heartened by President Obama's "Memorandum For The Heads Of Executive Departments And Agencies" which sets out his goals for a more transparent and open government. The President stated, "We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration." The initiatives by the Obama Administration are very timely for organizations that already recognize the improved performance and organizational well-being that can result.