September 2013 - Collaboration by Arkansas Coalition for Excellence

Helping Nonprofits Help Arkansas

September 2013

Collaboration

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence: Helping Nonprofits Help Arkansas We are proud to work with you to achieve ACEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mission and vision together: Mission: Strengthen Arkansas Nonprofits Vision: A strong, vibrant, united and effective nonprofit sector that is well positioned to meet the diverse needs of all Arkansans. Our Core Values: Best Practices |Inclusive | Unity in Diversity | Connecting & Equipping | Statewide Vision | Regional Approach

IN THIS EDITION 3

Greetings from ACE

Upcoming Trainings and Events

Member Corner

Advocacy Updates

A Funderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Perspective

8-9 ACE would like to congratulate our very own, Rebecca Zimmermann, for her acceptance into the Clinton School of Public Service. Best of luck, Class of 2015!

Resources & Other Links Contact Us

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

GREETINGS FROM ACE ACE Members & Supporters, Collaboration is not just a word, it is an action – at least the way ACE views it! You might remember at our last annual meeting in September of 2012, we talked a lot about collaboration and how it would be a focus of ours throughout the year. And was it ever! In my entire professional career, I have never seen so many opportunities to collaborate and partner than I have here in Arkansas through the nonprofit sector. I am talking about SERIOUS collaborations where you share staff, sign on the dotted line, put up money, you know the really serious kind of partnering – the hard kind! As you all know, anything worth doing usually has bumps in the road, and there may have been a few. They felt like tiny little speed bumps, though, rather than like jumping the curb! This last year, we began developing a wonderful partnership with the Arkansas Department of Human Services Division of Community Service and Nonprofit Support (DCSNS). In some ways, DCSNS and ACE have very similar missions. We both do nonprofit management training, conferences and technical assistance. We thought our nonprofit community would benefit if we could figure out how to work together and offer more service to our mutual nonprofit colleagues. Now, ACE staff coordinates with DCSNS staff in regions throughout the state whenever possible. We are collaborating on a booklet, How to Start a 501(C)(3), and we co-founded the Arkansas Nonprofit Training Partnership (ANTP) which now has nine collaborating partners including higher education and other associations. ANTP has worked to develop a comprehensive training calendar and will soon be surveying the nonprofit network on training issues and solutions. We share training resources and work to avoid duplication. Soon you will be able to find ANTP on our revised website. Feel free to add your training events, too! You might have noticed we have brought in some national speakers and utilized our local training talent in different ways. Partnering with the Clinton School of Public Service and UAMS, UALR and UCA as well as corporate sponsors, we have been able to offer in-depth training on board development with Creating Highly Effective Boards and other cutting edge topics in our Beyond Funding Series. We don’t only partner with training in mind. We also worked with UALR’s Center for Nonprofit Organizations to create Charity and Prosperity: The Economic Impact of Public Charities in Arkansas 2006-2010 and with the National Council of Nonprofits and Columbia Books on the 2012 Nonprofit Salary Survey. These are just some of the partnerships and collaborations we developed this year. ACE firmly believes that there is so much good work being done by so many different organizations that our job is not to duplicate or replicate but connect and convene. This way, we’ll be able to go much farther, much faster in building a strong nonprofit sector. And that benefits ALL of us! P.S. Stay tuned for exciting announcements about ACE and our programs at our 2013 Annual Meeting and 10th Anniversary Celebration, Moving Forward, on September 18th! Sincerely,

Stephanie F. Meincke, MSW President & CEO Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

UPCOMING TRAININGS, EVENTS & PROGRAMS MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Click here to view a video from our speaker, Robert Egger

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED, BUT THERE ARE LIMITED SEATS STILL AVAILABLE! ACE Members: $55 All Day Nonmembers: $75 All Day Lunch Only: $35 Contact Emily Ingram to reserve your seat, eingram@acenonprofit.org.

Additional Sponsors:

Arkansas Community Foundation Circle Communication Network

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

New and Renewing Members

MEMBERSHIP MEMBER OF THE MONTH SouthWest Artists

SouthWest Artists, Inc. is committed to in making this region a cultural destination by developing an interest in fine art. The gallery provides classes, exhibitions, and events focused on an appreciation and enjoyment of visual art and on improving the quality of life. The gallery provides a network for communication among artists, helping them to discover new techniques and improve their skills.

BENEFIT OF THE MONTH 50% Discount on Nonprofit Salary Survey Columbia Books and Arkansas Coalition for Excellence have joined together to produce the 2013 Arkansas Nonprofit Compensation Report.

How can the report help you? • Determine the most competitive salary level for each position to support recruitment and retention• Understand how your organization’s pay levels compare with others in your state • Track changes in nonprofit pay levels and trends from one year to the next • Provide hard data to support your salary structure recommendations

Want to join our coalition of over 350 members dedicated to strengthening the nonprofit sector ? Contact Rebecca at 501.375.1223 or email rzimmmann@ acenonprofit.org.

Purchase the report today! ACE members contact Rebecca at rzimmermann@acenonprofit.org or call 501-375-1223 for your discount code.

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

ADVOCACY UPDATES Congress Returns to Face Foreign Policy, Fiscal Decisions Congress returns from its summer recess this week deeply divided over whether to authorize military action in retaliation for Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons on its citizens. Once the votes are counted on a Syria Resolution, various deadlines will force Congress to turn to urgent fiscal matters: •Federal Spending: The Syria debate almost certainly guarantees that Congress will not enact spending bills before the new federal fiscal year begins on October 1. Lawmakers are predicting approval instead of a three-month stopgap appropriations measure, known as a Continuing Resolution or CR. That resolution would simply continue existing levels of spending through mid-December with few if any modifications. •Sequestration: The new fiscal year means that the next wave of arbitrary spending cuts of more than $100 billion go into effect unless Congress and the President reach an agreement on an alternative plan, which is not expected in the coming weeks. While a short-term CR would give policymakers more time to negotiate a more rational spending plan, some in Congress are using the crisis in Syria to call for exempting the Pentagon from the sequester, perhaps shifting more arbitrary cuts to domestic programs. •Debt Limit: A government shutdown could occur if Congress does not take action by mid-October to extend the federal government’s ability to borrow. Options on the table are agreeing to additional spending cuts to match any increase in the debt limit (the so-called “Boehner rule”), raising the debt limit to a specific dollar level, or granting new borrowing authority for a limited period of time. Reprinted with permission from Nonprofit Advocacy Matters, a publication of the National Council of Nonprofits

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

COLLABORATION IN ACTION Charitable Christian Medical Clinic, Hot Springs By: Lynn Blankenship Collaboration, what does this word mean to you? If you ask a group of people you are likely to receive 20 different answers. Probably no surprise to you since, like me, you probably hear the word all the time. One definition that I prefer is listed as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cooperative arrangement in which two or more parties (which may or may not have any previous relationship) work jointly towards a common goal.â&#x20AC;? I prefer this definition since I can cite numerous examples that I experience on a daily basis in my world. I manage a free medical clinic that serves patients that have no medical insurance nor funding to cover costs for typical medical care that most of society takes for granted. If you or I wake up with a severe sore throat we might make a call to our primary care provider to come in for an examination and leave with a prescription to solve our immediate health issue. The patients in my clinic have to make a decision between gas in the car to get the kids to school or address their own health. If worse comes to worse, they will seek a solution in the most expensive form of treatment available, the emergency room. The clinic that I manage utilizes the generosity of licensed medical professionals that donate their time to work towards our common goal of providing a less expensive and more accessible means of healthcare. We manage collaborative relationships with physicians, nurses, pharmacists on site at our clinic. The on-site services provide routine healthcare for this patient base but occasionally we have need to reach out to the surrounding medical community to assist with circumstances and diagnosis beyond what a primary care provider can accomplish. We reach out to local hospitals and have established relationships that benefit our patients. At the end of the year, we can record our collaborative efforts in numbers: partnerships with donors that share our goal of providing healthcare to the underserved provide approximately $400K towards our operational expenses, we have nearly 300 volunteers each year that share our common goal, all totaled, we provide nearly $6 Million in medical services each year for patients that normally would not be able to afford basic healthcare. To summarize, collaboration is not only pulling two or more people together to accomplish a common goal, it is a necessity in my world which has translated to success for approximately 10,300 patients in the Hot Springs community since 1997.

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

RESOURCES AND OTHER LINKS A TOOL FOR COLLABORATION By: Kelly Hunt Lyon, Webster University, Little Rock High impact nonprofits understand the necessity of collaboration. Strong ones continually add new tools to their toolkit. I’ve been involved in numerous collaborative efforts, most often formed either to seek—or as a result of—external funding. That may be why a very small book titled Getting the Grant by Rebecca Gajda and Richard Tulikangas (2005), forever changed my approach to collaboration. It isn’t her most recent work, and subsequent publications are now under her married name, Williams. I’m also not endorsing this as a comprehensive grant-writing book. But it does contain something unique, a matrix for evaluation collaboration called the Collaboration Assessment Rubric. This rubric is the one resource I wished I’d discovered earlier in my career because it explains the stages of collaboration in one easy to read chart. It was designed for assessment, but I’ve found it equally useful in developing collaborations because it shows when interpersonal conflict is likely to arise. Tip: Know the Specific Stages of Collaboration Gajda and Tulikangas break it down into five levels: networking, cooperating, partnering, merging, and unifying. They then divide the levels by purpose; Strategies and Tasks; Leadership and Decision Making; and Interpersonal and Communication. The majority of nonprofits in Arkansas work in the first three levels: networking, cooperating, and partnering. Tip: Expect Conflict Interpersonal conflict will inevitably arise during any meaningful collaboration. I’ve seen conflict take leaders of collaborations off guard because they think the process is breaking down when it is actually developing to the next stage. The Collaborative Assessment Rubric indicates there likely will be very little conflict at the networking level, minimal conflict in the cooperating phase, and some in the partnering level. Tip: Know When to expect it and at what level Leaders and organizers can keep everyone moving forward if they can show interpersonal conflict is part of the process, not a sign of a failing effort and are prepared to deal with it before it emerges. Tip: Remember—High impact nonprofits understand the necessity of collaboration. ___________________________________ Kelly Hunt Lyon is Little Rock Area Director for Webster University and a member of the ACE Board of Directors. She has lectured on a collaborative approach to grant writing at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as presenting at national webinars and conferences. 1. Gajda, R. & R. Tulikangas (2005). Getting the grant. Alexndria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

LEADERSHIP TIP OF THE MONTH By: Mike Harbour, Harbour Resources When someone establishes an organization, they form a management team and a Board of Directors. When a project manager takes on a complex project, he or she will immediately begin to identify the components and then connect with experts for each area. When disaster strikes, a crisis management team is immediately activated. Read more...

IN THE KNOW ACE Is Hiring! Full-time position responsible for program development, implementation, and evaluation for statewide nonprofit association. Includes planning and marketing training events for nonprofit audiences. Bachelor’s degree in related field with 3 years in progressively responsible positions or a master’s degree in a related field with 3 years of relevant work experience. Demonstrated experience in developing, marketing and implementing training or professional development programs required. Knowledge of the nonprofit sector a must. Instructional design experience a plus. Must have a valid driver’s license, car insurance and reliable transportation for primarily in-state travel. Excellent benefits package. Salary commensurate with experience. Closing date 10/1/2013. To apply send resume to the Arkansas Coalition for Excellence, 200 River Market Ave., Suite 100, Little Rock, AR 72201. No phone calls please. Arkansas Arts Council ArtLinks Annual Conference This year's conference focuses on the importance of finding and communicating your story to influence policy and increase support. Click here to learn more and download a registration form, or call their office at (501) 324-9766 to receive a form by mail. NE Arkansas Charitable Gift Planning Giving Committee September Meeting Arkansas Charitable Gift Planning Council is hosting a Northeast Arkansas Meeting at Arkansas State University on September 26th at 10:30. Our speaker will be Barlow Mann, J.D. from the Sharpe Group. To RSVP and for more information, please reply to this email or call me at 501-492-7090 by 5:00 pm on Monday, September 23rd.

JOBS CENTER EAST Core Coordinator– The EAST Initiative Communications Coordinator– The EAST Initiative Site-based Specialist– Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arkansas Arkansas Coalition for Excellence | 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 | Little Rock, AR 72201 | 501.375.1223 | www.acenonprofit.org

Thank you for reading this monthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edition of our newsletter. Questions or Comments? Contact us.

Stephanie F. Meincke, MSW President and CEO smeincke@acenonprofit.org Emily C. Ingram, Vice President eingram@acenonprofit.org Rebecca Zimmermann, Program Assistant rzimmermann@acenonprofit.org Ivan Martinez, Membership Services, AmeriCorps*VISTA imartinez@acenonprofit.org

Helping Nonprofits Help Arkansas

Located within the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation Offices 200 River Market Avenue, Suite 100 Little Rock, AR 72201 (501) 375-1223 www.acenonprofit.org