What’s hot in New Orleans?
Posted on Feb 04, 2010
No, it’s not just that the Saints are going to the Super Bowl − it’s Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu’s candidacy for the mayor of New Orleans.
This Saturday’s election in New Orleans features the latest in a string of campaigns in which a candidate’s core messages include social innovation or civic engagement. Lt. Gov. Landrieu, for [...]
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Social Innovation Fund Draft NOFA is out…Public Comments Due By Jan 15th
Posted on Dec 20, 2009
The moment that we have been waiting for is here. This week, the Corporation for National and Community Service released a draft Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) for public comment. As I have mentioned before, this should be seen as a good step toward building a broader social innovation [...]
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Driving at Social Impact in Texas
Posted on Dec 16, 2009
Last week I traveled to Dallas for the OneStar Foundation: Texas Center for Social Impact’s Governor’s Nonprofit Leadership Conference. The theme of the conference was “The Driving Force for Social Impact 2009: Where the Rubber Meets the Road.” The title was well chosen; the OneStar Foundation is definitely taking a leadership role in advancing social [...]
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Exploring the Role of Government in Social Innovation
Posted on Dec 10, 2009
As I mentioned in a recent post, Root Cause’s Public Innovators initiative recently hosted an event at the Capitol called Advancing Social Innovation in Government: Investing in Community Solutions.
We hosted the event because we wanted to broaden the conversation and educate people in the federal government about the importance of social innovation. We were fortunate [...]
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Governor’s Nonprofit Leadership Conference
Posted on Dec 08, 2009
I’m excited to be giving a keynote tomorrow at the OneStar Foundation: Texas Center for Social Impact’s Governor’s Nonprofit Leadership Conference in Dallas. OneStar is doing some great work through their Texas Social Innovation Initiative to identify effective nonprofits and support their work (they will announce the seven winners of their competition tomorrow), drawing on [...]
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Social Innovation at an Inflection Point
Posted on Dec 02, 2009
I kicked off this blog by stating that the world is at an inflection point. As we head into the holiday season, I can’t help but feel that the work of advancing social innovation – developing, testing, and honing promising approaches, rewarding exceptional performance, spreading and scaling success, and catalyzing public-private partnerships across the nation [...]
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Response to comments on my Michelle Rhee post
Posted on Nov 14, 2009
Thanks for your comments; it’s clear that you are very passionate about the state of education in Washington, D.C. I welcome this kind of dialogue on the blog, and am glad that you have contributed.
While I absolutely hear your points, I remain committed to my claim that Ms. Rhee is a public innovator. The D.C. [...]
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Michelle Rhee, Public Innovator
Posted on Nov 12, 2009
As many of you know, one of my main focuses at the moment is on enabling government to become more actively engaged with on-the-ground, community-based solutions. So from time to time on this blog I plan to highlight what I call public innovators – those who work at the city, state or federal levels of [...]
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Performance Measurement – It’s Now or Never!
Posted on Nov 04, 2009
Nonprofit performance measurement (also known by the names evaluation, metrics, outcomes, and logic models, among others) seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days.
The ‘measurement movement’ is not new – some might say it started well over a decade ago when the logic model came into fashion. What’s new today is that [...]



