Scaling Global Change

A Social Entrepreneur's Guide to Surviving the Start-up Phase and Driving Impact

Erin Ganju, Cory Heyman

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119483885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Organismes sans but lucratif et organismes de bienfaisance

Grow your start-up into a global influence with real-world impact

Scaling Global Change provides social entrepreneurs with the strong organizational foundation they need to change the world. Through the story of Room to Read, one of the fastest-growing nonprofits in the last 18 years, this book features clear, real-world lessons for growing a non-profit or social enterprise, with special insight into girls' education and literacy programming in lower-income countries. By outlining theories of program, operational, and system-level change, the discussion delves into the meat of the entrepreneurial spirit and applies it directly to everyday strategic decisions.

The book begins with an overview of essential communication, vision, and execution fundamentals, and then dives into a discussion of metrics, monitoring, planning, leadership, and more. Clear guidance on internal operations, fundraising, team building, management, and other central topics provides a roadmap for new and experienced leaders, while further exploration of influence, strategy, and government funding relates the wisdom of experience from the perspective of a successful organization.

• Cross the chasm from start-up to mature organization with worldwide impact
• Gain insight into the theoretical and practical underpinnings of nonprofit success
• Adopt new perspectives on effectiveness, excellence, and influence

• Translate ideas into action in a way that will change the world

Social entrepreneurship has taken off more than ever, and the market is crowded with optimistic leaders wanting to change the world. How do you differentiate your organization from the pack? How can you stand out, stand up, and make a real impact? These lessons are gained through experience and building a strong organizational culture; Room to Read has treaded this path and found itself at the heights of success. With Scaling Global Change, you reap the benefit of experiential lessons while applying them to the success of your own organization. **All Royalties from the sale of Scaling Global Change will be donated directly to Room To Read**

III
How We Do It

6
Administration, Finance, and International Operations: Strengthening Operations and the Implementation Chain

A Tale of Two Libraries

We decided to make one last stop on the long ride back to the hotel in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, after a great day of visiting schools. The schools we visited in the morning had been waiting for us. They knew we were coming and were prepared to show us why they appreciated Room to Read support. Despite its being late in the school year in September 2014, when students were busy preparing for exams, students and community members still took the time to welcome foreign visitors. Children waited outside to greet us. School administrators were dressed in their nicest clothes. Even parent representatives from the school management committee were at the school to answer questions, express appreciation, and gently request additional support. Often district education officials are on hand to show they are actively engaged.

We always ask schools not to go out of their way. We know that everyone is busy with many more important things to do than greet international Room to Read staff. Yet the red carpet is rolled out (figuratively most of the time but literally in some instances, too), and so we often go through this ritual. In contrast, unannounced school visits give us a chance to see what really goes on in a school. There is no time for libraries to be set up or for children to practice responses.

It was easy to make unannounced school visits that day without being too conspicuous. We had just been in the area earlier in the week to facilitate an area-wide reading competition. The competition brought together children from communities throughout the region to participate in reading-themed sport activities (for example, a reading relay, in which children had to read a few pages of a book out loud before they could run down the field and tag their next team member), with hundreds of teachers and parents cheering the children on. Room to Read was a known quantity. We were therefore confident that we were working within the rules to stop at two adjacent primary schools off the main road that tracks the spectacular coast on the way back to Dar es Salaam.

What is interesting about these two schools is that Room to Read was supporting just one of them at the time. Another organization had been supporting libraries in the area, and we had agreed with that organization to focus our efforts on the schools that had not been previously been served.

We started our unannounced visit with the school that Room to Read had not been supporting. As is the custom, we walked to the office of the head teacher. She was happy to see us, as she knew Room to Read. Many of her children had participated in the reading event earlier that week. She took us to the room that housed the school library and tried to open the door. It was locked, so she excused herself to go find the key. It took some time for her to return; she initially did not know which of the teachers had the key. Eventually she found it and opened the door with a smile.

We entered a small room that did not seem to get much use. On one side was a series of dusty, dilapidated bookcases with a small number of books strewn about in semirandom piles on each shelf. Some shelves had taped, paper labels of the letters of the alphabet, presumably to alphabetize the storybooks, but there did not seem to be any real attempt at organization. Two other cases were blocked by a table on which there were precarious stacks of storybooks. The other side of the room was used as storage space for broken furniture. These included broken desks and chairs piled close together. Sharp, broken edges protruded dangerously from the pile. The only pieces of artwork on display were a few paper plates taped to the wall with colored animal faces on them and a painting of a large baobab tree on its side on top of one of the cases.

This was not what we would consider a child-friendly space, yet the head teacher was very proud of it. She appreciated the book donations and was happy to have a library. We asked about the school’s ongoing interaction with the organization that helped set up the library. The head teacher said there was not much contact. The organization helped to organize the space initially and donated the books but did not help establish meaningful organizational or checkout systems or help school staff learn how to promote use of the books.

We thanked the head teacher and made the short walk to the second school. As we approached the second school library, the doors were wide open. Even though the formal school day had ended, there were still children and teachers milling about. The school librarian was busy attending to others but welcomed us with a nod. The space was three to four times as large as the first library. It was meant to accommodate frequent use by large classes of children. There were two big mats for children to sit on, with some pillows scattered on the floor.

Bookcases lined two of the four walls. They were painted brightly in blue, red, green, and yellow, reflecting the level of difficulty of books that were organized on each one. Shelves with neatly stacked books were labeled with photos of the animals that represented each book level: fish for blue, rooster for red, butterfly for green, and elephant for yellow. Colorful posters filled the wall space. These included the alphabet; maps of Tanzania, Africa, and the world; bodies and body parts; and health and hygiene. The wall also included a chart of the weekly class schedule for visiting the library. The librarian’s desk included the checkout registry and registry of books. The space was clean, bright, and welcoming.

The point of contrasting these two libraries is not to cast aspersions on another organization’s work or to pat ourselves on the back. We have been there ourselves! We’ve seen Room to Read libraries in the past that have resembled the first library described here. Focusing implementation in our early days on simply establishing libraries, stocking them with books, and moving on to the next school created a huge amount of uncertainty about what would happen to those spaces over time. Some of our earliest libraries were fantastic, while others were not. This had as much to do with school leadership and its interest in maintaining library spaces as it was a consequence of Room to Read’s actions.

The difference between then and now is our implementation strategy. We decided many years ago that simply creating large numbers of libraries would not be sufficient. Nor would donating used English-language children’s books. Nor would giving girls’ families money for school tuition and school uniforms. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have 100 locked libraries with broken bookshelves and dusty books if the same investment can support ten thriving libraries that are the focal point of school and community reading. We had to do something differently in our program implementation to increase the likelihood of achieving results. And we did! We were a young but rapidly growing organization, and we had learned a lot about what we needed to do better.

The differences between our old and new implementation strategies lay in how we structured professional development activities for school staff and hired school-level support staff. As described in Chapter 4, it was at this time that we started to create training workshops and ongoing monitoring support visits to prepare school staff to implement projects with quality and sustain them over time instead of just establishing libraries and filling them with books. This required hiring a new cadre of country staff members, including staff to conduct workshops and do school-level monitoring and coaching.

Overall Approach to Program Implementation

Our goal in evolving our implementation strategy has been clear from the start: growth with quality in everything we do. However, this is easier said than done, especially when staff are geographically spread out across time zones and oceans and speak multiple languages. As we fine-tuned our implementation over time, the pendulum swung back and forth between highly centralized to decentralized ways to improve the value we were delivering, but with one constant: All action is focused on the goal of providing high-quality educational opportunities for children. We knew that evolving our operational and implementation strategies had to be rooted in our organizational mission and theory of change but also aligned with the stage of development we were in at any given time. We also needed to be clear about changes along the way and the reasons for them so staff could understand and orient their own evolving functions appropriately.

Organizational Structure and Functions

Room to Read implements its historical country programs in similar ways in each of the nine countries in which we have country offices and full programs. These offices coordinate the work in countries and contextualize our global program content for local circumstances, manage program implementation, advocate, and negotiate with governments and other country stakeholders, and act as a communication hub for country staff. Field-based staff then have the most important job of all: delivering high-quality programming and support to schools and communities. Staff in regional offices throughout countries are responsible for facilitating training activities and managing school-based program activities. We then have staff who support the work in schools themselves. This includes staff members who monitor and coach the literacy work happening in classrooms, manage the library, and work with girls and their families. Finally, each of our country offices has staff members who are responsible for research, monitoring, and evaluation. These staff develop study designs and data collection tools, as well as oversee data collection, processing, and analysis.

The country office structure is meant to scale. In countries with fewer projects that are less geographically dispersed, we hire fewer program officers, program associates, and school-level staff. However, for countries with large portfolios, we hire the appropriate number of staff members for oversight and support.

---

Operational Structure at Room to Read

From an operational perspective, Room to Read is divided into two core operational units: the global office and the country offices. Figure 6.1 below shows the main functional areas as well as reporting relationships. Each country office has its own programs and its own finance and accounting, research, monitoring and evaluation, human resources, technology, and administration teams.

1. Global office (darker shaded boxes in Figure 6.1): Room to Read’s global office works collaboratively with all countries to design programs; develop and oversee worldwide policies, standards, approaches, and guidelines; raise funds; and drive awareness of Room to Read’s programs and their impact. The global office supports the country offices so that local programs are consistent, yet contextualized, and are operating with the efficiency and effectiveness needed to ensure the best results for the children we serve.
2. Country offices (lighter shaded ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• I: Framing the Issues
• II: What We Do
• III: How We Do It
• IV: Scaling for Global Change
• Index
• End User License Agreement