Put yourself in the other person’s shoes

Yesterday I attended a Compass DC event about megacommunities. Reggie Van Lee, author of Megacommunities: How Leaders of Government, Business and Nonprofits Can Tackle Today’s Global Challenges Together spoke about the tri-sector approach to problem solving. Megacommunities was a new concept for me, but makes absolute sense. The point is that many societal issues are too large and complex for any one entity to solve. Megacommunities bring together business, nonprofit and government to collaborate on common interests and achieve results.

Reggie spoke about Megacommunity projects that he has been involved with through Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH). BAH has served as the program manager on Megacommunities around Alzheimer’s and HIV/AIDS. Reggie said one of the key things they do when launching a Megacommunity is to get all the stakeholders to put themselves in each other’s shoes. Often times the biggest challenge to getting sectors to collaborate is that people fail to think about things from each other’s perspective.

This got me to think about a value-add that sector switchers can bring to nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits are increasingly working with the private sector to help them address their missions. It used to be that nonprofits only viewed corporations as a source of funding, but now that is changing. Organizations like America’s Second Harvest get corporate donations of food for food banks around the country. Environmental Defense Fund works with corporations to decrease their environmental impact. Forces for Good highlights this concept of “Make Markets Work” as one of the six practices of high-impact nonprofits.

So one of the things that sector switchers should think about is how they can leverage their private sector experience in a nonprofit organization. Sector switchers have experience wearing both shoes, and this may help them identify new opportunities for nonprofit organizations.