Journal 1
The Blue Ridge Foundation is a social venture capital fund, which incubates growing nonprofits in their office space in downtown Brooklyn. In addition to providing their portfolio organizations with seed capital, Blue Ridge also offers strategic consulting services through hiring summer interns. Currently, Blue Ridge has three organizations — Common Justice, Green City Force, and Blue Engine — housed in their office space, as well as a few affiliate staff from partner organizations. In addition, Blue Ridge continuously supports their alumni portfolio — such as exalt, iMentor, Groundwork, Citizen Schools, and Year Up — in a number of ways, including providing summer consulting services.Having spent last summer and part of the school year interning at the Blue Ridge Foundation, I was asked by Columbia Business School’s social enterprise office why I felt like I needed to go back to Blue Ridge for yet another summer. Hadn’t I learned what I was meant to learn the first time? Shouldn’t I spend my time at another organization, with different needs and different lessons? All were valid questions, and provided me with an opportunity to solidify my rationale for spending another summer at Blue Ridge. There were two reasons why going back provided an experience that I needed, and couldn’t have gotten anywhere else:
Organisms, not Mechanisms: As the Columbia Business School professor Michael Feiner likes to say, “Being successful in organizational life requires a level of trust.” You have to learn to trust that your boss, peers, and subordinates are all moving toward the same goal of fulfilling the company’s mission. This trust is built upon the successful inculcation of company values in all employees, and without these shared values, trust will never develop. As important as this principle is in the abstract, it is doubly critical when you’re a business school student and a consultant to a number of innovative nonprofit start-ups, as I was at Blue Ridge.
Generally, nonprofit founders feel very protective of their innovative intervention. Additionally, they tend to be skeptical of a business-school type approach. This combination can prove damaging to the project — stalling or even derailing the project altogether, sometimes in subtle, yet toxic, ways. Being at Blue Ridge for an extended period of time, unlike the typical 10-week internship, gave me deeper knowledge about the organizations I was consulting with. In addition, I built strong relationships with the organizational leaders — this rapport was key in building a deepening trust between us, which allowed for successful projects and serious organizational change. Finally, I honed my intuition around the types of challenges these organizations face and the most viable proposed solutions for their particular organizational cultures.
Another great Columbia Business School leadership professor, Ralph Biggadike, likes to say “Organizations are organisms, not mechanisms.” My extended tenure at Blue Ridge allowed me the luxury of seeing everything more richly and with more complexity than a standard engagement would have allowed. And my burgeoning ability — to see complexity, to be compassionate, to build strong relationships, to engender trust — will be well utilized in any other setting.
Difficult Conversations: In addition to knowing the nonprofit organizations better, Blue Ridge knows me better too — which allowed them to tailor my projects to my strengths and weaknesses. While the first summer I requested (and received) projects focused on finance and operations, this summer I was more nuanced in my requests, and they were more generous in their offerings.
My desire to expand my skill set led them to give me a more managerial role on a set of performance management projects, a process evaluation which required a 20-page report, and an analysis of the foundation’s efficacy in the past 10 years. In addition, they managed me more aggressively as they knew how to push me harder and how to be more effective thought partners.
Matt and Meryl, my bosses, had much more productive conversations with me, as we trusted each other enough to be comfortable with conflict, which was a critical skill I will take away from my time at Blue Ridge. We often had difficult conversations, where we disagreed about a concept or approach, without worrying about being polite or if we were being misunderstood. Developing the capacity for difficult conversations, real constructive criticism, or “clean” conflict, is a skill I was so afraid of before Blue Ridge. And now, I’m actually looking forward to building this culture at my next organization.
Journal 2
One of the biggest challenges I faced this summer took me completely by surprise. When I was assigned to write a process evaluation of Blue Engine’s first year, I assumed it would be a fairly cut and dry project. I would interview the program’s stakeholders, aggregate their key observations about what worked and what didn’t, and develop a list of strategic insights for implementation in the coming years. It was a big task, but had clear steps and an overall sense of direction.
At first, all seemed to be going according to plan. However, a third of the way into my interviews, I noticed something strange. When I asked the same questions (I had prepared a list), I received answers that were almost identical, down to the word choice. However, when I veered from the script to probe about specific answers, I heard radically different opinions. People were saying the same things, but they meant something different. Conversely, they also sometimes said what seemed like contradictory things, but actually meant the same thing. It was very confusing, and I soon became panicked that I would get no meaningful data from the interviews.
After consulting with Meryl, I tried a different approach. Instead of sticking strictly to the script, I allowed for more improvisation, and more importantly, I followed their train of thought, instead of my own. Learning to listen was a much more difficult task than I had anticipated. I had to withhold judgments or assumptions and continue to ask questions that would get closer to the heart of the matter. Throughout this process, I learned that many of the program’s stakeholders spent time talking to each other about their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the program. Through conversations, certain phrases and key themes were codified, despite not actually hewing to evidence or representing the unanimous opinion.
Only by listening closely to what people meant, and not what they said, was I able to extract the meaningful data from my interviews, which was markedly different from the hypothesis we developed initially. Allowing myself to spend time in a state of suspended judgment was difficult, as part of business school training focuses on developing hypotheses and conclusions early, but this skill, which is part of learning how to listen, is one I am proud of mastering.
Journal 3
As a senior summer associate, I was privy to more foundation-related work than before. I was tapped to help Matt on rebranding and rebuilding the Blue Ridge website, and to help Meryl streamline a very confusing resource bank project. These two projects, along with an analysis of the foundation’s performance over the last 10 years for our founder and funder, John Griffin, gave me a much clearer picture of how the foundation manages, organizes, and assesses its own work.
All this was very enlightening, especially as I embarked on my final Blue Ridge project — building a performance management system for the foundation, which will help it track impact, predict trends, and make decisions about how to allocate resources (monetary and otherwise) to supporting organizations.
Working on this project was like trying to tell a story without knowing any of the main characters or the plot line. I was certain that the data from the past 10 years would show some key trends, which — coupled with additional metrics garnered from the world of philanthropy and impact investing (ROI, Leverage) — would provide a complete universe of characters. Watching these metrics rise and fall in correlation with each other would tell us the story of how Blue Ridge works: Does ROI increase as leverage does? Does impact increase exponentially, or in a step-wise fashion over the years? Do organizations who track high school graduation have higher Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGRs) than organizations who do criminal justice work? Knowing the answers to these questions would allow for more precise decision making.
What we thought at the beginning of the summer would be a neat and complete story, turned out to be a veritable Choose Your Own Adventure book. The 17 organizations in Blue Ridge’s portfolio are so idiosyncratic that distilled trends were meaningless for making decisions. Only financial trends, such as leverage and CAGR, could be assessed portfolio-wide, but even these had little relevance. In fact, we discovered that instead of telling the story of Blue Ridge, it was more meaningful to help the organizations tell their own stories. Allowing the organizations to tell their own stories, instead of imposing our structure on them, is another way Blue Ridge differentiates itself from other foundations and lives its values — we keep the focus on what our portfolio does, not what we do for them.
Overall, I’m so proud to say that I was a part of the Blue Ridge family. Everyone who works at a Blue Ridge portfolio organization embodies that rare alchemy of deep passion combined with fierce intellect. It’s a group of people who are working insanely hard to solve intractable problems in innovative ways and I hope to find (or create) this culture wherever I am next.
