Opinion: Nonprofit Groups Should Narrowly Define Their Missions

Charities in China should take cues from charities that have succeeded by focusing clearly on what they want to achieve and on the people they want to serve, say two nonprofit consultants in an opinion article for Forbes.

Susan Colby and Nan Stone, both partners with the Bridgespan Group, a consulting firm, write of the Harlem Children’s Zone as one example of a group that used what they call “strategic clarity” to better define what it wanted to achieve.

Until 2000, Harlem Children’s Zone, originally named the Rheedlen Centers, worked to help poor children in the nation’s most-impoverished areas but realized this goal was out of reach with its limited resources.

The group renamed itself the Harlem Children’s Zone and focused solely on helping children up to age 18 living within the Harlem area of New York make the transition to adult self-sufficiency. At the end of 2007, 142 students had entered college, and graduating high-school seniors had received more than $2.25-million in scholarships.

Write Ms. Colby and Ms. Stone, “Whether in Harlem or China, deciding what’s inside and what’s outside an organization’s “zone” of activities is a challenge with which all nonprofits will have to wrestle as they mature. By bringing clarity and transparent measures to good intentions, they increase the case for philanthropy itself.”

Read The Chronicle’s special report on ways Harlem Children’s Zone and other organizations are seeking to grow.

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