December 2008

Dear Friends:
It has been an extraordinary year at the Community-Driven Institute. While composing this letter lets us reflect on just how amazing the year has been, it also us excited to head into 2009!

2008 Was Incredible!
Everything we worked on this year was groundbreaking, laying the foundation for what is to come. Looking back, it is incredible that all this happened in just one twelve month period!

First, this year saw the completion of The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing ‘Nonprofit Organizations' to Create the Future of Our World. The response to the practical concepts in the book has been inspiring - we already have college professors anxious to use it as a text in their classes, having read only the manuscript!

The Consultant Education Program at the Community-Driven Institute was another big part of the year. In June, a team of seven brilliant consultants from across the U.S. and Canada spent a week helping us deconstruct every thought process we are intending to teach, infusing the program with their own wisdom and experience. We are excited to debut that program early in 2009.

Our ongoing relationship with the Duquesne University School of Leadership has been one of the most affirming parts of our work for the past several years. This year, we officially joined their faculty, teaching a course titled Creating the Future of Your Community in their Masters level Community Leadership program. It was wonderful to add "teaching" to the list of hats we have worn with the School of Leadership.

Hildy's best-selling Board Recruitment workbook underwent a long-overdue rewrite, adding 55 pages and 21 new chapters - not to mention 7 years worth of stories! Hildy also spent hours with foundation leaders across the U.S., the result of which was What Do Funders Want? (And Why Do They Want It?). It never occurred to us that the biggest purchasers of this little 50-page book would be funders themselves, but they are buying it in bulk to provide to grant applicants and volunteer grant review committees. Wow!

As always, there was a great deal of travel this year, as we visited communities from coast to coast across the continent

We spent a month last spring traveling the length and width of California, teaching small, local fire safe councils about Community Engagement. We also had several projects in Reno, Nevada this year, all focused on building a better future in Northern Nevada. That work culminated in July with a United Way-sponsored summit, bringing together 100 community leaders to address the question, "How can we ensure Northern Nevada families are financially secure?"

The year's travels culminated with our 2 ½ month Community-Driven Tour. Starting off in Grand Rapids, Michigan with a keynote for the Dorothy Johnson Center for Philanthropy, and heading east from there, the tour spanned almost 20 communities across the U.S. and Canada. Our message resonated everywhere we went: Creating visionary change in our communities is not only possible; it is practical and doable. The tour will definitely become an annual effort. How else to "spread the gospel of community change" than to bring that message directly to communities!?

What's In Store for 2009
With the release of The Pollyanna Principles in January, the year will certainly kick off to a rousing start. The week-long intensive "Skill-Builder" level of the Consultant Education Program will begin in April, running monthly from there. Hildy's ongoing speaking schedule always keeps us busy, and of course there will be the Community-Driven Tour 2009 (locations yet to be determined).

In addition, we will be working on several demonstration projects, to help build community-wide infrastructure for the kinds of change our sector is all about. Imagine what could be accomplished if every community had everything it needed for building a strong Community Benefit Sector!

Lastly, we will continue our campaign to eliminate the word "nonprofit" from this sector's work (yes, including a name change at Help 4 NonProfits.) Between our mug and our You Tube video, we are just getting warmed up! We are asking you to join us as we stop talking about what we're not, and start calling ourselves by what we are - Community Benefit Organizations!

The rest is up to providence and serendipity, both of which continue to lead us to opportunities we never could have imagined. If you have a Community-Driven project you would like our help with, you may just find yourself in next year's holiday letter!

And so, to all of you who have been friends, colleagues and supporters this past year, we thank you for the incredible work you are doing to make our world a more healthy, vibrant, humane place to live. We wish you all the possibilities life holds, and, more importantly, the willingness to embrace those possibilities when they show up at your door.

Fondly,

Dimitri Petropolis Hildy Gottlieb Community-Driven Institute