Change Notes: Three Million Give Back on Make A Difference Day

Friends,

Last Saturday, 50 women in Florida held a baby shower for someone they had never met: an Arkansas woman widowed this summer when her Navy SEAL husband was killed in Afghanistan. They collected more than $2,500 in gifts and filled a journal with heartfelt messages to the family. “We’re a military community,” said organizer Sue Bynum. “We need to take care of our own. Whether we know them or not, they’re ours.”

This was just one story from the three million volunteers who joined together in service on Oct. 22 as part of Make A Difference Day, the largest day of community service each year

For more than two decades, Points of Light has partnered with USA Weekend to sponsor Make A Difference Day. It is the day we celebrate the power of people to use their time, talent, voice and money to create change.

Our collective effort has grown over the years to include people from all walks of life – young and old, families, those from communities large and small. These volunteers see a problem or an opportunity in their community and take action to address it. They touch the lives of millions and find their own lives changed and transformed.

More than 50 HandsOn Network affiliates hosted signature Make A Difference Day projects addressing a variety of community needs. In Washington, D.C., more than 200 volunteers – U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his family, and employees from Make A Difference Day sponsors Citi and Gannett – worked together to revitalize J.C. Nalle Elementary School. Students from the school greeted the volunteers with cheers and encouraged them throughout their work – painting, landscaping, play space building and improvements to the school’s library.

Make A Difference Day volunteer projects from around the world included: building houses in Kenya; preparing care packages in Florida for soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq; conducting seminars about finance and careers to students in China; renovating an orphanage in Honduras; raising money for police and firefighter widows in New York; packing food and clothing for the homeless in California; rebuilding a park in Massachusetts; cleaning beaches in Brunei, Japan and Guam; and beautifying parks in England and the Philippines.

Along with getting their hands dirty at service projects, these volunteers also voiced their commitment to serve with two million people using the #MDDay11 Twitter hashtag and more than 268,000 engaging on the Make A Difference Day Facebook page.

You can continue to make a difference by submitting your Make A Difference Day project on the DAYtaBANK for an opportunity to win one of 10 $10,000 grants from Newman’s Own for the nonprofit of your choice. Sharing your story also makes you eligible to win one of three $100 Citi prepaid cards or the grand prize of a $500 Citi prepaid card.

We also encourage you to join the Make A Difference Day photo album by submitting your volunteer photos with #MDDay11 or on the DAYtaBANK.

As we move into the season of Thanksgiving, Make a Difference Day serves as an important reminder that volunteer service can be a means to strengthen communities and build bonds. We thank USA WEEKEND for its ongoing commitment to not only inform, but also inspire people to action.

Yours in service,

Michelle Nunn

CEO, Point of Light

Change Notes: Looking Back At Our Work

Friends,

For many of us, September feels like the beginning of a new year – the start of school, back to work, the change of seasons. Because Points of Light works within an annual cycle that ends Sept. 30 and “begins” on Oct. 1, this sense of fall as a time for new beginnings is accentuated.

Over the summer, we were hard at work on our annual conference in New Orleans in June, the celebration of generationOn’s partnership with Parade Magazine’s All-American Service Team, supporting our AmeriCorps Alums’ Save Service efforts and preparing to mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers for 9/11 Day.

We also dedicated time to strategic planning – plotting our work for the coming years. We consulted with literally hundreds of stakeholders and looked back on our own work over the last few years.

As we begin to share our vision for the future, we want to first share our accomplishments and mine the lessons from the previous three years.

Our previous strategic plan took us from October 2009 through September 2011, and included a number of initiatives that addressed two key pillars – driving impact and innovation across the service sector and building organizational excellence within Points of Light Institute.

Over the course of three years, we exceeded a number of our strategic goals including:

• Engaging 8.8 million Americans to serve through our network
• Recognizing and honoring 1.2 million volunteers for their contribution to communities
• Generating $116 million for nonprofits by enabling people to use their purchasing power for good
• Mobilizing 37 million people through innovative technology

We fell short of our aggressive goals to provide 10 million people with tools and resources, and we feel like we are just beginning to approach our goal to engage hundreds of thousands of volunteer leaders in self-organized projects. We have applied the lessons we’ve learned in these areas to our updated strategic plan and we are excited about the possibilities.

As the nation faces increasing challenges and limited resources, we believe it is incumbent upon us to think creatively and embrace risk, and even failure, in pursuit of transformation. We will try to embrace big goals in the hope of creating big impact at a time when we really need it. We will strive to make service central to meeting the critical issues of our time.

We are grateful for the extraordinary partnerships and support that made the work of our last three year plan possible and we look forward to sharing our new strategic plan in the coming weeks.

Yours in service,

    Michelle Nunn CEO, Points of Light Institute

Change Notes: 50 Years of Global Impact

Friends,

On Sept. 22, 1961, Congress approved legislation creating the Peace Corps. This organization was born not of politics, but rather the enthusiasm and idealism of students responding to a speech by President John F. Kennedy that lasted less than five minutes. These students gathered signatures on a petition expressing support for President Kennedy’s idea and, buoyed by this response, the president went on to create his signature service program.

The Peace Corps has shaped the sensibility of our nation and it has become an iconic representation of our nation’s idealism. It has had a profound impact in shaping our relationship with the world, creating change on the ground in developing nations, and cultivating a leadership corps of Peace Corps Alums who have shaped our nation and its global interactions. Yet, it still stands at only 8,000 annual volunteers versus President Kennedy’s dream of 100,000 volunteers serving around the world.

As we mark the triumphs and continued aspirations of the program, it gives us an opportunity to think about the larger trends around international service and the opportunities before us.

On a personal note, when I graduated from college 20-plus years ago, I applied to the Peace Corps. I knew I wanted to be involved in service and I was committed to doing something internationally. While I waited for my Peace Corps application, I met a group of individuals who were starting an effort to mobilize volunteers in Atlanta and I became the first glorified, part-time executive director of a nascent effort called Hands On Atlanta. By the time I was accepted into the Peace Corps, I had found that I loved my domestic service work and deferred, focusing on building Hands On Atlanta and later HandsOn Network, which now has combined to form Points of Light Institute – with more than 250 HandsOn affiliates and a presence in 40 international cities.

I share this story because I think it helps illustrate the changing landscape of international service and three salient trend lines.

Twenty years ago, there was a fairly well-defined choice – serve domestically or serve internationally. Today, the lines are more blurred. Increasingly, young people are operating as global citizens. One of our Daily Point of Light award winners, Sejal Hathi, illustrates this trend. Sejal was a 15-year-old in a suburb of San Francisco who decided her mission was to empower girls in developing countries. She founded Girls Helping Girls (GHG), an international nonprofit that partners girls in the U.S. with girls in schools and communities in developing countries. The American and local girls jointly identify problems in those countries and develop programs to create positive change.

Today, those GHG volunteers have worked with 5,000 girls in 15 countries. They have also raised $40,000 to provide basic necessities to impoverished girls around the world. Sejal, who is now in college, continues to create change. She has amplified GHG into the Sisters 4 Peace Network, a social change forum that mentors and provides resources to girls who want to create their own destinies. I think we will increasingly see people participating seamlessly in both domestic and international service.

The second trend is the role that the private sector is playing in international engagement and development. The interactions of private sector marketplaces and charities are increasingly complex and interesting. I am participating in the Clinton Global Initiative this week in New York and the entire forum is a testament to the fact that efforts to tackle complex global problems necessitate a high degree of collaboration across all sectors.

We are also starting to see the blurring of the lines between sectors as forces for international development. Social enterprise and the creation of new “B Corps,” or hybrids doing social good through private sector and markets, will increasingly change the nature of international service. A new generation of social entrepreneurs and international service leaders are choosing to support global development through the private marketplace. This will inevitably shape the future of international service as we have traditionally known it.

International service is increasingly being dominated not by well-intentioned generalists like I was when I volunteered for the Peace Corps 20 years ago, but well-intentioned business specialists – engineers, medical technicians, scientists, agricultural economists who are lending their technical expertise to the social and economic development work being done by members of local communities – all hearkening back to President Kennedy’s call 50 years ago. NGOs and the Peace Corps are looking for skilled volunteers.

And international service is now being adopted by businesses in creative new ways. Corporations like IBM, Dow and Pfizer are deploying their most capable professionals in focused projects across the globe to create transformational impact. IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, for example, has deployed 1,000 skilled volunteers over the last year to implement extraordinary projects in countries around the world, and has become a model for other businesses that seek to replicate and expand their own efforts. Points of Light Institute’s Corporate Service Council and many of our partners – Brookings Institute, Clinton Global Initiative, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Civic Leadership Center – are exploring ways to effectively scale these corporate models for international engagement.

Corporations are empowering not only their employees to give back, but also their customers. MissionFish, an initiative that started with Points of Light Institute and now is fully incorporated and run by eBay, allows individuals to contribute a portion of their purchase or sale to the charity of their choice. In eight years, it has raised close to more than $241 million dollars for international charities.

So people are now able to leverage their time, their skills, their philanthropic dollars and their purchasing power to create change in the international arena – and they are doing it as volunteers, as social entrepreneurs, as employees and as customers.

Finally, my third point is that what Tom Friedman has famously called our “flat world” has created international service that is increasingly reciprocal and circular.

Gianna Montinola, the founder of HandsOn Manila, is a terrific example. Gianna volunteered with HandsOn Phoenix until she moved back to her native Philippines. There she recognized the need to start a similar organization. HandsOn Manila builds on the local concept of bayanihan, the local term for getting together to help someone in need. But it applies this value to a model of flexible volunteering borrowed from the United States. In the last 10 years, it has grown to engage 8,500 volunteers.

HandsOn Manila has hosted international teams around disaster relief, has brought back innovations that have been modeled by our domestic affiliates, such as creating CDs to raise money and partnering with corporations like Accenture, Chevron, InterContinental Hotels and Starbucks. It has launched a HandsOn Vacation program, hosting international volunteers to work on ecological, heritage and disaster response efforts.

Gianna started as a HandsOn Phoenix volunteer, moved home and created a program in Manila. She now engages volunteers from HandsOn Phoenix and across the U.S. in international service projects that mix international and domestic volunteers. The volunteers at HandsOn Phoenix participate in projects at home that have been inspired by volunteers in Manila. It is a flat world indeed.

There is, again, a blurring of lines. With the strengthened volunteer and civic infrastructure in countries around the world, so-called international volunteers will increasingly be working side by side with indigenous volunteers. A program like Atlas Corps is now bringing rising leaders from around the world to the U.S. to serve for a year with U.S.-based nonprofit organizations.

With this change comes a change in mindset. No longer will we think in terms of helping people in need “over there,” but rather we will think in terms of how we work together to build a better, more sustainable world for us all. This example also illustrates the importance of building the capacity of local organizations to effectively use the time and talents of volunteers from overseas. Points of Light Institute is equipping a growing number of social entrepreneurs around the world with the resources and tools they need to launch volunteer-mobilizing organizations that also strengthen how local NGOs are leveraging volunteer talent.

I think these trends around international service are hopeful and can create new ways of creating scale and impact globally. So many things have changed in the last 50 years, but one constant is that we still need the idealism and creative energy of people to create change in the world.

One day I hope to return to my deferred dream to join the Peace Corps. Perhaps when I retire, I will be one of a hundred thousand inter-generational volunteers serving around the globe, changing our nation, the world and ourselves in the process.

To learn more about ServiceWorld, an initiative to help us achieve President Kennedy’s vision of 100,000 volunteers serving abroad each year and usher in new thresholds of global service, go to www.ourserviceworld.org.

Yours in service,

Michelle Nunn

CEO, Points of Light Institute

Personal Reflection on the Day of Service and Remembrance and 9/12

Michelle Nunn, CEO of Points of Light Institute and Co-Founder of HandsOn Network personally reflects on the 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance and the day that followed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, when  Glenn Winuk, a lawyer and volunteer fire fighter, ran into the burning buildings instead of running for safety, he did something both unexpected and also, evidently, completely in character. He did not follow his fear instinct; he followed his instinct to help. He was willing to sacrifice his own safety and, ultimately, his life, to ensure the safety of others.

Glenn’s brother, Jay, responded to the tragedy of 9/11 and the death of his brother in an improbable way as well. In grappling with his brother’s death, he decided he wanted to commemorate this terrible loss each year by asking us all to act upon our own instinct to help. He and his friend, David Paine, created an organization called MyGoodDeed. They worked against many odds and obstacles over the last decade to commemorate 9/11 as a Day of Service and Remembrance.

This unexpected response now seems entirely fitting. It helps us recapture the spirit that united our nation as we grappled with the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years ago, on 9/12, people across the country and around the world responded with empathy and compassion. They reached out to support friends and family – and total strangers. The world embraced our nation with a spirit of solidarity, and the nation embraced the victims and their families with a generosity that took the form of uniting, giving and acting.

Ten years later, that unity seems to have been fleeting. But I believe it was recaptured, in some measure, over the last weekend in hundreds of thousands of acts of service. Points of Light Institute and our 250 HandsOn Network affiliates had the privilege of partnering with MyGoodDeed and a coalition of other organizations to activate one million people to pay tribute through service in commemorating 9/11.

Hundreds of thousands of people joined hands to give back, honor the memory of those victims and heroes that were lost and assert the nation’s resiliency and compassion. More than 12,000 people volunteered with HandsOn Greater DC Cares, an almost 80 percent increase year over year. HandsOn Bay area kicked off a documentary film series, “What It Means to Be an American in a Post-9/11 World” that will run throughout the month of September, bringing together hundreds to learn, discuss and address multiculturalism and look for solutions. Volunteers with Boston Cares planted 3,000 American flags in complete silence to honor the lives lost on 9/11.

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, Director of the Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Rep. Jerry Nadler, California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, Boston Mayor Thomas  Menino, San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee,  and NBA Legends were just a few of the dignitaries and leaders who joined hands to serve with our affiliates.

All of this was made possible with private sector support. American Express inspired thousands of employees and customers to act and remember with the launch of their I WILL VOLUNTEER Facebook application and were the signature sponsor of the effort. National contributors included Chase, the events mobilization partner who focused on military families and veterans; Best Buy whose support enabled thousands to upload stories and post tributes on 911day.org; and GlaxoSmithKline, whose investment provided more than one million teachers with lesson plans and age-appropriate service projects.

This Day of Service and Remembrance was a reminder that, at our best, our nation addresses challenges and tragedy with compassion, generosity and service. This is a tribute to Glenn and Jay and the family, victims and heroes of 9/11 and those who have served our country in its aftermath.

On the night of the 9/11 anniversary, twin shafts of light illuminated Ground Zero in tribute. And throughout the day, a living memorial, a million volunteers, illuminated the nation through their acts of service.

Change Notes: Four Year Anniversary Reflections on Points of Light Institute

Anniversaries are always a good time to reflect upon the past – what we have learned and also what we want for the future. This month marks the four-year anniversary of the merger of Points of Light Foundation and HandsOn Network. I thought it would be a good time to share some of our achievements, lessons learned and plans for the future.

In August 2007, HandsOn Network merged with Points of Light Foundation to become Points of Light Institute. Our hope was to create an integrated, dynamic force in the volunteer sector. Both organizations entered the merger with unique histories, champions and assets – including, uniquely a Presidential legacy. As with any merger, there were both high aspirations and anxiety. Could we make our combined efforts create more impact than our singular efforts? What would we give up and what would be gained?

We believe we have answered these questions in the affirmative. We have broadened our impact, increased efficiencies and done more than either organization could have done alone. At this time of constrained resources, when nonprofits are being asked to do more with less, and organizations are looking at new forms of partnership and even mergers, we thought it would be helpful to share some of the things we have learned and achieved in our merger.

Our Accomplishments

Over four years, Points of Light Institute has grown, learned, innovated and found new ways to inspire, equip and mobilize volunteers. While this journey has had its challenges, we have emerged stronger.

Organizational Gains

• We have found new models for fundraising and investment and we are no longer dependant on federal funding to sustain our operations. We have expanded and diversified our funding base to include investments from America’s leading companies, created innovative cause-marketing campaigns, and mounted a successful social enterprise and $30 million legacy campaign that was fueled largely by individual investors. This campaign was a terrific tribute to the enthusiasm that President George H.W. Bush has inspired with his call to a Thousand Points of Light and his own servant and civic leadership.
• We have relocated our office headquarters to Atlanta, shaved millions off our expenses and made thoughtful choices around personnel consolidation. We have strong, diverse and dedicated board and staff teams made up of leaders in our sector who work effectively together.
• Since its inception we have generated more than $241 million for the nonprofit sector through MissionFish, enabling people to designate portions of online purchases and sales to charities. We successfully spun this venture off to eBay in 2011, allowing for continued growth and dollars for the sector.

Programmatic Gains

• We have implemented a comprehensive evaluation system with our HandsOn Network affiliates where none existed before. That measurement tells us that, from 2008 to 2010, we increased our annual volunteer engagement by 1.5 million people, and added more than 6,000 new partners and 21,000 Volunteer Leaders to implement high impact service projects for communities in need.
• We have continued to grow important corporate partners, including executing exciting volunteer mobilization efforts like Disney’s “Give A Day, Get a Disney Day” with one million people activated, and Starbucks’ “I’m In” campaign that contributed more than one million service hours in communities around the country. We have strengthened our Corporate Service Council, a group of more than 50 corporations that are leading the way in volunteerism and employee engagement. This group is defining new models of global service, skill-based volunteering and shared corporate standards to measure the impact of employee volunteer service. We are also poised to take on a new threshold of leadership with our new Corporate Institute, designed to bring together and harness the power of companies. The Corporate Institute will provide a forum for businesses, create and share vital resources and consulting services and support on-the-ground employee volunteer activation around the world.
• We merged the strong assets of three powerful youth service organizations – Children for Children, the League and Learning to Give – into generationOn, our new youth activation division that has the national scale to put kids, tweens and teens at the center of change. We have established a $5 million partnership with Hasbro, and have been building strong partnerships with organizations like Parade Magazine to fuel our work with youth. An example of the collective impact of generationOn and our Hasbro partnership was our 2010 Toys for Tots campaign where, within a week during the holiday season, more than 115,000 kids pledged an act of service in 2011 through the generationOn website and Hasbro donated a toy for each pledge to underserved children across the country.
• The Points of Light Institute Civic Incubator has been established and laid a foundation for leadership around mergers and acquisitions and incubating promising ventures. The Civic Incubator completed the mergers that resulted in generationOn, and supported the post-merger integration, and program and website development to formally launch generationOn. AmeriCorps Alums is another incubating unit with new focus and strategy developed to take this unit to scale. Two critical ventures – global service and the Corporate Institute – have been launched and seeded with accomplished leaders. Finally, a new model of incubating early stage ventures by civic entrepreneurs was piloted with the launch of Fuse Corps – a fellowship program putting young executive talent at the center of community initiatives across the country.

Creating a Culture of Service

• Our national days of service are providing a strong foundation and national leadership for volunteer mobilization across the country and throughout the year. The 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance, Make A Difference Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service and National Volunteer Week mobilize more than four million Americans annually to find ways to address the challenges in their communities. Each of these days provides a moment in time for the entire sector to inspire both long-time volunteers and new audiences.
• We have solidified and expanded our recognition programs, including Daily Point of Light Award, installed 13 medallions in the past four years in the Extra Mile monument in Washington, D.C., and distributed nearly 550,000 Presidential Volunteer Service Awards over the past four years. We have truly lifted up service and millions of Points of Light – with the nationally televised “All Together Now” celebration of service and tribute to President George H. W. Bush earlier this year, the Presidential Forum on Service with President Barack Obama at Texas A&M University in 2009, and a White House reception honoring President Bush’s leadership in volunteerism, among other national platforms. President Bush’s original vision for Points of Light continues to inspire and guide our work.
• We helped support and lead a coalition of organizations to imagine and pass the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act – the largest extension of the federal investment in service since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Points of Light helped formulate several new dimensions of the Act including the Volunteer Generation Fund.
• Finally, the National Conference on Volunteering and Service has become the marquee event for the service sector. The annual conference has grown to include more than 4,500 thought leaders bringing together grassroots, national and global nonprofit organizations, corporations, educators, youth leaders, faith organizations, national service members, community volunteers and national leaders including Presidents George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, First Lady Michelle Obama, former California First Lady and journalist Maria Shriver, actress and activist Ruby Dee, civil rights icons John Lewis and Andrew Young, musician Jon Bon Jovi, comedian John Oliver, and media personalities such as James Carville, Mary Matalin, Soledad O’Brien, Robin Roberts, Arianna Huffington, David Gergen and Joe Scarborough.

Lessons Learned

We have learned many lessons, a few of them painful. We have learned that while there is universal acclaim for consolidation, there are few funders or resources that are focused on the effort. It is important to get some up-front funding to support integration and that gives a runway to the merger efforts. It is critical to have expertise to assist on an often tricky path – we were lucky to have merger consulting support from Accenture, legal support from McKenna Long & Aldridge, and consulting around restructuring our finances from Deloitte – all of this was pro bono and we could not have done the work without these resources. With our subsequent mergers and acquisition efforts, The Kellogg Foundation was a valuable partner and funder to make the emergence of generationOn possible.

We learned that however long you think it will take, it will likely take longer to realize full integration, and that while there are long-term efficiencies, there are also up-front costs. We also learned that culture is extraordinarily important and creating shared agreements around values and direction is critical to minimize disruption down the line.

Our Plans for the Future

As a sector, as we face increasing challenges and limited resources, I think it is incumbent upon all of us to think creatively and embrace risk and even failure in pursuit of transformation. We are excited about the future of the organization and are at the end of a strategic planning process to chart out our next three years. We look forward to sharing our plans in the coming months.  As we have been looking forward in our planning, we have also been looking back and reflecting upon our lessons and the many champions who have been a part of our work. We are grateful to all the essential partners and stakeholders who have helped us on this journey and we look forward to working together to make service central to meeting the critical issues of our time in the coming years.

Yours in service,

CEO, Points of Light Institute