Tamara Woodbury, Executive Director, Girl Scouts-Arizona; 2001 Piper Fellow. Photo Credit: Girl Scouts-Arizona Cactus-Pine Council

Tamara Woodbury, executive director of the Girl Scouts-Arizona Cactus-Pine Council was in the first class of Piper Fellows, chosen in 2001.

The sabbatical let her explore a different style of management:  working collaboratively in a “learning organization” that continually adapts and improves.

She started at the source: a three-day course run by scientist and strategist Peter Senge, who developed the concept. At the end of her travel and study, the Fellowship gave Woodbury the breathing space to spend time in her cabin in Flagstaff, reflecting on how to use what she’d learned.

Then she helped lead the Cactus-Pine Council away from a hierarchical structure to cooperative self-managed teams, “leadership from the inside out,” as Woodbury puts it. “We want to inspire every girl to be a leader,” she said.

Arizona became a model, shaping the organization of the national Girl Scout movement, which even adopted the council’s new mission statement: “Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.”

Without the Fellowship, it would never have happened. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford to have taken the additional leadership development that really inspired me,” Woodbury said.

David Noble, Development Director, Sun Sounds of Arizona; 2012 Piper Fellow.

David Noble is part of the latest class, the 2012 Fellows. He’s the development director for Sun Sounds of Arizona, which provides audio access to information to people in the Southwest who cannot read print because they have a disability.

The focus of his Fellowship is how to make radios and home electronics accessible. He has a dual goal: improving the lives of those with limited or no vision and raising money to support the nonprofit.

“At the end of my Fellowship,” Noble said, “I intend to have a business plan for Sun Sounds of Arizona to become a consultant for pay to major manufacturers of products that they would like to have accessible.”

As corporate and federal funding for nonprofits continues to shrink, the Piper Fellowship can be a crash course in becoming more self-sufficient and entrepreneurial.

Darlene Newsom, CEO, UMOM New Day Centers; 2011 Piper Fellow. Photo Credit: UMOM New Day Centers

That was a major draw for Darlene Newsom, chief executive officer of UMOM New Day Centers, who became a 2011 Piper Fellow. The nonprofit is the largest homeless shelter for families in Arizona, providing services designed to lead to stable, permanent housing.

Through conferences and site visits, Newsom studied the opportunities in social enterprise—businesses that generate income while also advancing a nonprofit’s mission. She wanted to build on UMOM’s food-service training program, which provides job skills to break the cycle of homelessness.

The Fellowship paid for travel and training that were far beyond her nonprofit’s budget. “To me,” she said, “this is like gold.”

Now UMOM is expanding its training program and adding a barista component. It has already picked up two more contracts to supply meals to other institutions, raising extra revenue. It’s adopting catering software to track business and looking at a “chef’s night” fundraiser.

Thanks to a $50,000 Piper Trust Organizational Enhancement Award, UMOM is hiring a social-enterprise director to ramp up its business side.

This opportunity for follow-up grants has magnified the power of the Fellowships.

With a staff development grant, the Desert Botanical Garden was able to send 25 people to a design symposium. That gave them a common vocabulary and vision, said planning and exhibits director McGinn.

The Garden received a Piper Trust Organizational Enhancement Award to design a new core trail master plan—and almost immediately picked up a $1 million donation to build a key part of it, the Desert Portal.

Karl Gentles, Executive Director of Back-To-School Clothing Drive Association and 2011 Piper Fellow, talks with community members about what to expect when 5,000 children show up to get new school clothing. Photo credit: Wayne Parham

The Piper Fellowship is a personal as well as a professional journey. For many ambitious nonprofit executives, taking care of themselves is the last priority, said Avein Saaty-Tafoya, chief executive officer of Adelante Healthcare.

As a 2010 Fellow, she gained insights about customer service and environmental sustainability, which are now being applied in the not-for-profit’s seven sites in the greater Phoenix area. She also got insight into herself.

For the first time in years, Saaty-Tafoya focused on her own welfare. She did a week-long silent meditative retreat at the Esalen Institute in California. “I had never been silent in my entire life,” she said. She reconnected with her passion for painting.

Saaty-Tafoya became so convinced of the value of self-care that most Adelante facilities now have a wellness room, where people can relax, exercise, or meditate.

An unexpected side effect of the Fellowship program is how it strengthens nonprofit management, said Chris Tompkins, a 2002 Fellow. He was executive director of the Foundation for Blind Children at the time and is now the Piper Fellows program coordinator.

The sabbatical forces organizations to plan for the director or another key executive to be gone for an extended time. They become more resilient and better prepared for later transitions in leadership.

Sometimes, as in Tompkins’ case, delegating the work leads to a permanent reorganization and reassignment of duties. “It allowed me to be a much truer CEO,” he said, “and allowed the senior team to assume more day-to-day responsibilities.”

Another surprise bonus was how the Fellows took charge.

“One of the most important things about this program is that the Piper Fellows have owned it themselves,” Mohraz said. “They have shaped it themselves.”

So past Fellows continue to meet regularly, along with the current group. The program includes annual retreats, monthly breakfasts, and monthly learning circles, where Fellows share ideas and collaborate in problem solving.

Developing this network of leaders has multiplied the impact of Piper Fellowships.

“It’s opened up so many opportunities and relationships,” said Paul Mittman, president of Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine & Health Sciences and a 2009 Fellow.

For instance, a former Piper Fellow joined the college’s board of trustees and almost immediately brought in a major donation, catalyzing a campus expansion. Another Fellow gave the keynote address at a recent graduation.

Paul Mittman, President, Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. Photo Credit: Suzanne Starr

To help grantees deliver effective programs and sustain operations over time, Piper Trust created a tiered system that supports nonprofits in different ways, at different levels, at times that are right for each organization.

“If we want to go broad and shallow we have what we call our Piper Academies,” Solowey says. “The idea is to bring in national thought leaders who will offer new ideas, new ways of thinking, or the best practices in operating a nonprofit.” Topics run the gamut from those about traditional nonprofit management—fundraising, human resources, succession planning—to those about nurturing nonprofit leaders.

“There are sessions about poetry, motivation, and forgiveness,” says Lyman. “So it’s not just like they’re feeding one side of the organization. They’re looking at the people who come to it and treating them holistically.”

Dr. Paul Mittman, president of Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, says these Academies have affected his school in two ways. They routinely make incremental impacts by introducing new best practices or other innovative ideas that the school can incorporate. “But periodically we have these transformational experiences through the Academies,” he says. “Part of that is because Piper usually invites us to bring along a board member. Once you do that, you have an opportunity for change that happens at the very top of the organization’s governance. It increases the likelihood you’ll see a big change.”

An example is an Academy program on succession planning Mittman attended with his board chair last year. “As a result, we went back and not only did we develop a succession plan, we put an emergency plan in place,” he says. “The Piper Academy not only became the catalyst for it but also gave us detailed information that served as a template for how to do it.”

If a nonprofit’s programs are the “tabletop” then focusing on organizational effectiveness means strengthening the “table legs.” Source: Susan Kenny Stevens, Ph.D.

Additionally, Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine received two hours of complimentary consulting with the company that did the presentation. This is an example of an Academy follow-on, which is the next tier of Piper Trust assistance. Here, grantees gain access to expert guidance or one-on-one coaching with Academy presenters.

“We started thinking, ‘Just because you come for an Academy workshop for a couple of hours doesn’t mean that anything is going to change,’” Solowey says. So to help organizations get access to individualized services, Piper Trust began funding follow-on training. The Trust sets aside funds so that nonprofits can apply for grants when they are ready, and for the type of assistance they need. The follow-on model is designed with flexibility in mind, recognizing that one size does not fit all.

“Theoretically, we have a variety of follow-ons going on at any one time,” Solowey says. “Currently we have follow-on activities for board governance, human resources, and succession of executive directors.” To date, Academy follow-on programs have served 40 different organizations in board governance alone with slightly different levels of individualized assistance and 95 organizations total for all follow-on.

This was the help Marc Ashton says turned Foundation for Blind Children’s board into a true team. As a follow-on to an Academy on board development, Piper Trust offered Foundation for Blind Children intensive consulting from an organization called BoardSource. “Throughout the process, we totally revamped our board, our bylaws, our board expectations. We streamlined our board and transformed it into a highly organized, highly productive board. That’s allowed Foundation for Blind Children to grow immensely. We are a new organization because of it.”

Piper Trust ATLAS program participant, Linda Lyman (center), CEO of New Pathways for Youth, with board members David Rousseau (SRP) and Kathleen Holmes (Cushman & Wakefield). Photo Credit: Katia Howard

The top tier of Piper Trust’s organizational-effectiveness assistance, called the ATLAS program, is the brainchild of Susan Kenny Stevens, Ph.D. The author of Nonprofit Lifecycles, Kenny Stevens advocates taking a comprehensive look at nonprofits at whatever stage they are in their organizational development. Through this program, Piper provides expert assessment and long-term support to six organizations. “To be eligible, each organization had to compile a leadership team consisting of the executive director, the board chair, and another significant board member, plus one other key staff or board person,” Kenny Stevens says. Their responsibility collectively is to go through the program, do all the analysis work that goes with it, and then put together a game plan that allows for real change within their organization.

“The assessment period helped break down our preconceived notions about ourselves,” says Linda Lyman of New Pathways for Youth. “It held up that stark mirror and forced us to look into areas we hadn’t examined before.”

After the assessment, Kenny Stevens and a group of consultants put together a plan to strengthen the organizations and help them become more effective. “This is definitely a change program,” says Kenny Stevens. “In some cases, it’s changing mindset and attitude. In other cases, it’s just changing everyday behavior.”

The ATLAS program is an area of great experimentation for Piper. “I liken it to therapy,” says Solowey. “It’s institutional therapy. It’s like going to a therapist and saying, ‘I know something is holding me back; I’m not sure what it is.’ Organizations have to look deep and hard at themselves and then they have to make changes. But we believe that when an organization wants to do something, their chances of success and engagement are much higher.”

For Lyman, the ATLAS project provided a structured approach that has made New Pathways begin to conceive of itself in new ways and even consider undertaking a capital campaign to build a new headquarters. “The ATLAS program makes our organization invest the time that we need for success rather than dealing with constant interruptions. It forces us to constantly and consistently move forward,” Lyman says.

Whether it be through Piper Academies, Academy follow-ons, or the ATLAS program, Piper Trust’s investment in organizational effectiveness supports the belief that stronger organizations are better able to meet their missions.

“For me, to work in the area of organizational effectiveness is the most powerful way that I can help nonprofits,” Solowey says. “It’s very rewarding—rewarding for the nonprofits and rewarding for Piper Trust.”

The Trust has brought in compelling speakers through its Piper Academy program. But they’ve come for just a few hours and could only address a relatively narrow audience from the nonprofit sector.

The Thought Leader in Residence, taking a cue from academic scholar-in-residence programs, allows Piper Trust to extend the conversation to the broader community, reaching policy makers, business people, and the general public, as well as the arts world, over several days.

Cameron, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, “was the perfect beginning,” said Judy Mohraz, Piper Trust president and CEO. Highly respected in the field, he already had a base of knowledge about the Phoenix area and its cultural landscape.

Critically, for Piper Trust’s goal of reaching a wide audience, he’s a master at translating complex issues into everyday terms. He gives concrete examples, such as the Boise, Idaho, bar that created drinks named for the dancers in a local troupe.

Cameron also has plenty of energy and stamina. He needed them during the March residency.

His schedule included talks with executives and board members of arts organizations, meetings with business and legislative leaders, discussions with Piper Trust’s Board of Trustees and key staff, an interview for radio station KJZZ, a TV appearance on KAET’s Horizon show, one-on-one consultations with several arts entities, and a meeting with marketing directors of arts organizations. He also wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in The Arizona Republic.

Ben Cameron talks with business and legislative leaders about local and national arts and culture issues and trends. Photo Credit: Suzanne Starr

The public got a chance to hear Cameron and local panelists at a forum, “The Role of Arts & Culture in a Healthy Urban Environment,” presented by Piper Trust, in partnership with Phoenix Center for the Arts and Local First Arizona.

Cameron’s visit came at a critical moment. “There’s not a traditional arts institution that isn’t struggling,” said Kimber Lanning, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Local First Arizona, which promotes consumer spending in locally owned businesses.

“The arts world is changing,” said Lanning, who moderated the public forum, “and if we don’t respond to that change, our audiences are going to continue to dwindle.”

The message isn’t new. But it’s easy to ignore in hectic, cash-strapped, staff-short organizations. As Thought Leader in Residence, Cameron sounded the alarm for those who aren’t listening.

The technology-driven upheaval of today, he said, resembles the religious Reformation of the 16th century. Back then, thanks to the innovation of the printing press, average people could own Bibles and interpret the text on their own, without the mediation of priests.

Now, thanks to electronic innovation, average people can participate in the arts on their own—creating video, publishing books, making music—without turning to formal arts organizations.

The result is a conundrum: “We’re watching consumption going down, but participation is going up.”

Arts and culture groups must figure out how to connect their expertise with that enthusiasm, which means rethinking formats, venues, schedules, and outreach.

The challenge is the same across the country, and Cameron provided a valuable macro perspective, said Tim Sprague, an urban developer at Habitat Metro and a panel member at the public forum.

“He helped everyone here in Arizona understand that we are not the only ones facing difficult times in funding arts and culture activities,” Sprague said.

Dan Schay, executive director of Theater Works, calls Cameron “an inspirational leader,” who gets to the heart of problems while also suggesting solutions and re-stoking enthusiasm for the arts.

One solution Cameron tossed out was to go beyond the traditional format of season-ticket subscriptions, maybe creating memberships.

Theater Works, the resident theater company of the Peoria Center for the Performing Arts, is looking at just that approach to supplement subscriptions.

Left: A public forum on arts and economic development featured Cameron and business and arts leaders. From left: Greg Esser (Roosevelt Row), Ben Cameron, Kimber Lanning (Local First Arizona), Tim Sprague (Habitat Metro), Matt Lehrman (Audience Avenue). Photo Credit: Suzanne Starr
Right: Ben Cameron talks with Dan Schay, Executive Director of Theater Works and Carol Kratz, Program Director for Piper Trust. Photo Credit: Suzanne Starr

Hearing someone with Cameron’s expertise support the idea, Schay said, “was very important in giving us the confidence to really pursue it.”

Cameron emphasizes connecting with the community, and the theme resonates here in Arizona.

Jared Sakren, producing artistic director of Southwest Shakespeare Company, was struck by the way the Trey McIntyre Project has “embedded itself”—as Cameron put it—in Boise.

The group works with hospitals, does spontaneous pop-up dance performances around town, meets with a wide range of local leaders, and travels with business executives to promote Boise. No one misses the connection, because the dancers wear T-shirts with the company’s name.

As Sakren reflected on the synergy between the town and dance company, “it got the wheels spinning” with possibilities for his Mesa-based group.

He also liked Cameron’s underlying financial message: “Sometimes it doesn’t take a lot of money and resources to gain very widespread community recognition. It just takes smart marshaling of one’s resources.”

With corporate donations “in free fall,” Cameron reeled off other smart strategies. Use social media. Hold micro-fundraisers. Ask businesses for practical help in gaining marketing and accounting skills, as the Z Space “art hub” in San Francisco has done.

And perhaps the smartest strategy of all: Cooperate. The possibilities include joint performances (New York has an annual “tasting menu” of dance groups), coordinated marketing, and creative matchups (Ballet Arizona’s open-air performances at the Desert Botanical Garden, for instance).

Local arts groups shouldn’t look at one another as rivals but instead as partners, Lanning said. And the collaborative spirit should include the business community.

The competition is tough. Technology puts virtually limitless entertainment options at people’s fingertips. Yet they still value live encounters, Cameron said, “and I think that’s really a window of opportunity for the arts.”

To seize the opportunity, arts organizations need information about their audience profile, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they compare with their cohorts.

It’s also high time to document the real dollars that arts and culture pour into the local economy, Cameron said. The impact is vast, from jobs at the box office to an artist’s paint supplies to the hungry patrons who go to nearby restaurants.

A key tool is the Cultural Data Project: a systematic way to collect those metrics and track them over time. With the support of Piper Trust, Flinn Foundation, and eight other local organizations, Arizona did its first report, which shows an annual economic impact of $581 million from arts and culture organizations and their audiences.

The next step for Flinn and Piper Trust is to ensure that arts organizations know how to use the data for strategic planning.

They can also revisit the energy and ideas of Cameron’s residency. A video of the forum is online, and Piper Trust has produced a summary of his major points.

The Arts & Culture Survival Guide: Perspectives from Ben Cameron

Mohraz envisions future Thought Leaders in Residence in Piper Trust’s five other program areas: children, education, older adults, religious organizations, and healthcare and medical research. “We’ll do it when the right person is available,” she said.

The first residency certainly tapped the right person, according to Sprague.

“It’s no mystery that one needs to be exposed to new ideas to find solutions,” he said. “Bringing Ben Cameron to Phoenix was a stroke of genius. Keep the programs coming.”

The Arizona Parent Kit. Photo Credit: Bruce Peterson

The Trust has long recognized the need for investment in literacy. A decade ago, Piper Trust, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Tufts University Center for Reading and Language Research partnered to implement an after-school reading remediation program; research supporting the program’s effectiveness was funded by a federal grant. The program took failing second- and third-grade readers in Chandler and Moon Valley and provided remediation after school. “We learned what much research since has shown—that remediation takes a lot of resources and, while it can be effective, it’s difficult to make course corrections as a child gets older,” says Dal Pra.

That understanding led Piper to look for other, more effective ways to make a significant difference, so the Trust shifted its strategy and explored investing in early childhood efforts that would support a child holistically on “the front end.” For instance, to provide support for parents during their children’s earliest years, Piper Trust created the Arizona Parent Kit, which provides a wealth of resources to help parents navigate their babies’ critical first years, including a book to encourage them to read to their children. (Now administered by First Things First, an initiative that funds childhood development, health, and education for kids 5 and under, the kit is distributed to more than 65,000 new parents each year.)

Today, experts know that the foundational skills for literacy must be in place before a child enters kindergarten. “If a child doesn’t start kindergarten ready to go—hasn’t seen a letter, hasn’t been sounding things out—the child is already behind,” Dal Pra says. So the Trust has funded several research-based programs designed to improve early childhood literacy. Programs include Reach Out and Read, which provides pediatric medical offices with books to give to children; and Raising a Reader, Parents as Teachers, and Motheread, which provide parents with the tools to help build early literacy skills in their young children.

Still, the literacy problem continues to grow, so Piper looked for an opportunity to address it in a unified way. “Arizona is in a moment in time where there is much more pressure to get this right and do it quickly,” Dal Pra says. “We have to ensure that all of our children have the supports necessary to get them reading at grade level.”

Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal and Secretary of State Ken Bennett talk with Terri Clark about early childhood literacy at Peralta Elementary School.

Tackling the state’s literacy crisis requires a united effort. Educators, families, businesses, public agencies, and communities all must play a role. Building on the momentum of the National Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, last year Read On Arizona was launched, a statewide initiative to advance children’s language and literacy. Piper Trust, Helios Education Foundation, and Arizona Community Foundation joined forces with Arizona Department of Education, First Things First, and Head Start State Collaboration Office as founding partners to support this statewide effort to ensure children can read at the end of third grade.

This initiative is different from anything the Trust has supported before in that it is a public/private collaborative of government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and other community stakeholders leveraging every resource to improve literacy outcomes for Arizona’s children.

Through discussion, the partners agreed that Piper would fund the state literacy director position and the Read On Arizona partners would support the director. “The point is to have a person whose job is dedicated to aligning all of our resources,” says Dal Pra.

“The uniqueness of what they’ve done here in Arizona—and they did it purposefully—is having the literacy director be a shared position among all six partners,” Clark says. “This approach has fostered a shared agenda with priorities that move the collaborative effort forward. We find where everybody has common ground.”

The goals of Read On Arizona are clear—and high. The program aims to increase significantly the number of kids demonstrating school readiness in language and literacy by kindergarten. The program also strives to increase the percentage of students reading at or above grade level by the end of third grade to 100 percent. In short, Read On Arizona has set a target of building an efficient early literacy system that delivers the right program at the right time to every child in the state.

What sets Read On Arizona apart is the strong collaborative spirit between the partners, each of which has a defined role and a responsibility that fits.

One example is the summer reading collaborative. The Arizona State Library has always had a strong summer reading program and the state Department of Education had its own summer reading program, too. “We talked about taking the best of both programs and expanding our reach and our impact,” Clark says. “Then we went to First Things First as an organization with critical early childhood expertise and said, ‘We’d really like you to be involved in the summer reading promotion. It’s actually a perfect way to get families with young kids to understand what they can be doing.’ They’ve been a great partner for this, promoting and getting the message out. None of that would have happened without Read On saying, ‘You have more in common here than you realize.”

The Read On Arizona partners meet every month, which promotes shared leadership, vision, and accountability. They are learning what their tactical strengths are and where they can each step in and help. In the process, they are discovering ways to join forces and align resources so they use every dollar wisely to ensure kids get access to the supports and services they need.

A family builds reading skills in a young child through the Raising a Reader program. Photo Credit: Bruce Peterson

Read On Arizona developed a process so that cities, towns, or larger communities can become Read On communities. The program launched with four communities: Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, and Yuma. Today there are 10. (Goodyear, Greater Phoenix, Sahuarita, Mesa, Buckeye, and Cochise County are now Read On communities, as well.) Each of the communities has plans in place to address literacy challenges such as school readiness, summer learning loss, and chronic absence.

“Suddenly you have the whole community talking and focusing on early literacy and how they can make it a priority. That’s where the momentum comes from,” Clark says. “It gives the network the infrastructure it needs at both the state level and the boots-on-the-ground, local level.”

Each community uses the same process to develop a literacy plan that is specific to that community. “You look at certain key data points, your third-grade reading scores, countywide assessment. Then suddenly you can know what services are being offered in the community you’re focused on, what gaps there are, and then devise a plan designed to fill those gaps,” Clark says. “We can then say here’s a continuum of supports and services in that particular area that have been vetted.”

With the third-grade retention policy going into effect this fall, Read On Arizona also has a role to play there. Because many families know little or nothing about the new policy, the collaborative is creating a Move On When Reading toolkit that talks about the policy, what it means, and what families can do to support literacy at home. “That’s the role we’re starting to see Read On Arizona play: that technical assistance and filling the gap in the literacy continuum,” Clark says.

Moving forward, Read On Arizona will methodically connect the dots among standards, programs, and needs. And though the program goals are lofty and the to-do list lengthy, Dal Pra is confident much can be achieved. “We have partners coming together—philanthropic, public, nonprofit—aligning around the common goal to turn this literacy issue in Arizona around. We are all in this, working together, and have to hold each other accountable to making a difference in these kids’ lives,” she says.

Young reading advocates and future leaders with Terri Clark.

That is pressure Terri Clark feels, but not anything that prevents her from embracing her role as Arizona literacy director. In fact, the chance to make a difference for her home state is part of her dream.

“This is focused around literacy but it’s so much bigger than literacy. It really is about Arizona’s future,” she says. “If we want the Arizona that can compete on a global scale and we want the kind of workforce we need, then you have to invest in literacy as a foundational skill that’s not optional. The end goal is really the success of Arizona.”