Bridgespan Group Audio Summaries

Often nonprofits focus their efforts on creating services that they think are innovative or effective and then express surprise when those services go begging for participants. It’s time for nonprofits to develop a more sales-driven approach to social change. Learn more by visiting our resource center, where you can find the full Stanford Social Innovation Review article or download worksheets to help you design your own strategy for selling social change.

Nonprofit organizations should explore the answers to a handful of key questions to develop pragmatic, specific plans of action to increase their impact. In this Harvard Business Review article, Bridgespan authors Jeff Bradach, Nan Stone, and Tom Tierney explore how these questions provided a framework to help the Harlem Children’s Zone meet its goals.

Many school district leaders, particularly those in urban areas, struggle to reduce dropout rates, but find themselves overwhelmed by the dimensions of the problem. There are, however, a few districts making notable progress towards reducing the number of dropouts and ensuring that students earn high school diplomas in a timely manner.One of these is the Portland, Oregon, Public Schools (PPS). In the course of a single calendar year (2007-2008) PPS began to have a positive impact in addressing its dropout problem. Bridgespan partner Daniel Stid interviews Leslie Rennie-Hill, former Chief of the PPS Office of High Schools, and Carole Smith, current Superintendent of the Portland Public Schools to find out more.

What should the high school of the future look like, both for teachers and students? Former Bridgespan Partner Daniel Stid and Kelly Trlica, former Assistant Superintendant of Secondary Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment for the Houston Independent School District, sit down and discuss everything from elimination of the Carnegie Unit to educational standards to incentive-based pay to new modes of teacher empowerment.