NGOs, Imagination, and Nancy Lublin's ZILCH: Win this book!

I'm a big fan of Nancy Lublin. She writes an inspiring (and inspired) column about NGO / NPO (that's Non-Govt Organizations, or Non-Profit Organizations) topics for Fast Company magazine. She's also CEO of DoSomething.org, among other things.

Via an email exchange of emails earlier this year Nancy sent me a review copy of her new book, Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business. Like her columns, it's inspiring (and inspired). The basic premise: that businesses in the "for profit" world have much to gain by looking at how "not-for-profit" organizations manage to do so many cool and important things, with very little financial capital.

Nancy's message is both cool and critical, especially for small businesses and for NGOs in regions where financial resources are scarce. I'm thinking about non-urban, non-metro regions. Living outside the big centres, where there is both an abundance of cash and an abundance of imaginative capital, we have to be especially creative to get things done. From my observations, we also have to be very good at creating relationships – collaborations – with local government, businesses, other NGOs that are "outside the box."

I like Nancy's book a lot. I want to pass it on to someone who is "working in the trenches" in rural or small town BC. I'm going to do that by drawing a name out of a hat (I have lots of hats) in mid-December.

To enter, all you have to do is send me a short note by Wednesday, December 1, 2010. Topic: the coolest collaboration you've been a part of in a small town or rural BC context. I'll be following up on the examples I receive, I'll write about it and publishing a blog post about it in 2011.

Know anyone who's got an interesting collaboration? Who likes what Nancy does in her Fast Company column? Who's up to their eyeballs in NGO management tasks and might benefit from a little (or a lot of) inspiration?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

hanspetermeyer
for development-issues.com

October 19, 2010