"This is our moment – what we have worked for, over the years has brought us to this moment.”
 – Patrick Corvington, CEO, Corporation for National and Community Service (June 29, 2010)

The CEO transition between David Eisner and Corvington created a large outflow of key personnel and required a temporary management team composed primarily of long-standing Corporation employees in acting positions who ran the agency for 15 months (many more months than initially anticipated). That team, led by acting CEO Nicola Goren (now president at the Washington Area Women’s Foundation), pushed for the Corporation's reauthorization through the Serve America Act, received and allocated $200 million in Recovery Act funding, and expanded the agency's budget and scope.

This post is part of a series of posts generated through a collaboration with Geri Stengel of Ventureneer to provide a one-stop resource for insights and news from the Social Impact Exchange Conference on Scaling Social Impact, held June 17 - 18, 2010.

As I take a brief moment to reflect on this morning’s discussion about the need for growth capital at the Social Impact Exchange Conference on Scaling Social Impact, I’m struck by five issues that I hope will be further discussed at the conference and after it concludes:

In a well covered decision in April (see New York Times article, for example), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation terminated a $5.2 million grant to the International Development Research Center (IDRC) because of an unacceptable conflict of interest. IDRC, a Canadian research center, had originally received the grant to advance tobacco control work in Africa. Unfortunately, the chair of the IDRC Board of Directors also served as a Director of Imperial Tobacco Canada, a subsidiary of British American Tobacco. When this conflict came to light, the Gates Foundation immediately ended the grant (see Gates Foundation statement).

Apparently, such concerns about conflicts of interest do not extend to other areas of the foundation’s work.

Two and a half weeks, a unique advocacy campaign on Twitter came to a successful close. The #losethecig campaign – an effort that started off innocently enough with a simple tweet – generated more than 500 individual posts encouraging Supercool Creative, a Los Angeles marketing firm, to change its corporate logo and online avatar. It also represented the first anti-smoking campaign on Twitter and an important litmus test for future online advocacy efforts. Below, I summarize the campaign and note many of the lessons learned from the experience.

Here's a light moment and an interesting ironic look at corporate social responsibility via Stephen Colbert. The video is here (starting at the 1:29 mark).