How to Change the World: Lessons From Nonprofit Leaders

We just completed an amazing week at Claremont McKenna College, which included the awarding of two Kravis Prizes for leadership in the nonprofit sector, and discussions and workshops with most of the previous prize winners. If you examine the impact of this handful of leaders and their organizations, you will find that they have helped millions of people worldwide and saved countless lives. Impressively, they are able to do this on very modest budgets.

As I listened to the stories of these successful social entrepreneurs, I started to notice common themes and leadership lessons. Here are the key leadership elements that allow these leaders and their organizations to truly change the world:

1. Mission and Vision. Successful social entrepreneurs have a very focused mission. Rather than "eliminate poverty," inaugural Kravis Prize recipient, Roy Prosterman, and his organization, Landesa, had a singular focus: to use the legal system to gain land rights for poor farmers in developing countries. Their efforts have improved the lives of more than 100 million families.

2. Empowerment and Shared Leadership. A critical key to changing the world is to empower the disenfranchised and get them to lead the change efforts. For example, 2012 Kravis Prize winner, Mothers2Mothers, hires HIV-positive mothers to serve as peer mentors to pregnant women in Africa who learn that they have the HIV virus. Transmission of the virus to the infant can be avoided through treatment, but 400,000 babies are born infected because these mothers do not receive treatment and support. By empowering the peer mentor mothers, they ensure that the new mothers receive the treatment and save their babies' lives.

2011 Prize winner, Escuela Nueva, and its founder, Vicky Colbert, similarly empowers teachers in rural communities in Latin America through training and support programs to lead (and model leadership) in their classrooms - greatly improving both academic achievement and graduation rates of thousands of children.

3. Passion and Persistence. The passion of these successful agents of social change is palpable. Soriya Salti, a 2012 Kravis Prize winner is passionate about her organization's mission of inspiring entrepreneurialism in Arab youth. Soriya understood that the high unemployment rates of youth in Arab countries is primarily due to a lack of knowledge about business enterprise. With her indomitable spirit, Soriya was able to convince educational ministers in Arab countries to put entrepreneurial and business education into the curriculum and she arranges partnerships with businesses who provide student internship opportunities.

Similar passion is displayed by the members of the Forum of African Women Educationalists (FAWE), the 2008 recipients of the Kravis Prize. These women have dedicated their lives to educating girls and women in Africa, and they are able to do it on very limited funds.

4. A Focus on Outcomes. All of the Kravis Prize winners, these agents of social change, are successful because they have a clear idea of what it means to be successful. They focus on specific outcomes. Mother-2-Mother's goal is to eradicate HIV transmission from mothers to their infants; Landesa focuses on land ownership for the poor. These are not vague social agendas, such as a "War on Poverty."

While these leadership principles have led to extraordinary success for these agents of social change, they are also the same principles that can lead to success in the private sector, in the management of your career, and more generally for success in life.

I hope you will follow the links and learn more about these amazing leaders of social change, and that you will email these stories to your friends, colleagues, and to young people who want to help change the world.

The Kravis Prize website is here.

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