Share Our Strength and KaBOOM!- Two Successful Social Foundations

While searching on the internet, I ran into an article by Bill Shore (the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength), Darell Hammond (the founder and CEO of KaBOOM!) and Amy Celep (the president and CEO of Community Wealth Partners) in the Stanford Social Innovation Review Magazine which might give an insight on what motivates social foundations, how they work and how they succeed in tackling social problems. (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/when_good_is_not_good_enough)

The article is about two successful non-profit US organizations that are trying to deal with: hunger and lack of opportunity to play. How their founders were inspired, what they targeted at and what they did better than other similar non-profit organizations are touched upon.

Share Our Strength is tackling with hunger whereas KaBOOM! is struggling with the lack of opportunities to play. Unlike other non-profit foundations, they focused on the underlying set of problems rather than the symptom. They looked beyond short-term achievements and focused on long-term outcomes that will ultimately solve social problems.

Inspired by the news about thousands of Ethiopians expected to die soon from famine that was on the Washington Post, Bill Shore founded Share Our Strength in 1984. Share Our Strength has raised and invested more than $376 million. Much of the focus was on the entrepreneurial ways to generate funds rather than on how it used the funds to advance its mission.

Similarly, KaBOOM! was founded in 1995, when Darell Hammond came into a story about two children who suffocated while playing in a car because they didn’t have anywhere else to play in The Washington Post. They focused on building, improving, and opening playgrounds by mobilizing communities and engaging the corporate sector to fund and volunteer to support the work.

Despite the novelty and satisfaction of the organizational growth, Share Our Strength and KaBOOM!’s efforts were reaching only a fraction of those in need. Later on, they delved deeper into the problems and succeeded in tackling these problems.

Share Our Strength designed and lead a national campaign called “No Kid Hungry”. The campaign suggested that kids are not hungry because of a lack of food or effective programs, but because they lack access to nutrition programs such as school breakfasts and food stamps. So, their focus became helping kids in need access to these programs. Gaining confidence from their stakeholders, they attracted more investment which helped them add children in need to public nutrition programs.

At KaBOOM! the story was similar. Despite its growth, they weren’t solving the problem completely. KaBOOM! initially only built more places for kids to play; but the important thing is how society values and engages in play. Many playgrounds are empty most of the time, active play is disappearing in America, kids are spending more than eight hours a day in front of a screen. Afterwards, what makes KaBOOM! more successful is addressing the complexity of the issue by creating transformational change. They developed new strategies to inspire the importance of play in kids’ live. For example, they are launching a new initiative that will reward individuals taking action to make their communities more playful.