2005-2006 Board Member Testimonial
Christopher Donohue
WG '06
"My organization recently received two grants totaling $850,000. These funds literally changed the organization overnight from one that had to stretch resources to fund its entrepreneurship training programs, to one that was now able to expand its curriculum and ramp up its activities. The Executive Director asked me to analyze their program costs under the new funding to come up with a cost/student for the training program. In putting together this analysis, I realized that most of the performance metrics they were using focused exclusively on the number of people that received training/graduated the program and to a certain degree, the number of new businesses started. In a board meeting, I pointed out that while these were all valuable metrics, they were very shortsighted and that the real benefit to the community was the long-term impact program participants and the business they started had on job creation and income generation 1, 2 and 3 years after training.
"I understand that the emphasis on meeting short term goals is natural for organizations that are trying to establish a track record and prove themselves in the community, particularly in the non-profit world; however, I think my ability to step back and look at the organization's mission through a long-term lens, helped them to begin thinking beyond the next training program, to what the ultimate goals of the program are and how they could best achieve them."
