This weeks reading discusses the aspects of capacity
building in non-profits. Reading the table of contents I got pretty excited to
get to the end of the PDF. More precisely I was “FIRED UP!!!!”. The reason for
my excitement was not that as I approached the end of the reading I would be
closer to being done with my Sunday school work, but rather the fact that the
end of the reading examined an organization near and dear to my heart; City
Year, the largest AmeriCorps program in the nation.
I am an alumnus of City Year New York (CYNY). At CYNY I got
to work with a diverse and amazing group of people. Every weekday we would
start our day at 7am with the daily warm-up activity, and then we would head up
from our converted locker room offices to the entrance of P.S. 111 where we
enthusiastically greet incoming students, doling out high fives like it was our
true calling. This was a routine that is done by every City Year team at
countless school across the nation.
This routine is in large part a product of CY’s capacity
building focused on culture. Our reading defines a non-profits cultural aspects
as: The connective tissue that binds
together the organization, including shared values and practices, behavior norms,
and most important, the organization’s orientation towards performance.[i]
Truth be told when I first arrived at CYNY I despised the
cultural aspects of the organization. I thought of them to be wastes of time’s
detracting us from engaging in our core mission of assisting at-risk students
in their studies. I didn’t want to wear the uniform, I didn’t want to learn the
starfish story, and I really didn’t appreciate not being allowed to jay walk; it
was NYC after all. All in all I initially found the cultural aspects of CY to
be bordering on cultish.
It was only towards the end of my year of service that I
truly began to open my eyes to the positive aspects of the culture. I began to
see the benefits of having shared values and practices which allowed anyone
from any of the other CY teams across the nation to step in at a moments notice
when they visited CYNY and feel right at home and confident in what they were
doing. I saw how having a high standard of behavior norms allowed kids from
across the NYC to feel confident in approaching anyone with the CY red jacket
on for help. And most importantly I saw how all of these cultural aspects bound
the organization together.
In fact just the other day I was able to again experience
the positive of CY culture when I ran into a fellow CY alum at a bar. We had
served in different city's but it mattered not because instantly we were able to
related on our shared experiences. More important then relating our shared experiences
though was what we were both currently doing. We both were continuing to live
the real mission of CY, which is to produce young idealist who never stop
wanting to make the world a better place.
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