Call Alex If:
Peer/colleague organizations compete with yours with a zero-sum gain mentality, imagining that anything good that happens to your organization is bad for them, and vice versa.
Peer organizations typically speak poorly of your organization to funders and the general public, or characterize your niche and capabilities much differently than you would.
A coalition you belong to suffer from poorly constructed agendas and meeting facilitation, weak leadership, or lack of clarity about its purpose and goals.
A coalition you belong to dominated by a few organizations that participate most actively, effectively becoming an arm of those organizations and their agendas.
A coalition your organization belongs to have great potential to advance your mission and social/environmental movement but falls far short most of the time.
A coalition you are part of or support is under-performing compared to its potential.
One of the new buzzwords in philanthropy is “collective impact.” Oftentimes, organizations that are in some sense competitors can come together and accomplish things as a coalition that none of them could do individually. Yet, many worthwhile coalitions are never formed and some that are perform poorly.
Alex’s latest success in coalition-building was the launch of the India Philanthropy Alliance, which was announced in October 2019 by an article he co-authored in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He continues to serve as its part time senior adviser and staff director.
Alex was also a founding member of the Microfinance CEO Working Group (now the Partnership for Responsible Financial Inclusion) and served as its co-chair for two years. He worked closely with the small Secretariat to ensure that all meetings and initiatives were strategically chosen, had sufficient buy-in, and were well executed. He has also been part of other coalitions and collective impact initiatives, such as the Microcredit Summit Campaign. Alex can work to form or reform a coalition in virtually any mission-driven field/sector/movement, drawing on the collective impact literature and his own experience and facilitation skills.
“I first came to know Alex as a peer, when he was the CEO of the American India Foundation. In that role he became a trusted and respected professional colleague and he helped draw our two organizations closer together. I was able to work even more closely with Alex when he became a consultant who focused on bringing together a diverse coalition of nonprofits advancing the humanitarian agenda in India to work collaboratively towards common goals. His skillful facilitation and leadership in steering the coalition has made all the difference.”
— Bala Venkatachalam