And for this edition of Better Than Most, you’ll be traveling to Arlington, Virginia and the corporate headquarters of The Nature Conservancy, the largest nonprofit environmental group in the world.
We will begin with their President and CEO, Mark Tercek, and then hear from several of the dedicated members of the TNC team.
This week, I traveled to our nation’s capital to visit the offices of Generations United and to see how a smaller nonprofit organization went about creating a healthy work culture.
We’ll start with their Executive Director, Donna Butts, who will tell you about the goals of the organization, and then hear from some of the people who work there.
One of the hot young nonprofit organizations that people have been buzzing about is Venture for America. So I made my way up to their offices at West 29th street to check it out for myself and to hear from some of the staff on what makes it so exceptional.
We’ll start with their CEO, Andrew Yang, and then we’ll hear form some of the other folks who work there.
And this week’s Better Than Most takes us to Washington, D.C., at the offices of Population Services International or PSI, one the blue chip names in global health.
We’re going to start with Kate Roberts who leads the Maverick Collective, one of the initiatives of PSI, and then hear from other members of the staff.
If you are a smart kid in the U.S. today, you’re going to do one of six things in one of six places,” says Andrew Yang, founder and CEO of Venture for America. Learning how to build a business is not one of those things, and Cleveland and Detroit are not among the places.
What Mr. Yang means, as he explains in this segment from the Business of Giving, is that today’s top college graduates tend to gravitate toward a handful of fields (financial services, management consulting, the law) in a handful of cities (New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco). As did he, going from Brown and Columbia to a Wall Street law firm before realizing it was a bad fit and starting a successful career in start-ups.
Now Mr. Yang brings that experience to bear at Venture for America, a nonprofit he seeded with $120,000 of his own money. In this interview he details how Venture works to develop the next generation of entrepreneurs through fellowships and mentoring and shepherd that budding business talent to cities most in need of an economic boost. He also discusses Generation Startup, an upcoming documentary about the organization, and Venture’s goal to create 100,000 new jobs across the country by 2025.