Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, Revised Edition

By Alex Counts

One of today's most acclaimed books on nonprofit leadership, Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind is a down-to-earth guide to mission-driven leadership. Drawing on his decades of experience as an acclaimed nonprofit leader, Alex Counts offers practical advice on such vital activities as fundraising, team-building, commu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rivertowns Books
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953943040

Alex Counts

Alex Counts founded Grameen Foundation and became its President and CEO in 1997. A Cornell University graduate, Counts's commitment to poverty eradication deepened as a Fulbright scholar in Bangladesh, where he trained under Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, and co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Since its modest beginnings, Grameen Foundation has grown to become a leading international humanitarian organization.   Counts is also the author of When in Doubt, Ask for More, and 213 Other Life and Career Lessons for the Mission-Driven Leader (Rivertowns, 2020); Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance Are Changing the World (Wiley, 2008), and numerous articles in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Washington Post, and other publications. Today he is an independent consultant to nonprofit organizations and an adjunct professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland College Park. Learn more about Alex Counts at www.alexcounts.com.

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PART ONE: GETTING STARTED

1

Deciding to Make a Difference

How early experiences shaped my commitment to a life and work centered on making the world a better place

THE SIGHT TOOK MY BREATH AWAY. It is still etched in my memory thirty-five years later.

On one level, it was just a bunch of middle-school kids running around playing games on a field. But to me, it was so much more than that.

As a sports-crazed kid, I had missed not being able to play team sports when I was in the seventh and eighth grades due to school policy. So during my senior year, when my friend Paul Hilal was elected student body president, I hatched a plan with him to organize an intramural sports program for the lower schoolers. With Paul’s support, I began methodically securing permission from the school administration, and the idea quickly became a reality.

To this day, I have an intense memory of looking down the main sports field with four frenetic games being played simultaneously by scores of kids, contemplating what I had done. Despite always feeling a bit out of place at my high school, I had made something happen! A hundred-something of my peers were doing something that Paul and I had brought into reality. They were not just going through the motions to humor me. Clearly, they were having fun. I had never experienced a sense of agency like that before. The program even continued after Paul and I graduated later that spring.

Ever since then, it has been difficult for me to hatch an idea about making things better for myself or others and then pooh-pooh my ability to make it happen if I set my mind to it, even if it involved hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people and millions if not billions of dollars. (And years later, Paul became a Grameen Foundation board member who helped me create things much bigger than an intramural sports league.)

The lessons I took away from this teenaged accomplishment have profoundly shaped my character and career. Complaints can be turned into tangible plans and progress that benefit one’s peers and future generations. Things can be improved, often simply by getting motivated, designing a plan, enlisting others, and following through. Watching others benefit from your achievement can feel satisfying, even glorious, even (or especially) if most of the beneficiaries don’t realize that you are responsible, allowing you to remain anonymous. Reinforcing your sense of agency and power to change things can propel you into a virtuous cycle of ambition, action, and results.

At the same time, I think that this pivotal moment has occasionally made me overconfident in my ability to right wrongs, especially since I occasionally misjudge what is actually wrong. Sometimes you can misdiagnose a problem and then implement a flawed solution. Other times, trying to solve a problem without enough skills can backfire. If it is another person’s job to deal with an issue, jumping in can make it appear that you are showing them up. Experiencing success can lead to an exaggerated sense of agency which can then cause overconfidence, hubris, and overreach. Solving a problem in an ad hoc way might retard efforts of others to come up with a permanent and sustainable solution.

My willingness to stand up for what I think is right, even at personal risk, is both one of the qualities I am proudest of and also one that I need to better calibrate and use more thoughtfully during the remaining years of my life.

An Activism Focused on Practical Solutions

I LIVED PRIMARILY WITH MY FATHER and stepmother after my parents divorced when I was 8 years old. They were both enormously influential even though their parenting style was decidedly hands-off. My mother was also an important part of my life growing up. Above all, she nurtured her children’s creative and entrepreneurial gifts. (And she had the good sense to marry a wonderful man named John Fox who was, like my stepmother, a great stabilizing force in our extended family.)

In recent years, I have credited my career choice in part to being brought up in a family that included many helping professionals. For example, my father was a psychiatrist, and my stepmother and older brother Doug were social workers. People working in professions focused on helping people overcome mental health issues frequented our home. Their worldviews shaped my younger brother Michael and me in subtle ways. Dinner table conversation sometimes included my stepmother Norma and my father discussing issues that arose in his practice. Occasionally I offered my own views.

Once, my father told me that he sometimes told patients who were struggling to find meaning and motivation in life the magnificent quotation that was part of a poster of Martin Luther King, Jr., that has hung in my room or office since I was in my teens: If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. I felt proud that something I had brought into our household had made it into my father’s healing sessions, and I still feel that way today. (Another thing that has struck me is how many African-Americans who’ve visited me have been astonished that I idolize Dr. King so much that a large poster of him is always in a prominent place in my home—a potent reminder of how powerful images can both build and burn bridges between people.)

I was born in New York City and spent some early, formative years living first in Brigantine, New Jersey, which at the time was a sleepy little island off the shore of Atlantic City. Our family moved to the upper east side of Manhattan when I was nine years old, into an apartment that my stepmother still lives in and that I continue to visit regularly. I attended a public primary school through sixth grade, then switched to Horace Mann School in the Bronx, one of four private schools that my father picked out as options for me. He let me make the final choice, a typical thing for him to do; from the time I was quite young, he showed an unusual degree of respect for my independent judgment, which I am sure helped me to grow up into a self-confident person.

During my senior year at Horace Mann, three things happened that sowed the seeds of the kinds of things I would involve myself in during college, and beyond. One was the opportunity to create the intramural sports program that I described a moment ago.

Another was sitting through several assemblies and films about the Holocaust, which the school’s largely Jewish alumni network was interested in sensitizing all students about. It helped me to understand the great evil human beings are capable of.

On the other side of the spectrum, some of my fellow students urged everyone to fast for one day in November and give the money they would have spent on food to Oxfam America, to support anti-hunger programs. Like many of my peers, my closest friends and I avoided the cafeteria more out of peer pressure than solidarity with the poor—in fact, we ate lunch in a local restaurant—but the idea that there were things that could be done to fight modern-day injustice left a mark on my psyche. I also got involved in something called the Tutoring Project, where every Saturday I would help a handful of younger students from nearby low-income schools prepare for college. This would involve my travelling two hours by subway round trip, which I was happy to do since the students seemed so grateful.

It was during my sophomore year at Cornell University that my social conscience began to develop beyond what it had become in high school, and move towards reformist activism grounded in idealism and practical solutions. This awakening was catalyzed by observing a nationwide divestment movement that began at Cornell and Colombia Universities. Our own anti-apartheid activists campaigned to get Cornell to divest its endowment of all investments (then totaling about $120 million) in companies that did business with South Africa. At one point, 211 of my fellow Cornellians were arrested. Those brave kids and many others constructed a vast replica shantytown on the Arts and Sciences quadrangle. It was meant to drive home to all of us the abysmal living conditions of blacks in South Africa, and Cornell’s complicity. I never lifted a finger to help those activists, who were criticized by some but who nonetheless cowed the administration into not demolishing the eyesore of all the rickety houses until after the semester was over.

Still, while not moved to taking action against apartheid, I began to construct my own activist paradigm and strategy. I gave presentations that I had been trained to deliver on world hunger to fellow Cornell as well as Ithaca College and Ithaca high school students, and I led a campuswide fast to raise money for Oxfam America similar to the one organized by my classmates that I’d lamely observed while in high school.

I felt most drawn to approaches that were practical and positive. I asked myself the question: What would need to be done when apartheid was over in South Africa, and when the senseless proxy wars the U.S. was waging in Central America concluded? Poverty would remain. Could it be solved? I went on a journey spanning classes, lectures, and my own personal research to see if there were existing solutions to poverty that addressed root causes, rather than just Band-Aids that dealt with symptoms. My curiosity was heightened when someone said that all of the major problems facing humanity had been solved somewhere; the major challenge was adapting and scaling those micro solutions to scale of macro problems such as poverty, environmental degradation, racism, overpopulation, and so on.

Time and again, people pointed me in the direction of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and its founder, Muhammad Yunus. This was pre-Internet, and there was not yet much written about Grameen; what was published was not easily available, even at Cornell. Yet my increasing commitment to pragmatic activism prompted me to learn everything I could about the success of Grameen, and thus became a launching pad for what became my career.

Stimulating classes and romances, which had about equally long shelf lives for me during college, began to take a back seat to my involvement in social issues, poverty in particular, during my sophomore year. Over lunch one day, not far from the model shanty town on the Arts Quad, my friend Julia Plotnik asked for help in starting a Cornell chapter of RESULTS, a scrappy grassroots advocacy organization founded by Sam Daley-Harris that focused on lobbying Congress to allocate more U.S. foreign aid to effective anti-poverty solutions.

She explained how her mother and stepfather had led the Bronx chapter for years. Its focus on creating the political will to end hunger and poverty by advocating for known solutions to receive a bigger share of the U.S. foreign aid budget seemed practical and exciting. In fact, it resonated strongly with two blue-ribbon commissions’ reports on world hunger, which both found that existing technologies would be capable of ending world hunger—which meant that the overriding factor preventing us from getting the job done was the lack of political will.

RESULTS had a standard formula for starting groups (and for much else, as I would learn; this was part of the genius and also the limitations of Sam Daley-Harris’s approach). The people trying to start a group would write letters to their friends inviting them to a kick-off presentation featuring a RESULTS staff member (of which there were exactly three at the time) or an experienced volunteer, who usually flew in (or, especially in the early years, arrived by Greyhound bus) for the occasion. Late in the fall semester, Julia and I spoke to Nick Schatzki (a volunteer leader from the Manhattan group who would later figure prominently in my life) on a Radio Shack speaker phone. He gave us pointers for writing our letters.

Two things attracted me to RESULTS. First, it promoted practical and positive solutions. I never could develop more than momentary passion for handwringing and oppositional types of activism that focused on stopping things that were bad, rather than promoting things that were good. Second, RESULTS was winning—and still is today. Modest though the triumphs were in the grand scheme of things, they were moving the ball down the field in terms of getting Congressionally mandated spending increased for what it had identified as proven anti-poverty programs. With each passing year, the scale of the victories achieved by RESULTS seemed to be growing. Not only did this reaffirm the responsiveness of our political system, but it fired up my competitive juices. Like many people, I liked being on a winning team and being able to help it do even better.

So I spent the winter break of 1985-86 crafting my letter inviting friends to the kick-off presentation. Soon after we returned in January, Julia, one or two others involved, and I had another speaker-box call with a staff member named Cameron Duncan (who would sadly die of complications from AIDS a few years later). His gentle and affirming voice calmed all of us as he went over the basics. Then he asked those who had written letters to read them aloud. I went first. My letter was over-engineered and much too detailed. I did not yet understand that excessive information could overwhelm clarity and readability, wisdom I still neglect on occasion today. Julia’s letter, on the other hand, was much shorter and more effective.

In the nicest way possible, Cameron said he thought Julia’s letter was stronger and urged us in any case to get our letters delivered as the meeting was only a few weeks away. (I was too embarrassed to admit to the group that I had already delivered mine to scores of friends around campus.) His gentleness with me and my flawed letter evoked my father and how he passed on nearly every opportunity to rebuke me, and seized most opportunities to affirm me.

As the kick-off presentation approached, I studied RESULTS advocacy materials. In the past, campaigns conducted by fewer than seventy chapters around the country in support of more funding for immunizations and Vitamin A supplements for children had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Fewer deaths led to fewer births, so these solutions did not contribute to over-population. It all seemed so simple, positive, and practical. I was hooked—and remain hooked three decades later.

On March 16, 1986, Nick Schatkzi flew up from New York City and delivered a three-hour workshop for thirty-two fellow students. There was a big educational component, but the highlight was writing a letter to a member of Congress in support of one of the solutions RESULTS staff had identified for support that year. While students were provided with the information needed to write their home-state member of Congress, Nick emphasized that the local representative, Matthew McHugh, sat on a key subcommittee allocating foreign aid and that sending an appeal to him might make a bigger impact. I felt a sense of euphoria when I sealed my letter, which was further heightened when sixteen people held up their hands at the end to say they wanted to be part of the group, despite the requirement that all members commit to attending three meetings per month. Since the minimum number of partners was four, we were in business! Success felt sweet.

There wasn’t much time left in the semester to hold meetings, but we squeezed in as many as we could. As co-founder of the group, I was in a position of leadership for the first time, and I struggled, despite my experience managing people as a student supervisor at Cornell Dining. (I worked there fifteen hours per week for my spending money.) Perhaps the difference was that this work was much more meaningful for me than getting 1,800 fellow students fed over a four-hour period. In any case, members of our group started to leave due to my uncompromising and inflexible style. Still, letters got written, and, as classes ended, we still had a core that made us one of the bigger chapters in the county in terms of the number of active members.

It was the end of my sophomore year at Cornell, and even liberal arts students like me needed to choose a major. (I had been amazed when many of my fellow students arrived on campus at the start of freshman year being crystal clear about what they wanted to major in.) I had a vague sense that the discipline of economics was central to the battle against world poverty, so I opted for that. Immediately I realized that I was short on credits in that subject area, so my father indulged me by letting me take summer classes, which he paid for.

A highlight of that summer was attending my first RESULTS national conference in Washington, which included an inspirational banquet with great speakers whom Sam introduced to the delegates only after he had introduced the delegates to the speakers by asking each to stand up if they had hit certain advocacy milestones. The next morning, we all headed to Capitol Hill to lobby for various pieces of legislation related to reducing poverty. I recall emerging from Rayburn building with Julia after having visited with Rep. McHugh’s staff member Gary Bombardier. My excitement and high sense of purpose had not been dulled at all when, at the last minute, we did not get to meet with McHugh himself.

I kept the Cornell RESULTS chapter alive over the summer, as a few students who were involved stayed in the area, and we had by then attracted a handful of members from the local community. The lobbying approach of RESULTS at the time was organized around monthly actions—usually letters to one’s senator, U.S. representative, or the editor of the local newspaper. The first meeting of the month was a nationwide conference call lasting two hours. Partners in all the cities with active chapters gathered around the inevitable Radio Shack speaker phone and listened to updates from staff on the current month’s action as well as past campaigns. The highlight was hearing a guest speaker, usually an international development expert or an ally in Congress. These took place on the first Saturday of the month. It was thrilling to hear people chime in from cities and states I had never visited, knowing there were people coordinating their letters and other advocacy with mine. That created a sense of community as well as plausibility that our individual actions could add up to big changes (which was reinforced by the track record of success in the organization’s first five years of existence). Activists who are atomized and uncoordinated usually lose influence and interest, but ones who are powerfully connected to a well-coordinated network can feed on each other’s wins and learnings.

The second monthly gathering was called the delivery meeting. Just the partners huddled and practiced speaking concisely about the issue of the month using some simple but effective exercises. The third was the action meeting, where partners and invited guests came together to learn about the issue, see a related video whenever possible, and then take action through writing a letter. (There was often discussion of a follow-up, in-person meeting with one’s elected representatives or newspaper editorial board—though in practice those usually involved only the partners.)

The July, 1986, action meeting was held in downtown Ithaca, to make it more convenient for our growing number of community members who were not affiliated with Cornell. I was proud of the fact that nearly twenty people came on a sweltering upstate New York evening. But more exciting still was the topic. Until then, RESULTS had mostly focused on health and nutrition interventions as well as famine relief. Many volunteers, including me, felt that these were an important but incomplete response to the global hunger crisis. Malnutrition resulted from poverty, and poverty was fundamentally an economic issue. Unless people had opportunities to earn more money, health and nutrition deficits and crises would remain the norm, if perhaps less severe.

The RESULTS staff had sensed this gap in their choices of issues for us to lobby for as well, and had been searching for an advocacy campaign related to self-help economics. Staff from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a U.N. agency focused on rural poverty that owed its post-1985 existence to a RESULTS campaign to save it from being shuttered, had provided RESULTS an emotionally evocative video about the Grameen Bank, which was just coming on the scene as an innovative institution. (IFAD was dedicated to improving the condition of the rural poor in the developing world, mainly subsistence farmers, and RESULTS support of it was its first major attempt to go beyond advocating health, nutrition, and famine relief measures.)

When Ben Gilman, a liberal Republican from Upstate New York, introduced a bill to promote this kind of work, which it termed microenterprise development, that was all RESULTS needed to begin a new line of advocacy. Sam Daley-Harris had mentioned on the conference call that this would likely be the first of many actions related to microenterprise, which I shared with our Ithaca action meeting attendees. Little did I know that within a year, I would be taking concrete steps to dedicate my life to supporting the founder of the Grameen Bank, the leading practitioner of microenterprise development.

Geeking Out in D.C.

MY JUNIOR YEAR AT CORNELL was something of a blur. The fall of 1986 was spent working on another Fast for A World Harvest to raise money for Oxfam, keeping the RESULTS group going and my grades up, and chasing after attractive young women. Under my leadership, several thousand students signed up to give up their meals at Cornell Dining on the Thursday before Thanksgiving, with the understanding that Cornell would donate the value of those meals to Oxfam America. I did everything I could to make sure that year’s campaign was successful—it had been done annually for years—but I left out an important follow up: verifying that a check had gone to Oxfam. I did not know who to call and with each passing week my omission weighed on me more, but I never placed any calls, and feel guilty about it to this day. Perhaps the payment was made, but I will probably never be sure. This error, after so much work by so many people, continues to motivate me to this day to never take follow-up for granted unless I confirm it myself.

After having lived in the fraternity house my sophomore year (as was the rule), I moved back into the freshman dorms into a single room. My best friend, Rohit Bakshi, had graduated and left for medical school, and I had not invested enough time in the friendships and planning needed to end up with roommates off campus or in the frat house. I was a bit lonely, but it turned out to be a good thing. During the middle of that semester, I heard about the Cornell in Washington program and immediately applied with the idea that I would do my obligatory internship in the RESULTS national office. Like the Fulbright program that I would get connected to the following year, I was lucky and just diligent enough to take advantage of an excellent program set up to encourage idealistic and energetic young adults to get outside their comfort zones and prepare for lives of achievement and