Copiavia - Moving off the map. Sharing the Why of Copiavia.
A few years ago, when I was deciding on a dissertation topic, I was a business owner as well as a participant and spectator in the world of nonprofits. I served on nonprofit boards, worked as a volunteer, and even helped form a new nonprofit. During that same time, my husband was a leader and employee of a local nonprofit. Professionally, however, I was running a successful for-profit company and pursuing a doctoral degree in business. Later, after I completed my research, I was running a university’s entrepreneurial center and teaching in the business department.
These experiences have given me a bit of a front row seat to the commonalities and differences that exist in the two worlds. One problem that initially caught my attention was effective leadership succession planning in nonprofits. While for-profit companies expended significant resources to groom new leaders, it seemed like every time a leader retired or left in a nonprofit, there was a gap in leadership that caused the organization to suffer. There were few nonprofits that actively groomed the next generation leaders and created succession plans within the organization. That problem is one that I spent a significant amount of time researching and studying, as well as nonprofit board effectiveness. Both of those issues plague nonprofits, and I found them most interesting because the boards who would need to lead the change had no interest in changing themselves or their processes!
Ultimately, however, I decided to spend my time on nonprofit revenue generation models and the role they play in a nonprofit’s long term sustainability. Basically, I wanted to understand the opportunities and barriers nonprofits face when trying to fund their mission. I chose to focus on faith-based nonprofits in a time when their revenue was dramatically declining, creating a forcing function for seeking new options. What I uncovered was a string of factors that contributed to the challenges and were creating barriers to change. Boards, organizational cultures, institutional logic, and staff expectations were all significant factors that influenced the opportunity to adopt new practices. The findings were the foundation for designing new pathways to overcome the barriers and led to my desire to help nonprofits create a new culture that integrated the best of both worlds to support their mission.
In this research, I found that there is not one right path, but many potential paths that can get you to your destination. The path will depend on where you start, where you want to end up, and how much tolerance for risk or pain you have going into the endeavor. In trying to find a name that would represent that idea, Copiavia was born. The concept was to combine the word “copia” from the latin word for abundance or many with “via” the latin word for path. Thus, Copiavia is designed to represent the idea that there are many paths to the destination that works for your organization.
The company was founded with a goal to help both for profit and nonprofits with their business practices. We support strategic planning efforts, design leader development and leadership succession strategies, and work to ensure the board is equipped to effectively lead the organization. We also partner with organizations to provide training, and design optimally efficient business models that leverage existing resources and talents to maximize the mission capacity.
Off the Map is a blog designed to explore what it looks like to get off the beaten path and chart your own course as an organization. When you are off the map you get to look around and pick the direction you want to go, rather than simply doing what has always been done. This blog is a place to share ideas, encourage and empower leaders, and think about ways to make the most of what we each bring to the table. Thanks for reading!