Innovation for Social Change

Chapter 13Win Others Over to Your Cause

No matter what our nonprofit's mission, we need resources to implement our ideas. We often find ourselves persuading others. Innovation requires resources, a budget, talented team members, and buy‐in. Two stories of persuasive and tenacious social entrepreneurs are illustrative.

Dr. Nancy Harris, founder of the Terma Foundation, exemplifies tenacity. The mission of the Terma Foundation is to develop integrated health programs to educate, research, treat, and prevent illness in vulnerable communities around the world. The path to launching the nonprofit and saving lives was fraught with obstacles.

In 1990, Harris was a young American doctor studying medicine in China. When traveling in Tibet, she noticed something very wrong in many of the children: stunted size. The current theory of the medical community was that this was caused by high altitudes, but she knew this couldn't be the case. She had observed healthy children living in high altitudes in Chile. After she returned to the United States, she couldn't get the problem out of her mind. She kept asking questions and talking with doctors, but it would take three years for her visa to be granted so she could return and further investigate.¹

When she finally got permission from the Chinese government to return, she was prepared. She and her team examined 50–100 children a day. They found that 71% of the children had intestinal parasites, 41% had chronic malnutrition, and 67% had rickets. ...