2009 Managing for Excellence Award: November 5, 2009

Atlanta nonprofit Open Hand has taken the top prize of $25,000 in The Community Foundation’s annual Managing for Excellence Award competition. Jewish Family & Career Services was chosen as this year’s finalist and received a $5,000 award. Both organizations were honored yesterday at the Foundation’s Annual Meeting, which focused on the importance of strong and effective management for nonprofits. This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the awards competition, sponsored by The Boston Consulting Group.

Since 1984, the Foundation has presented the Managing for Excellence Award to organizations exhibiting outstanding nonprofit management. This year, the Foundation has focused on nonprofit effectiveness as a grantmaking priority. “We know the organizations that will make a lasting impact in our community are those with strong planning, operations, governance, partnerships. These and other areas help nonprofits to sustain and succeed over time,” says Alicia Philipp, president of the Foundation. “The current economic crisis has shown us the importance of effective management to an organization’s survival.”

“Open Hand represents how excellent management helps nonprofits adapt to change. The organization began more than 20 years ago at the start of the AIDS epidemic providing meals to people living with the disease. Over the years, as Open Hand expanded its mission to include seniors and those living with virtually any chronic illness, the organization professionalized its staff and actively responded to the changes in the epidemic and in the community as a whole,” says Phillip. “Its innovative and effective programs are byproducts of its strong management.”

Founded in 1988, Open Hand, formerly Project Open Hand, provides home-delivered meals and nutrition education to help people prevent and better manage chronic disease, and ultimately empower individuals to live healthier, more productive lives. Each day, Open Hand serves more than 5,000 meals and reaches nearly 4,000 clients annually. Before winning this year’s competition, Open Hand won the award in 1992 and was recognized in 2003 and 2004 as a Managing for Excellence Award finalist.

“Alicia once said, ‘the nonprofit of the future will go beyond responding to the problems and actually create solutions to the problems they address.’ Well, Open Hand was paying attention,” says Open Hand executive director Stephen Woods. “We have entered into the food and healthcare arenas in a big way, and from there we’ve been led down the advocacy path. The best thing about all of this is that so little of our infrastructure has changed on the surface yet we are doing so much more with it.”

Highlights include:

• Open Hand still delivers meals, but now the meals are nutrient specific and come with nutrition education messages.
• Open Hand still has meal delivery staff and volunteer drivers, but they are now being trained to become eyes and ears of the clients’ physician.
• Open Hand still recruits and orients volunteers, but orientation now connects the organization’s mission to the volunteers’ lives by educating them on why Open Hand’s work matters to them, which turns them into advocates for the cause.
• Open Hand is now collaborating with the Atlanta Regional Commission on a special initiative to plant edible gardens in senior communities throughout the metro Atlanta region. This is just the first step in creating multigenerational wellness community centers.

Since the inception of the Managing for Excellence Award, more than 500 organizations have participated in the competition. The competition is open to organizations that have received at least one competitive grant from The Community Foundation in the past five years. Click here for more information.