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Jimmy Carter. Picture: JOHN AMIS/REUTERS
Jimmy Carter. Picture: JOHN AMIS/REUTERS

Of the many tributes to Jimmy Carter, the former US president who died last month aged 100, the most interesting relates to how he helped turn Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organisation, into a global institution. 

The focus on Carter’s role in transforming Habitat is interesting because successful nonprofits seldom get their due. Carter joined Habitat four years after he lost the 1980 US presidential election to Ronald Reagan. 

Habitat for Humanity assists low-income people across the world to access decent housing. Before Carter signed up, Habitat was, according to the Wall Street Journal, “an obscure Christian nonprofit” that helped build affordable housing. 

Carter’s joining of an eight-year-old Habitat “kicked off a collaboration that became one of his enduring legacies: helping transform the organisation into a juggernaut that operates across the US and the world and has helped millions of people improve their living conditions”. 

Habitat, which has assisted more than 22-million people globally, works with corporates, NGOs, academics, policymakers and philanthropists. That easily rivals the performance of some multinational corporations. Which brings me to Jim Collins, the US business management researcher and author. 

Collins argues that the main difference between business and the social sector (a big umbrella term for institutions that include nonprofits, NGOs and universities) lies in inputs and outputs. Money is both an input and output for business. For the social sector, money is only an input. 

“For a business, financial returns are a perfectly legitimate measure of performance. For a social sector organisation, however, performance must be assessed relative to mission, not financial returns,” writes Collins in Good to Great and the Social Sector, a monograph that accompanies his book, Good to Great, which sets out how companies achieve excellence.

The critical question for the social sector, writes Collins, is how effectively an organisation delivers on its mission and make a distinctive impact relative to its resources. In Habitat’s case, the mission is assisting low-income earners have decent housing. 

Collins also disputes that social sector leaders are less decisive than their business counterparts. They only appear so because of the “complex governance and diffuse power structures common to social sectors”. 

Troops carry the flag-draped casket of former US President Jimmy Carter at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the US, January 9 2025. Picture: SUSAN WALSH/REUTERS
Troops carry the flag-draped casket of former US President Jimmy Carter at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the US, January 9 2025. Picture: SUSAN WALSH/REUTERS

He agrees with three US academics who described universities in 1972 as examples of organised anarchies. “Recent studies of universities, a familiar form of organised anarchy, suggest that such organisations can be viewed for some purposes as collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decisionmakers looking for work,” wrote Michael Cohen, James March and Johan Olsen in a paper, “A Garbage Can Model of Organisational Choice”. 

As an aside, it would be interesting to overhear conversations in the home of the Vilakazis — Mary, group CEO of FirstRand, and Zeblon, vice-chancellor of Wits University. They might shed light, and perhaps lighter moments, about these issues. 

Back to Collins. He adds that social sector organisations can, as their business counterparts, be driven to greatness by three things:

  • Passion — what an organisation stands for and why it exists.
  • Best at — what an organisation can uniquely contribute to the people it touches (housing in Habitat’s case) better than other organisations.
  • The resource engine, which refers to time, money and brand. 

Here, the critical questions a social sector organisation must answer are how what it does best “ties directly to our resource engine” and in turn how its resource engine directly reinforces what it does best. 

Most importantly, a social sector organisation must have the discipline to say no to resources that “drive it away from the middle of its three circles” — the core made up of passion, best at and resource engine. Here too, businesses stray far from their core, often with disastrous consequences. Habitat’s history shows that with the guidance of Carter and others the organisation has stuck to its core. 

Collins concludes that despite the differences between business and social sector economics, organisations in both sectors can be moved from good to great. In business, success is a function of the link between financial success and capital resources. Success in this regard creates a flywheel effect. 

In the social sector, this is created through the delivery of tangible results and the earning of the emotional share of heart, “so that potential supporters believe not only in your mission, but in your capacity to deliver on that mission”.

That’s what the tributes to Carter’s work with Habitat for Humanity are all about.

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.

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