November's Career in the Spotlight: Doug Bunch Interview

We sat down with Doug Bunch, Founder and Chairman of Global Playground, Inc. to discuss the logistical aspects of starting your own non-profit, the intangibles needed to succeed in the non-profit world, and the future role of non-profits in foreign policy discussion.
 
JL: Mr. Bunch, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to YPFP JobLink.  You started Global Playground in May 2006, around the same time you received your Juris Doctorate from the William & Mary School of Law and joined Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.  Fast-forward to the present day, and Global Playground is a success with projects in Uganda, Cambodia, Thailand, and Honduras, and another project starting in Vietnam.  What was the most challenging logistical aspect of starting Global Playground?
 
Doug: We incorporated in May 2006, but in October 2006 we began receiving our first donations, and around that same time we had our first board meetings.  In the spring we filed all of our documents with the IRS and the New York Secretary of State, who supervises corporations.
 
There were administrative challenges, mainly the paperwork and navigating the bureaucracy to fulfill all the legal requirements.  But I’d done that once before with another nonprofit [Ascanius: The Youth Classics Institute] that I helped set up in college, so I was used to that.
 
The big things that we had to overcome were forming a board of directors, creating a mission statement, creating a strategic plan, and creating a five-year plan that would actually help us take the strategic plan and put it into action, and give us concrete steps to accomplish our mission.  This went on until January 2007.
 
Since then, we’ve been building a school a year, and we just recently started putting Teaching Fellows (recent college graduates) into our schools to teach for a year.  It’s all been an evolution; the first step was just getting all the legal pieces in place, then the second step was getting the people in place, and getting the people behind the mission.  The third phase of growth, which we’re still in, is actually carrying out the five-year plan and carrying out the strategic plan.  We’re in year six so we’ve already revised our five-year plan once and created a new five-year plan, though it’s part of the same continuous process.
 
JL: Are there any aspects that turned out to be more important than others?
 
Doug: Well with the first non-profit, I didn’t really know what I was doing.  To be honest, with the second [Global Playground] we still didn’t know what we were doing [laughter].  We sometimes shock ourselves that people as unqualified, truly unqualified as us, could have managed to build an organization that’s been so successful.  I think a lot of it is determination; a lot of it is the ability to listen to other people’s advice, to be willing to take risks.
 
We’ve encountered so many obstacles but also successes and opportunities that we could never have anticipated five years ago.  In terms of what I’ve learned the second time around, I guess the biggest difference is that Global Playground has, from the beginning, had a lot more people involved in it than Ascanius.  I would say about 25% of my time is spent doing the substantive work of the organization, 75% is spent managing people; managing people’s personalities and all of the external constituencies that Global Playground deals with, whether that’s donors or partner organizations.  This also includes internal constituencies such as board members and volunteers.
 
JL: Looking back to May 2006, what was the original mission of Global Playground?  Moreover, as new initiatives, such as the Virtual Playground, are coming to fruition, how has this mission evolved?
 
Doug: The mission has always been the same; it has always been to create educational opportunities where they don’t exist, to give opportunities to attend school to children who would otherwise have none and to share that awareness about educational needs in developing countries with other people in the developed world.  And that hasn’t changed since the beginning.
 
What has changed is the implementation of our mission.  Our strategic plan hasn’t changed either; we’ve been following the same plan.  The five-year plan has continuously been revised but it’s been tweaked to figure out how best to implement this goal of not only building schools, but also promoting cross-cultural dialogue.  When we founded Global Playground, we really wanted it to be something that engaged kids across the world in a way that got more out of schools, more out of the infrastructure we were building than just using them for the sake of infrastructure.  We wanted them to be a launch pad for a very rich, vibrant cross-cultural dialogue so that a child in Honduras could play chess with a child in Uganda and a child in Thailand could talk about what peace means with a child in Cambodia.
 
The idea of the Virtual Playground is to give children a platform to do that.  It’s something we are still implementing and hasn’t been fully launched yet.  But a lot of what we’re doing, by putting Teaching Fellows in our schools and getting teachers and their students in the U.S involved in our schools, is part of the lead up to launching the Virtual Playground.
 
JL: As Global Playground has grown, so has your career at Cohen Milstein.  Do you believe there are certain intangibles that you possess that have helped you succeed in pushing forward Global Playground, while balancing your career and other responsibilities?
 
Doug: I would say a couple of things.  First of all, Edward [Branagan], co-founder of Global Playground, and I since the beginning have wanted Global Playground to be something that’s not about us. It’s about the children we are trying to help and about the schools we are building.  Moreover, we wanted our organization to be about this intangible idea of the “global playground.”  To that end our leadership style focuses on building consensus and never losing vision and a sense of mission.  But it also rests on informing our own judgment by listening to other people and enlisting their help.
 
We’ve always had a sense of the big picture but we’ve learned, really in a true sense, what humility means in the context of leadership, what it means to take a step back and say to yourself as a leader “maybe I should listen more than talk, maybe I should figure out what great ideas other people have that I can follow.”
 
So that’s why we’ve built such a great group of volunteers; no one at Global Playground does this full time, we all do it in our spare time.  Our volunteers share the same passion for our mission so we really try hard to take a step back and realize that we don’t know it all.  And sometimes that means failing, we take risks that end up not working out, whether it’s a grant application that falls through or a program that we develop for our teachers that doesn’t pan out.
 
But an organization is only as good as the people who are part of it.  Our time is limited, we can’t make every single decision that our volunteers are making on a micro level, so we have to trust them with responsibility, we have to learn how to let go and let them drive the organization.
 
I talk to Edward all the time about Global Playground’s development and the way we envision things being five, ten years in the future.  I keep telling him that our development is like a plane going down the runway and you eagerly expect it to take off.  There are signs that it is about to take off.  One of these signs is when you realize you’re no longer needed in the organization, that you’re dispensable.
 
It may sound counter-intuitive from the point of view of a leader but it’s actually the best thing for an organization; if you’re able to one day say this organization can survive without me, that these volunteers are collaborating in such a rich way that they don’t need me anymore.  That’s when the plane really takes off.  And that’s beginning to happen at Global Playground.
 
JL: Building on this, what are some personal characteristics that you continually judge as being most important for success, not only in this field, but also in the non-profit environment?
 
Doug: Being proactive and taking initiative.  We can’t follow up all the time and demand accountability; instead we really rely on our volunteers to lead the conversation, to come up with ideas that push the organization forward.
 
When I’m interviewing people for volunteer positions, I ask them “Are you able to be proactive?  Are you able to push us? Because we can’t constantly follow up with you to get something out of you.”  Everyone involved in Global Playground has that drive, has that sense of what it means to take initiative.
 
In addition, they are good communicators; they can write and speak well.  They know what it means to represent the organization when they are acting on our behalf.  They have really solid skills of judgment.  One of the most important things you can have as a professional is the ability to use judgment, when to do something and when not to, when to say something and when not to.  Of course, multitasking is also quite important.  Everyone within Global Playground, just by the nature of what they do, has to have their own sense of multitasking and time management.
 
JL: Global Playground focuses on creating educational opportunities in the developing world through multiple channels and partnerships.  How does one become involved in this specific field?  Equally important, how does a young professional progress?
 
Doug: Willingness to put yourself out there and take the risk of learning what an organization is and what it does without any assurance that you’re going to have a job or you’re going to be employed with the organization full-time.  The people brought on board to work for Global Playground have no expectation of employment; they’re doing it because they possess a sheer passion for our mission.
 
During the interview process, it takes me about 30 seconds to assess whether people are truly genuine, whether they really have the passion to work for Global Playground.  I don’t believe there is any reason why in a city that’s as rich as this one is, in terms of non-profit opportunities, that they can’t just walk down the street, walk into a place and reach out through a contact to make an appointment with someone to sit down and talk with them about what they do, with no expectation that something will turn out career-wise.
 
This takes courage and it takes determination.  If you’re persistent, people will recognize that you share their passion.
 
JL: In recent years the role non-profits play in foreign policy discussion has steadily increased.  How has Global Playground adapted to this growing importance?  Moreover, how do you see the non-profit community developing in the years to come?
 
Doug: One aspect that is evolving along with that shift towards listening to the perspective of non-profits is the non-profit world itself.  The traditional non-profit used to be a bureaucracy indistinguishable from a government agency, a bureaucracy that had layers of administrators and huge overheard.
 
The most powerful non-profits now are very entrepreneurial.  They operate like businesses in the true profit sense.  Now profit may not be the dividends they pay to their shareholders, it’s more likely the number of schools they’re building or the number of children they are providing an education to.  At the end of the day they have very measurable outcomes that shape the way they do business.
 
Also, they are mostly very young, mostly relatively new organizations.  I know when Global Playground makes a decision to do something it takes us only roughly 24 hours to implement it; we just do it.  The ability of non-profits to move so quickly and efficiently has impacted policy in a way that forces policy makers to defer, in terms of thought leadership, to non-profits.  For example, when I want to know what is happening on the ground in Africa, I’m more likely to ask a non-profit like One Acre Fund or Building Tomorrow than I am the World Bank.  It’s much easier to obtain a real answer from the ground, from the micro level, from people that truly know where aid dollars can have the most impact.  Simply, non-profits can do it a lot better.
 
Non-profits are also becoming more streamlined.  As Global Playground grows, we actively fight to keep bureaucracy to a non-existent level.  We are an organization that is driven from the bottom up, rather than the top down.  The people doing the most phenomenal work for us are not our board members but instead our Teaching Fellows, the people on the ground teaching these children.
 
This is powerful for a series of reason.  Not only is it what donors want to see but it also promotes transparency and accountability.  In the age of reality TV, if you really want to know what’s happening you can log on [onto the Global Playground website] and see it.  This trend will only increase in the future.
 
JL: For someone who is thinking about starting a non-profit or working for a non-profit, what would say are the biggest misconceptions?  Furthermore, in your experience, what aspects are wrongly ignored but yet play a significant role in successfully starting a non-profit and working for one?
 
Doug: I think that some people assume that when you go and build schools in developing countries, that all of the countries are the same.  Also, when you work with partner organizations, all of these organizations are the same.  And nothing could be further from the truth.  Each of the organizations we work with has its own personality.  Each of the countries we work in has unique realities on the ground that we must be sensitive to.
 
The moment you step into the non-profit world, especially in development, you have to understand the people you are trying to help.  You can’t do anything until you do that first.  That’s one thing we really try hard to do in all of the countries we work in; before we even think about building a project, in a place like Vietnam or a place like Honduras, we go and we visit.  We talk to the people and we figure out what their challenges are and how education fits into that.  That creates a foundation for what we hope to do later, in terms of connecting these schools with each other.  People underestimate how important that is.
 
Also, people underestimate how important managing people and personalities is. Some of the issues we’ve faced and some of the e-mails I’ve received from people who want to help us in the past have been crazy.  But you have to understand two things.  First of all, their heart is in the right place, they are trying to help and bring a perspective that you may not have considered.  Second, it forces you as a leader to reassemble consensus and listen more carefully to people that are trying to help you.  So it’s actually a very good process.
If you think when you start an organization everyone is always going to get along, that’s not true.  But sometimes conflict within an organization is a healthy thing; it forces you to listen to a perspective that you hadn’t been open to before.
 
Doug Bunch is the Founder & Chairman of Global Playground, Inc.  He is also the Founder and former Executive Director of Ascanius: The Youth Classics Institute and has served on the Board of Directors of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.  In addition to his work with Global Playground, Mr. Bunch is an Associate at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, where he works in the Securities Fraud / Investor Protection practice group.
 
Mr. Bunch received his Bachelor’s degree in Government and Classical Studies from the College of William & Mary in 2002, a Master’s degree in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education in 2003, and a Juris Doctorate from the William & Mary School of Law in 2006.
If you are interested in becoming involved with Global Playgrounds, please feel
Free to send an email to volunteers@theglobalplayground.org