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On Friday, January 25th, 2008, Surgance began guiding a workgroup—an important, strategic results-based session involving 42 of the Valley's key community leaders—focused on building nonprofit capacity through the creation of a Center for Excellence in Southern Nevada.

Organized by its founding visionaries—Jan Craddock, Lisa Spencer, Stacey Wedding, Carolyn Wheeler—and sponsored by BLVDS Magazine, Henderson Community Foundation, Imagine Marketing, Professionals in Philanthropy, Surgance, Gard Jameson, Lisa Spencer, and Carolyn Wheeler, the event drew angel funders, business owners, community volunteers, corporate business professionals, educators from both the public sector and private institutions, faith-based organizations, foundation executives, the gaming industry, government service directors, non-profit leaders, philanthropists and a state senator; encompassing a remarkable, eclectic blend of Las Vegas' community-minded visionaries.

The purpose: to begin a collaborative movement across the spectrum of the community to spearhead excellence in non-profit leadership in Las Vegas.

The Purpose

As nonprofit organizations play increasingly important roles in society, it becomes even more critical for them to perform effectively.  The sooner leaders in the government, business, education, philanthropy and nonprofit sectors begin to collaborate on the challenging task of capacity building, the better off nonprofits—and community as a whole—will be.

However, many projects suffer from the inability to effectively bring together stakeholders and project teams in a manner that rapidly creates results needed for the project to move forward.

The event was purposefully tailored to present a vision, begin a dialogue, and create a collaborative coalition for the development of a Center for Excellence.

Specific outcomes from the day-long event included:

• Agreement on the value and impact for The Center
• Alignment on the model for The Center including services, focus and structure
• Discussion of possible funding mechanisms for The Center
• Greater ownership for the overall success of The Center
• Identification of actions (working groups, etc.) and a general plan for next steps for The Center

The Process

Surgance provides organizations with a systematic and consistent way to conduct collaborative meetings that produce better results in less time using the proven WildWorks Results-based Conversation™ (RbC) model of facilitation. 

Six effective principles guide both the flow of a collaborative session and the specific exercises, assignments and breakouts during the session—one of the key differences between Surgance's approach and traditional facilitation.

Much of traditional facilitation is “personality based”.  That is, the quality of the work done is directly tied to the experience, expertise and personality of the individual facilitating the work.

Surgance's method for collaborative work is “process based”.  That is, the quality of the work accomplished is a direct result of the principle-based process that guides the session’s specific design and conduct.

Thus, the collaborative work experience is very different from both common day-to-day activities as well as many other types of facilitated meetings.  This experience includes:

• The use of breakouts to allow for parallel processing of ideas
• The reporting of all breakouts back to the overall group to allow for the emergence of commonalities and new ideas
• The use of templates to focus the work
• The use of a specific agenda designed to guide the work
• Very little “direct” facilitation of group work

An experienced RbC facilitator, Surgance's Executive Director, Brian Audia,  effectively guided this prolific workgroup of community leaders through the RbC process at the request of its visionary leadership.

As an added bonus, WildWorks' CEO and Founder, Tom McGehee, who developed the RbC model, co-facilitated the process with Brian.  Sharing Surgance's passion for community transformation, Tom fully understood the significance of this event.  Because of his relationship with Surgance and Brian, Tom cleared his consultative schedule specifically to be in Las Vegas for this event.