$100,000 Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation

Today, we announced a call for applications for the 2013 Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation.

The prize is $100,000, thanks to a generous grant from The Coca-Cola Foundation.

The award application is now available on the Drucker Institute website. All IRS-certified 501(c)(3) organizations are eligible to apply. The submission deadline is July 1. (If you have questions about the application or award process, please contact award@druckerinstitute.com).

Administered annually since 1991, the Drucker Award is granted to a social-sector organization that demonstrates Peter Drucker’s definition of innovation—change that creates a new dimension of performance. In addition, the judges look for programs that are highly effective and that have made a demonstrable difference.

“For the past two decades, the Drucker Award has helped us to find the innovators, whether small or large; to celebrate their example; and to inspire others,” said Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute. “And each year, the judges have an extremely difficult choice to make in picking a final winner. I have no doubt that, once again, 2013 will bring us a large number of exciting and very well-qualified applicants.”

The Drucker Award application has been designed as a teaching tool, providing those organizations that fill it out with some of Peter Drucker’s key insights on innovation. Last year, 96% of respondents to an Institute survey indicated that the application had, in fact, given them a better understanding of how their program was innovative and 86% were prompted “to explore additional opportunities for innovation.”

Hailed by Businessweek magazine as “the man who invented management,” Drucker not only consulted for major corporations; he also advised the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and countless other social-sector organizations. He called the nonprofit “America’s most distinctive institution.”

The 2012 first-place Drucker Award winner was The American Refugee Committee, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that has engaged the global Somali community to help shape and lead ARC’s humanitarian response in their native country. The award recognized, in particular, ARC’s I AM A STAR program for leveraging the direct involvement of the Somali diaspora community to improve the lives of 170,000 people on the ground in Somalia by providing them with clean water, sanitation and healthcare. ARC based its model on a simple premise: A country’s global diaspora is not a lost resource but, rather, the greatest asset available in building a humanitarian response in that country.