Start the program with the smallest possible ask: a day together.

principle — attributed to Lisa Belzberg

Belzberg's PENCIL initiative was built on the smallest possible commitment. The CEO spends one day with a public school principal. That is the whole ask. The smallness is the design. Asking for money, or a year-long engagement, or a board seat would have produced a no from most potential participants. Asking for a day produces yes. The yes opens the door to the relationship that produces everything that follows: SAT tutoring buses, bodega owners who report truancy, scholarship programs that emerge organically. The principle generalizes for any program whose long-term value depends on first establishing a relationship between groups that do not currently know each other.

For nonprofit founders, civic conveners, and program designers thinking about how to bridge groups that share geography but not encounter. The principle is most useful as a corrective to the instinct to design large initial commitments.

pencil, small-commitment, principal-for-a-day, low-friction