By Hildy Gottlieb

At their heart, community organizations are places where people share their dreams and plan their common futures.

So says this month’s Making Change guest, John Stansfield. Mr. Stansfield is the director of advocacy and campaigns for the New Zealand office of Oxfam International, a global antipoverty organization.

He shares lessons from his experiences there and at his prior job as chief executive of the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand, where he led an effort to remove highly addictive slot machines (or, as they are called in New Zealand, Pokey machines) from communities across the nation.  

In addition to his work at nonprofits, Mr. Stansfield draws on his experience as co-founder of the graduate program in nonprofit management at New Zealand’s Unitec Institute of Technology.

Looking over his decades of social-change work, Mr. Stansfield suggests that the main competitive advantage community organizations have over government or for-profit businesses is “their ability to excite passion around shared values.”

Check out the podcast for his discussion on how to turn those values into social change.

Hildy Gottlieb is the co-founder of Creating the Future and author of The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing "Nonprofit Organizations" to Create the Future of Our World. In this podcast, Making Change, she interviews leaders to discuss how those who are working for the greater good can effect more social change. New episodes of Making Change appear on the second Thursday of every month.