Nonprofits whose work focuses on communities need to recognize that they are the keepers of knowledge and wisdom about community engagement and community development, the very skills most needed today. And community is the crucible of our major challenges—job loss, failing schools, home foreclosures, violence, fear—as well as where the answers for the future will be found.
Four Futures
During these troubled times, what lies in store for the nonprofit sector, and what do we need to do about it? Along with every family in America, the nonprofit sector is wondering about its future. Will we miraculously survive as we largely do today? Will we starve our organizations to the core or emerge from the current economic calamity mostly intact? Will we fight the prevailing downturn on behalf of our individual institutions and leave others to defend themselves, or instead will we join forces to shore up the sector as a whole? In the aftermath of this financial crisis, will we have real options and choices?
Nonprofits and Philanthropy: Scenario I – An Interview with Kelvin Taketa and Chris Van Bergeijk
Even before the financial crisis began to unfold, the Hawaii Community Foundation realized that it had lapsed into philanthropic habits that might be counterproductive. So it opted to try a different way. The attached interview describes its experiment — which is still ongoing — in building grantmaking from the collective intelligence of community activists.
One Step Removed: The U.S. Nonprofit Sector and the World
In other countries, the kind of innovation that is vital for the future of U.S. nonprofit abounds.
Stoking the Nonprofit Advocacy Engine
Advocacy suffers from an inadequate conceptual frame and inconsistent messages. We are mired in the same old debates about what constitutes advocacy, where the line is drawn between advocacy and civic engagement, and whether we should proudly proclaim lobbying as our constitutionally given right “to petition government” and our public-interest responsibility or should instead avoid the L word for fear of scaring nonprofits and funders away.
Welcome to Winter 2008
The Nonprofit Ethicist | Winter 2008
In the competitive marketplace, should you offer higher salaries to retain an eroding staff?
Dancing with Uncertainty: Keeping the Heat and Lights on in the Nonprofit Sector
What have the nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructures accomplished? What is their task?
The U.S. Nonprofit Infrastructure Mapped
The Nonprofit Quarterly’s maps of the U.S. nonprofit infrastructure provide a snapshot circa October 2008 of the dynamic and complex community of organizations and initiatives that comprise the national infrastructure of the U.S. nonprofit sector.
Accelerants: The Nonprofit Infrastructure on Fire
If the nonprofit infrastructure didn’t exist, there would be a movement to create it.
Seizing the Day: Opportunity in the Wake of Crisis—An Interview with Lester Salamon
Nonprofits can advance where for-profits fear to tread.
Nonprofits and Philanthropy: Scenario II — An Interview with Ralph Smith
The relationship between nonprofits and foundation philanthropists was once mutually exclusive, but not anymore.