Buffalo, where the Erie Canal met the Great Lakes, was once one of the wealthiest cities in the US, but later fell on hard times. Now, the city is rebounding, but will long-time residents benefit? Community-based nonprofits are organizing residents to make sure that they do.
While smaller organizations have always made use of fluid roles, the use of the practice by larger nonprofits and companies appears to increase good outcomes both for the organization and the employee.
When are reparations required? The University of Chicago’s official history dates its founding to 1890. But activists claim that the university has ignored an earlier campus founded in part with slave money that operated from the 1850s until the 1880s and from whom some of the original donor and faculty base of the campus derived.
As a result of nonprofit health insurers and some hospitals being sold to for-profits over past decades, health legacy foundations, today with $27.5 billion in assets, have become important players in addressing the economic, environmental and social drivers of poor health outcomes.
If what we measure matters, then standard economic measures leave out a whole lot. In response, communities, nations, and international bodies have developed well-being indicators that include community-identified social and environmental metrics. Done well, these indices provide valuable data that highlight nonprofits’ value and help us improve our overall quality of life.
All CEOs, if they claim any interest in organizational sustainability and stewardship of mission, should spend a good part of their time developing a deep bench that will both challenge and support them.
Do you lean heavily on pity and empathy in your fundraising without paying attention to the embedded messages being sent? Maybe you too can win an award for poverty porn!
When asked about the CEO’s salary, which appears to be roughly three times a comparable position brings in, a board member responded that such things were not his concern. The IRS, of course, thinks otherwise.
The Walton and Ford foundations have paired up to invest in diversity for museum leadership.
Corporations have become more activist over the past year, and in this case, they take on the president directly.
Last week, the Supreme Court let stand a Ninth Circuit California federal appellate court decision upholding the rights of American Indian nations to water aquifers under their land. The decision is likely to influence water management throughout western US states.
Founders are the very soul of this sector. They are people who envision a change vividly enough to place so much at risk—relationships, reputation and time—on a personal level to make a thing happen. They gather people of common cause, and attract financing, and risk being laughed out of whatever rooms they are in. But be careful, because all of that leadership is likely to be later diagnosed as “founder’s syndrome,” with the end result of “simplifying, exaggerating and blaming.” This article by Elizabeth Schmidt concedes that though some of the observable traits of founder-led organizations may be real, these same organizations may also have strengths that get overlooked in a mad attempt to replicate a norm.