Subject: Nonprofits

  • The Art$, Part II

    In my most recent post we started a conversation about some of the differences between very large cultural organizations and, well, everybody else. I pointed out that members of the Cultural Institutions Group (CIG) tend to be concentrated in the upper…

  • The Art$

    I was invited recently by the Municipal Art Society to do a research project called “Who Pays for the Arts." The goal is to create a tool using data provided by the Cultural Data Project (CDP) to better understand how…

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    Nine Rules of Engagement for Recruiting and Retaining Community Volunteers

    In community development's formative years, it would have been unthinkable for a nonprofit housing organization not to have a grassroots membership and not to have a governing board elected in whole or in part by that membership. It was universally…

  • Blurring the Lines Between For-Profit and Nonprofit

    In my last blog post I spent a good chunk of time talking about the trend toward "complexification" in the nonprofit sector. There are plenty of small, scrappy, neighborhood based nonprofits around (as a matter of fact, that number continues…

  • The Complexification of the Nonprofit Sector

    Nonprofit sector organizations are getting bigger, operations are getting more tentacled, financial tools are getting wonkier, and budgets keep growing. Don't just take my word for it: check out the Standford Social Innovation Review’s provocative article: "Why More Nonprofits Are…

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    How to Hire a Consultant

    Did you ever feel like you need a consultant to help you figure out what you need your consultant to do?  Believe me, you are not alone.  As a recovering executive director (and boy is that going to make a…

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    NYC’s Philanthropy Bagel Hole

    New York City has everything, just like this bagel. Yum! The secret, as they say, is in the water.  And water, as they say, is life.  But there’s a hole in the bagel, dear Liza, dear Liza. When I first…

  • I’m a Recovering Funder

    I spent 10 years as a corporate foundation program officer in New York City.  I managed our $5 million community development grants portfolio, which directly supported some 75 nonprofits.  After this, I went on to run the nonprofit intermediary charged…

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    The Healthy Nonprofit Ecosystem

    In the halcyon days of my youth, way back in 2006, I went to New Orleans. I traveled there at the behest of the corporation that I worked for at the time, as we had made a $2 million disaster…

  • Why Leadership Pays

    In previous blog posts (Why Evaluation Stinks), I’ve discussed how the fragmented nature of the nonprofit sector makes it very difficult to impose top-down, comprehensive evaluative frameworks. The primary problem is that even if you have two nonprofit organizations, each…