Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
In my last blog post, I talked about how making decisions from a place of fear is solidly rooting you in the world of scarcity. And that’s the last place you want your nonprofit and your social change work to be. Yet, scarcity is such an omnipresent ethos in the social change sector — from […]
I was talking to a nonprofit leader earlier this week who was unknowingly torturing herself. One part of her had a big vision for growing her nonprofit to reach more people and create change to a broken system. But another part of her felt stuck because she lacked so many things to make that big […]
There is something that I find nonprofit leaders often forget. And this is that you are immensely powerful. You are, in fact, powerful beyond measure. But there are so many ways that our society attempts to strip you of your power. To name a few: Legal and norm limits on your ability to influence policy […]
2020 continues to uncover the many social problems we need to solve, and broken systems we need to reinvent. This is crystal clear most recently with the horrific wildfires that have demonstrated how desperate we are for a solution to climate change. 2020 has been crisis after crisis, but these crises are also incredible opportunities. […]
I have been feeling lately that we social changemakers are on the cusp of something really big and new. It is an opportunity — an opportunity we have likely been training for our entire lives — to remake the world in ways we could formerly only imagine. Social change leaders, who have for so long […]
It feels like right now we are surrounded by can’ts. We can’t be near most other humans, we can’t travel as we used to, many can’t find work, we can’t really plan for the future because things seem to change by the minute. The can’ts seem to be everywhere. The sadder part is that in […]
These past few weeks have been heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. The protests around the country, around the world, fighting for racial justice and equality are growing by size and number every day. And those protests are already starting to result in some policy changes that only a couple of weeks ago felt […]
I received a great comment from a reader of my recent post, “The System for Funding Nonprofits is Crumbling. That’s a Good Thing.” While blog reader Vanessa agreed with my assessment that how we fund social change is horribly broken, she very rightly wanted to know what an individual nonprofit leader can do to overcome […]
There is much discussion lately about the financial doom that this pandemic is unleashing on nonprofits. Cancelled galas, shrinking corporate donations, fearful foundation donors, disappearing government coffers. It seems that the entire way nonprofits and social change are funded might be crumbling before our eyes. It’s about time! That’s because how money flows to the […]
Perhaps one of the worst things about this pandemic is that in practicing social distancing for days on end we begin to believe that we are alone. Zoom calls, emails and conversations with the same few people you are quarantining with can only get you so far. The silence, the physical distance from staff, board, […]
I was talking with a foundation leader the other day who was bogged down with the trauma of the past year – or years, decades even – of blows to progressive social change. He was worn down, disillusioned, demoralized. He felt powerless in the face of what seems, to him, to be a growing list […]
So I did something scary this week. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time (years, honestly). But I was afraid. I was afraid that if I did, people wouldn’t be able to find me, I’d miss important conversations, I’d feel left out, that it […]
We had a really great training earlier this week, The Roadmap to Abundance. In that training, I announced a unique online course I’m offering that will guide you step-by-step away from the exhausting hampster wheel of never having enough, to the effortless abundance of all of the money, people, power, and influence you need to […]
“I am so stuck!” said a nonprofit leader to me last week. She reached out to me because she’d been at a stagnant level of revenue for years, the board was disengaged, funders had lost interest, and they weren’t achieving their mission. They were STUCK! So here’s what I said to her, and I say […]
I’m so excited to announce a new, free training that will show you your roadmap to attracting all the abundance you need to achieve your social change goals. Are you tired of never having enough money, people, time, influence, and power to achieve your mission? What if, instead of being exhausted, worn out, disillusioned, and […]
We as humans are so good at making things hard, aren’t we? I know I am. Not to brag or anything, but I am incredibly talented at pushing so hard on something that I not only wear myself out, but also make the task so much longer and more difficult. For some reason we often […]
Note: I wrote this post for the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog where it appeared last week. “An old friend of Robert Frost’s was driving him home on a moonlit August night, with huge stars in the sky. The friend mused, ‘On a night like this, I keep thinking that life is so short, and […]
Let’s be honest for a second — the state of support inside most nonprofits is pretty sad. It usually goes something like this: a disengaged, dysfunctional board poorly leads a financially strapped, exhausted, and underappreciated staff. Harsh, but fairly true. If I just described your organization, take heart because it doesn’t have to be that […]
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple of months doing interviews and podcasts related to my book, Reinventing Social Change, and I have so enjoyed the conversations, that I wanted to share some of them with you. I also have several more podcasts and interviews coming up, so I’ll continue to […]
So often in the nonprofit sector scarcity manifests as a lack of money — nonprofit leaders constantly bemoan the (perceived) fact that there just isn’t enough money to go around. But if we dig a little deeper, money is just a means to an end. Likely the first thing you would buy if an abundance […]
