By Rusty Stahl. There is a vast chasm between the perspectives of foundation and nonprofit leaders when it comes to the state of investing in the people who make up grantee organizations. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Strengthening Grantees study compares how foundation and nonprofit leaders rate the need to strengthen various organizational capacity functions, such as [...]
By Yolanda Caldera-Durant, Vice President, Fund the People. For many aspiring professionals of color, unpaid internships and low-paying apprenticeships are one of the few ways they can enter the nonprofit workforce, but they simply are not financially viable. Moreover, their lived experience in communities is not fully valued by potential nonprofit employers. These conditions must [...]
By Yolanda Caldera-Durant, Vice President, Fund the People Today’s nonprofit workforce is being pushed to evolve the talent that’s traditionally been tapped to lead and staff nonprofits. Professionals of color are more frequently being sought after to take on executive leadership and management roles. Despite this trend, nonprofits continue to have leaders that are primarily [...]
By Rusty Stahl, President & CEO, Fund the People The other day, my Fund the People co-conspirator Yolanda Caldera-Durant and I took a break from co-working to enjoy a lunch of soup and sandwiches at a cozy Panera Bread in suburban Connecticut (it is at the midway point between where we each live and work). [...]
By Yolanda Caldera-Durant, Vice President, Fund the People How can young nonprofit professionals advocate for talent-investing at their organizations? I found out at a Fund the People workshop that I facilitated at the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (YNPN) conference this summer. Workshop participants were a mix of nonprofit and foundation professionals from across the U.S. [...]
Posted by Rusty Stahl, President and CEO, Fund the People The perennial excuse for not hiring diverse people to top-tier, mainstream nonprofit jobs is that the employer could not find any highly-qualified candidates. We know from many sources -- most recently from the Building Movement Project’s great Race to Lead research -- that diverse nonprofit [...]
Nicky Goren, president and CEO, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation Most nonprofit executive directors have experienced running an organization where cash is tight. In my first foray as a nonprofit executive director, I walked into an organization with unrealistic revenue projections and an operating budget tied to those projections. This meant that we were facing a [...]
Yolanda Caldera-Durant, director of programs, Fund the People A few weeks ago I had the exciting opportunity to participate in GEO’s national conference on the organization’s 20th anniversary in San Francisco. Equity was a key theme of this gathering of 950 funders from the U.S. and abroad. Participating in several challenging and thought-provoking discussions, both [...]
Emma Spalti, graduate fellow, Fund the People What happens when funders invest in nonprofit staff, and can it go beyond the individual to improve organizational performance and programmatic outcomes? Foundations that have taken the plunge into talent-investing – and measured the results along the way – can offer some insights. In this post, I share [...]
Marianne Philbin, executive director, Pierce Family Foundation Nonprofits tend to sink or swim based not on mission and funding alone, but on the talents of employees. Keeping good employees and equipping them for the work is one of the critical challenges frequently cited by nonprofit leaders, yet funders tend to invest much less in the [...]
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