About
Our mission is to maximize investment in America's nonprofit workforce.
We envision a nonprofit sector that is equitable, effective, and enduring:
- Equitable: Working conditions that are accessible, appealing, and supportive for all who wish to serve, including Americans across lines of race, gender, class, national origin, ability, age and generation.
- Effective: A sector that recognizes and respect nonprofit workers (paid and unpaid) as the human force that creates, sustains, and grows nonprofit strategy, capacity, and program impact.
- Enduring: The systems needed to support the wellbeing, economic realities, retention, advancement, and sustainability of nonprofit leaders and workers -- individually and collectively, for the present and for the long-haul.
We influence the attitudes and behaviors of funders and fundraisers, in order to ensure widespread adoption of talent-investing across the sector. Talent-investing is the intentional deployment of capital to support and develop nonprofit leaders and workers.
We achieve these changes through our three-part strategy of making the case, equipping for action, and organizing for widespread adoption of talent-investing.
We achieve these changes through our three-part strategy of making the case, equipping for action, and organizing for widespread adoption of talent-investing.
- Making the Case: Providing cogent logic, cold hard numbers, and compelling stories that demonstrate the urgent need for and significant value of investing in the nonprofit workforce.
- Equipping for Action: Offering guidance, intellectual resources, and peer-support to help leaders implement talent-investing practices in new and preexisting organizations.
- Organizing: Building a network of relationships among champions who are willing to support one another and are able to mobilize individually and collectively for the cause of talent-investing.
Since Fund the People began, we’ve laid the groundwork for a transformation of the field changes through the following deliverables:
- Thought-Leadership: Through both public and behind-the-scenes influence activities, we've driven a reframing of the problem facing the nonprofit sector. For decades the problem was framed as a deficit of leaders; we redefined the problem as a chronic deficit of investment in the nonprofit workforce. Moving from problem to solutions, we've developed actionable ideas, practical tools, and innovative practices. We've delivered these through our unique podcast, speaking engagements, and other platforms.
- Tools: We've built a robust toolkit of original, freely-available resources to help funders and nonprofits make the case and test-out talent-investing practices.
- Research: Our original research has established baseline data on how much foundation funding goest toward supporting grantee staff; examined how funders and nonprofits can invest in intersectional racial equity in the nonprofit workforce; and gathered data on the value that foundations can create by investing in grantee staff.
- Education and Training: Through our Funding that Works Academy online courses, in-person workshops, presentations, and more, we help social sector leaders understand why and how to invest in the nonprofit workforce.
Fund the People was launched by Rusty Stahl in 2014 with support from The Kresge Foundation, before multiple crises made sustainable staffing the #1 issue facing nonprofits. Our launch took place after nearly two years of R&D at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. The impetus to begin R&D, in turn, was inspired by Generating Change, a research effort at Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (EPIP). Further, our work was inspired by participation in the 2011 White House Forum on Nonprofit Leadership, and the Nonprofit Workforce Coalition that led to the Forum.