What’s on our minds

It’s time to inspire nonprofit leaders and teams to collaborate, get creative, innovate, and coalesce around a path forward. Appreciative Inquiry is a transformative approach to organizational change that focuses on highlighting what’s working well rather than fixing what’s broken.

We hope your annual end-of-year appeal is going splendidly and bringing in heaps of donations. Don’t forget that it’s not just about the dollars raised – this is your chance to forge individual connections with your donors.

Brian Saber, president of Asking Matters, recently published Fundraising for Introverts: Harnessing Our Powers for What Matters. This look at successful fundraising strategies builds on Brian’s already impressive life’s work with his company, Asking Matters – helping people determine their personal asking style and improve their approach to fundraising.

We believe that it’s imperative that nonprofits strive to embrace the values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in their operations and governance. This starts with the board of directors. If you are looking to build a board that reflects DEIB, here are a few suggestions.

New York City services millions of youths, homeless, and seniors in poverty through human service nonprofits whose government contracts ironically pay workers poverty wages. Most of the workers are people of color and more than half of the 80,000 in the city-funded nonprofit sector are women of color.

One of our favorite bloggers, Gotham Gal, aka Joanne Wilson posted a short article contemplating the world as we emerge from the Covid pandemic. If you don’t read Gotham Gal, you should! Joanne Wilson’s life is focused on making the world a better place, in line with Growth for Good’s company purpose.

Nonprofits often have thoughtful board recruitment and/or orientation process, but few nonprofits have a protocol for exiting board members. With or without term limits, even the very best of board members will eventually rotate off your nonprofit’s board.

This past week, Growth for Good provided transition consulting in multiple ways. We consulted an interim COO at Red Hook Initiative that we helped place. We proudly continued to support The Bronx Community Foundation as they move to be staff-led. Katherine DeFoyd has been serving as the interim development director on Town Hall’s capital campaign.