California Musing…

I’ve just come back from spending three days in California talking about how nonprofits all over the country are faring, these days.

The forum was the national Alliance for Nonprofit Management conference. Together with folks from Minnesota. Mew Mexico, Maryland, Ohio, California, New York and everywhere in between, over 100 nonprofit “capacity-builders’ made the space to think deeply about how nonprofits, and the people who run them, are coping.

I’ll warn you, this is not a column that offers solutions.

Some of the profound conversation-stoppers I heard:

As nonprofits hunker down and the more economically marginalized groups go back into their bedrooms, the nonprofit world is starting to become cleaved between two kinds of groups – small, unstaffed organizations, and larger, fully professionalized institutions. Are they really one sector?

In this time of profound change, do boards see their role as protecting the mission...or are they more vested in protecting their organization’s brand than in embracing change? Are boards ready to look at the fundamental business model of their nonprofit?

What is the net result of the deprofessionalization that goes on as a development director, or a chief financial officer, leaves – by attrition or through layoffs – and their role gets absorbed by the executive director? Leaving that piece of work to be done by someone without as much expertise and with multiple other competing priorities?

Are people tuning out from the advice deluge on coping strategies?

As hard as it was to live like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill, the burden now feels like we’re trying to carry a load of mud up the hill, which oozes out at every turn.

Sober musings, all…

Time to Contemplate

I was at a meeting today where board members were being asked to digest a long, complex planning document they’d first seen less than 12 hours ago, if at all.

It had some great ideas.

But it was just too much to absorb “live.”

Now would these board members have pored over the document ahead of time if it’d been sent a week in advance? Maybe, or maybe not.

But by bringing it to the meeting, the executive director all but guaranteed she’d have a “paper board” – a board whose function was to appreciate, not to contemplate.

I don’t think that’s what she intended to accomplish – after all, she went to the trouble of preparing a lengthy exegesis of current trends in the field and their relevance to the agency’s work. If she really wanted a noninvolved board, she could have simply prepared a board packet with financials, press releases and a program update, and called it a day.

So that got me thinking about the power of meetings to force preparation. You know you’re going to face people (especially the board), so you take the time to prepare a thoughtful framing of the issues you want far-sighted deliberation on. Well so far, so good…but the problem was, this executive director should have set a deadline not for the meeting date, but for (a minimum of) a week ahead.

Time to act thoughtfully – not a luxury in these tricky days. A lot depends on our ability to steer our agencies through tea leaves that are murky, at best.