Doing More with 'Enough'

In light of current economic conditions, the nonprofit sector can’t afford to continue in a “business as usual” manner. This was the message that NYU Professor Paul Light delivered at the 6th annual conference of the Connecticut Association of Nonprofits. His keynote reflected the event theme of “Sustaining Nonprofits, Strengthening Communities.”

“We’re the first to go into a recession and the last to come out,” said Light, who is also Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. To that end, he recommended the following paradigm shifts:

  • Greater state support. Grant money is appreciated, but state funds also need to help cover capacity building. Nonprofits can’t be expected to fulfill their respective missions with grants that don’t support training, marketing, and other critical areas.
  • Sector makeover. Many leaders in the nonprofit arena are getting older and retiring—and young people aren’t clamoring to take their places. The nonprofit world needs to shed its stodgy, ascetic image to attract innovative young minds.

As the global community prepares to tighten its belt, everyone talks about the need to “do more with less.” Light argues that it’s time that nonprofits have the opportunity to “do more with enough.”

WAKE UP CALL: What steps can we take to increase state support and to attract the fresh talent we need?

The Moment of Now Conference 2008



On October 24, 2008, the Columbia School of Business held a conference titled “The Moment of Now: Market Innovations in Social Enterprise” to explore themes in the emerging sector of social enterprise. In this session on Cultivating Effective NGO-Business Partnerships, Gordon Peterson (second from left),  VP of Corporate Social Responsibility for The Timberland Company, squared off with two nonprofits: Allison Clements (left), Corporate Counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Kyle Cahill, Director of Corporate Engagement at the Environmental Defense (third from left), moderated by Alan Webber, Founder of Fast Company magazine.Continue reading

The Triple Bottom Line


At a Craigslist Foundation event on Social Entrepreneurship, Jeffrey Robinson, PhD. Asst. Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, at the NYU Stern School of Business, discussed the triple bottom line of social ventures: profits, social responsibility and environmental responsibility – given equal weight. The triple bottom line concept is gaining traction as a viable business model as people seek to make a living by doing good.

WAKE UP CALL: In what ways can you incorporate these areas into your bottom line?

Fundraising Day NY 2008

Keynote speaker to Association of Fundraising Professionals Fundraising Day NY 2008 conference, Lorraine Cortes-Vasquez, Secretary of State for NYS, shares her insights and inspirations to the nonprofit sector.

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I liked her quote encouraging nonprofit leaders to think like business people: “I is not for profit, but I is not for loss.”

WAKE UP CALL: To have the capacity to continually serve clients, nonprofits need to think strategically about investing for the future.

Smart Models Conference

AIGA’s Smart Models Conference Provides Lessons for Nonprofits
Drew Hodges from Spot Design opens the AIGA conference on Smart Business Models by describing how his agency transformed from a design studio creating a posters for Broadway shows, most notably, RENT, into an ad agency to capture the  hundreds of thousands of dollars in media commissions. This is a good lesson in making the necessary changes in your organization in order to take advantage of opportunity.

Athletica 3

Matt Owens discusses how he works collaboratively on projects with other young designers under the name Athletica. By sharing an office, they reduce their overhead, and by approaching clients as experts in various areas they are able to attract business that they could not independently. Nonprofits can learn from this approach to collaboration.
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Douglas Riccardi, from Memo Productions, a protege of Tibor Kalman, the legendary designer from M&Co., describes his journey to attract respectable clients and produce outstanding work. Keeping his business small while tackling large projects, he found that his personality was was his key selling point. In the face of daily mediocrity, he urged designers to “push to do something fantastic.” A good lesson in that your recognition comes from doing great things that get noticed, not in doing good or mediocre things consistently. Nonprofits that seek wider visibility from the public and funders need to things dramatically in order to get noticed.
Joe Duffy & Eric Block
Joe Duffy and Eric Block describe their latest venture, Duffy Partners – essentially, the relaunching of Duffy Design before it was swallowed up by the advertising conglomerate. Nonprofits can learn from this process of building up, selling or merging the entity, and starting again.
WAKE UP CALL: New ways of conducting business, serving people and fundraising, are being developed in response to technologies that shrink the world and allow people the interact in different ways. Smart organizations conduct periodic reviews of their missions and their business models to assess whether they are still relevant. When is the last time your organization checked the relevancy of its method of achieving its mission?

Drawings from the Nonprofit Congress

The opening session of the National Nonpofit Congress held in June in Washington, DC, kicked off three days of conference sessions bringing together the best ideas to promote the public sector.

Kari Galloway

Karrie Galloway, the Director of Friends of Guest House, shares the joys and challenges of helping recovering addicts to acclimate to society.

Jenifer McDaniel
Former heroine addict, Jennifer McDaniel shares her heart-breaking story of being sexually abused as a child and kicked out of her home, leaving school without learning to read, entering the foster care system, becoming a drug addict and her ultimate path to literacy, a job and normalcy.
The format of the conference combined personal stories such as this one, with macro level sessions on issues and best practices affecting the public sector. On the last day participants broke out into statewide groups in order to form committees to continue the discussion during the course of the year. The conference concluded with all the statewide delegations assembling to share their plans for promoting the visibility and viability of the nonprofit sector in their states. Some, as I did, stayed in Washington, DC another day in order to participate in lobbying on behalf of a bill which would provide $25 million in funds for capacity-building for the nonprofit sector. The Nonprofit Congress reconvenes in May of 2009 in New Orleans.