nonprofit

The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Mom. Apple pie. Service. In The American Way to Change, Shirley Sagawa convincingly argues that volunteering is both deeply rooted in American history, as well as a creative solution to modern societal challenges. Sagawa argues that service can be used to impact many entrenched social ills, including an ineffective public education system, an aging population with fewer family support systems, environmental degradation, and poverty. Service—whether through a national program like AmeriCorps or through individuals working at volunteer-run organizations like Citizen Schools—is a critical component to a functioning civil society, according to Sagawa, and fill gaps between programs offered by the government, businesses, and nonprofits.

Over nine concise chapters, Sagawa outlines American volunteer service and its impact on the people serving, the communities being served, and the nation at large. This impact is not just due to the net social good that's being enacted through these programs, but also through the innovations that result from passionate people dealing with real challenges with limited resources. She also describes the people who serve, who are mostly people in transition: college graduates, retirees, and the recently jobless, among others.

Sagawa, who has been called "the mother of the modern service movement," is a very credible author, and The American Way to Change isn't pure conjecture about the impact volunteers and service organizations could have on the big issues facing America. She describes, at length, the impact of the volunteer-based programs that are presently working in prose both matter-of-fact and moving. For instance, one successful venture is the Prisoner Entrepreneurship Program, which combats recidivism through teaching basic business skills to the incarcerated. Founded by a former Wall Street investor, the program has a return-to-prison rate of less than ten percent, and an employment rate of eighty percent within thirty days of release. This is one of literally dozens of programs that Sagawa profiles that are both very successful and have concrete results that help solve some of America's biggest challenges.

In this fast-moving book, Sagawa makes a strong case for service no longer being considered something "nice" done to pad a resume or pass an afternoon, but an absolutely necessity in changing the United States for the better. Buy it if you're passionate about service, looking for organizations to volunteer with that are making a substantial difference, or simply in need of inspiration about the power of human potential.

Written by: Catherine Nicotera, August 16th 2010

Change the World, Change Your Life: Discover Your Life Purpose Through Service

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Angela Perkey

Red Wheel Weiser

Change the World, Change Your Life materialized as the author, Angela Perkey, reflected on how to help others find personal and community connections through donating one’s time. In her formative years, Perkey’s parents instilled in her the importance of volunteering and making a time commitment to help others. Thus, she spent time volunteering in various ways, and the most memorable volunteer experience to her was when she spent time painting the toenails of elderly women in a senior center.

Although she knew that she was providing companionship, she wasn’t wholly invested in the experience. As she got older, she realized she wanted to find volunteer experiences that matched her passions and interests, as well as find an opportunity to volunteer where her talents could be most utilized. Perkey discovered in college that she wanted to form an organization where students could apply for grants to fund their own service projects, and from this, Students Serve, Perkey’s nonprofit, was formed.

In Change the World, Change Your Life, Perkey advocates on how to find a type of giving that matches with one’s goals in life. At one point in the book, Perkey points out that, in reality, most organizations have failed because they have not succeeded in what they have aimed to do, such as eradicating hunger or providing an equal education for all students. Her brashness is a way to emphasize the fact that there are multiple problems which need solving and that maybe we are the ones to solve them.

Perkey also wants her readers to realize that we should be selective in choosing where we give our money and spend our time; in other words, we should think about what a volunteer opportunity is going to do for us as well as what we will be doing for the organization. Will we be happier as a result of the time we spend volunteering? Will we come home invigorated, so that our positive energy is felt by those around us? Perkey points out that only when we feel that we are making worthwhile contributions to our society will we be truly spurred on to continue our efforts, and only then will we be able to really help the causes to which we are dedicated. Furthermore, she creates many guiding questions which are meant to help her readers find the volunteer opportunities that will be the most fulfilling and rewarding, and have the most impact on those we are serving.

If an individual is not already volunteering her or his time to an organization, there are probably a plethora of reasons why she or he will start this important work in the future and not today. I have wanted to volunteer for years, yet my work and home schedule always seemed so hectic, and I couldn’t imagine fitting volunteering into my schedule. Then I had kids, and I wasn’t sure what service opportunities were available for families to do with their children. After starting Perkey’s book, I made a call to a local Meals on Wheels organization. I asked them if I could volunteer with my children, and sure enough, the following week I started taking meals to senior citizens in my town with my four year old and seven month old in tow.

That was a month ago, and now I am wholeheartedly enjoying spending a few hours each week volunteering due to Perkey’s straightforward guidance and gentle prodding to take action sooner rather than later. Any book that can motivate people to take action should be shared, and I’ll happily recommend this to anyone who is looking for a way to become involved in her or his community.

Written by: Kirsha Frye-Matte, July 6th 2010

Nonprofit Finance for Hard Times: Leadership Strategies When Economies Falter

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Susan U. Raymond

Wiley

Did you know there are over twenty-five IRS codes for nonprofits? Or that nonprofits make up the third largest sector in the US economy? Or that more than three quarters of the existing nonprofits have emerged since 1980? Given that this is such a large sector to examine and there are imperfections in available data, Susan Raymond limits the scope of her new book, Nonprofit Finance for Hard Times, to discussion of organizations with 501(c)(3) status.

The 501(c)(3) category includes organizations focused on myriad areas, including religion, education, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and prevention of cruelty to children or animals. Some examples of 501(c)(3) organizations you are probably familiar with are The Boys & Girls Club, The United Way, and the publisher of Bitch magazine, Bitch Media. I personally appreciated this limitation in scope since I work for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and could think about the arguments and tips in terms of how they can be of use to my particular agency.

Nonprofit Finance for Hard Times provides recommendations of strategies for revamping or revitalizing existing programs while engaging and strengthening relationships with donors, foundations, and other financial stakeholders. The text extensively discusses not only the ways to make it through economic hardship but also how to best plan for the long term in ways that can buffer more difficult times. My personal favorite of these tips is the the importance of a strong and committed volunteer base. In times of economic hardship, people’s most valuable asset is their time, which can make or break an organization when money is tight.

I liked the layout of the book and appreciated the thematic summaries at the beginning of each chapter. These summaries helped me decide if the information in the chapter was going to be of any use or interest for my purposes. Raymond furthered supports her recommendations by providing many examples and testimonials, which help illustrate how theory is translated into practice and what some organizations found effective. One such testimony was from the CEO of (RED) on how cause-related marketing has helped raise funds to fight AIDS in Africa. You may have seen some of this cause-related marketing at Starbucks or The GAP.

Another point of interest for me was the tone of the discussion. Many of Raymond’s ideas are based off of what I consider to be corporate business models. Yes, nonprofits must raise funds to continue to provide their services, keep their doors open, and continue the work, but I believe grassroots organizing is a more effective approach. Strangely enough, this is not mentioned in Raymond’s book. I even checked the index in the back, thinking perhaps my brain had gone on autopilot and missed it, but ‘grassroots’ wasn't even listed.

I worry that not considering a ground-up approach to stabilize an organization’s operational model is forever going to be deeply tied to the booms and busts of our capitalist economy, and it is concerning that this book makes no mention of involving the people directly impacted by nonprofit nor does it consider the impact these people's needs, desires, and investment may have in supporting the organization. This crucial aspect was not explored by Raymond to its fullest potential.

Taken as just one perspective of many, this book could be quite useful to large nonprofits with a global vision. While I did not particularly enjoy the book, I do believe sharing of effective practices and strategies is necessary for the nonprofit sector of the economy, and that long term planning is the key to an agency’s survival during the hard times.

Written by: Liz Martin, April 12th 2010

Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies: Activism in the GirlZone

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:18:00 +0000

By Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau

SUNY Press

Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies follows the short life GirlZone, a nonprofit in Central Illinois. Founded by two women living in Urbana-Champaign, GirlZone offered nontraditional workshops and other hands-on learning opportunities for girls in the area and its outskirts. Ranging from skateboarding lessons to a bi-weekly radio show, GirlZone sounds like it was very cool indeed.

I was really excited to receive this book, but it was disappointing in a number of ways. First, it's a real downer to read about how a neat nonprofit that was girl-centered simply flopped. Second, you have to plow through an academic, dry writing style to get to what should be the exciting meat of the book. It's written like a case study—notwithstanding the absence and misuse of punctuation, which grates on the nerves—rather than a narrative of what really seems like groundbreaking social work.

What is exciting is reading the interviews with girls who were activists in grade school, and finding out that they went on to become employed as journalists, radio DJs, and independent media producers. What's sad is that many of GirlZone's internal debates centered around whether or not to openly call themselves a feminist organization. While it's clear that the organization never had a solid funding or board structure, it's maddening to think that, being a nonprofit that focused on girls exclusively, they never really had a fair shot at funding. The author and one of GirlZone's founders, Aimee, both argue this point, and the statistics agree: Sheridan-Rabideau cites the fact that for every four private foundation grants to boys' groups, only one is given for girls.

One thing I did like about this book is that it made me, as a fundraising professional, want to go out and do something about that. It's high time for those numbers to change.

Written by: M.L. Madison, April 12th 2009

Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:17:00 +0000

By Dan Pallotta

Tufts University Press

In Uncharitable, Dan Pallotta demands nothing less than a complete overhaul of the way charity is understood and expected to function. He traces America's nonprofit ideology back to the Puritans, for whom charity was a form of self-denial used to counteract and assuage their guilt about their unabashed self-serving capitalist pursuits. Ever since, he argues, charity has been kept separate from capitalism and held to different and damaging standards.

He takes issue with the fact that many standard practices at for-profit companies, the very practices that allow them to grow and succeed financially, are generally seen as off-limits to nonprofit organizations. These include paying executives market-rate salaries, taking risks, planning according to a long-term vision instead of just short-term needs, advertising prominently, and allowing investors to receive a return on their investment through the stock market. If nonprofits were permitted to engage in similar practices, he argues, they would be able to make much more money and have a much better shot at achieving their long-term goals of ending homelessness, finding a cure for AIDS, and so on.

Whether or not you agree with Pallotta's argument that the non-profit sector should have access to the tools of free-market capitalism, it's hard to deny his claim that charities are held to a double standard and often judged on the wrong criteria. The book's most persuasive chapter concerns the common donor concerns about overhead, fundraising costs, and what percentage of their donation "goes to the cause." The measure of so-called efficiency drives the assessments and ratings of influential watchdog groups like the Better Business Bureau and Charity Navigator, and often ends up completely replacing questions about what organizations are actually accomplishing through their programs. While Pallotta acknowledges that most of his visions for an improved nonprofit sector are impossible without a widespread change in ideology, something we can all start doing today is concerning ourselves with outcomes rather than percentages, and doing the most good rather than having the fewest expenses.

In case you're wondering how Pallotta's ideas would actually function in the real world, the book is supplemented by a case study of Pallotta TeamWorks, the author's company that produced AIDS Rides, breast cancer walks and other large-scale fundraising events that raised hundreds of million dollars for charity before being forced out of business by the public outcry about its unorthodox approach to fundraising. PTW came under fire for its "slick" advertising and brochures, high expenses, risks that usually succeeded but occasionally failed, and the fact that it made a profit. Amazingly, despite the huge amounts of money being raised for vital AIDS vaccine research and more, activists and news outlets consistently painted PTW as a parasite taking advantage of charities, and the company eventually lost its contracts and was forced to cease operations. Unfortunately, the result of its closure was the loss of massive amounts of charitable funding that has not since been replaced by other revenue streams.

Uncharitable is a visionary work that will change the way you think about charity, how nonprofits operate, and what they could accomplish under a different set of rules.

Written by: Kiri Oliver, March 4th 2009

Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America

admin — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:54:00 +0000

By Susan A. Miller

Rutgers University Press

As a former Girl Scout, I have vivid memories of my first trip to Camp Hoffman where my troop and I listened to the history of the organization. I particularly remember an awful amount of fanfare when my leader discussed Juliette Gordon Low, the fearless founder of the Girl Scouts. After reading Susan A. Miller’s Growing Girls, I feel a little jaded about my 2nd grade introduction to the Girl Scouts. This book, which particularly focuses on the creation and growth of the Girl Scouts and the Campfire Girls during the early 20th century, is equally pertinent to today’s camping and scouting opportunities for girls.

Typical of the time period, scouting programs for girls were originally created to solve the “problems” of Victorian girls—namely their evolution away from the domestic sphere and towards modernism, fashion, and popular culture. Scout leaders claimed to be experts on adolescent girls, yet over the course of the few decades covered in this book, both the Girl Scouts and the Campfire Girls continuously shifted the focus of their programming in an effort to strike just the right balance. Miller’s research shows the finely gendered line between offering programming that taught independence, survival skills and discipline, without the threat of being perceived as too masculine. Unfortunately, scouting programs during this time period included too many gender-related rules and regulations that left girls mostly observing nature instead of participating in it. Later programming focused heavily on equally ridiculous tasks such as charting one’s weight and the fun of washing dishes in the outdoors.

From the founding of their organizations, both the Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls recruited thousands of girls by using two important tools — summer camp, now a multi-million dollar part of American culture, and purchasable items. I was amazed to read about the attention that leaders put into their organization’s badges, uniforms, supplies and endless publications, such as the Woodcraft Manual for Girls and Kettles and Campfires.

It is very obvious that Miller conducted a tremendous amount of research for this book, which makes Growing Girls a valuable resource about the history of scouting, as well as gender relations in the early 20th century United States. A few points are a little dry, but overall I think that this text deserves a spot next other important books about adolescent girls such as Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project _and Peggy Orenstein’s _SchoolGirls.

Written by: Kerri Kanelos, September 5th 2007

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

admin — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:15:00 +0000

Edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

South End Press

The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology was the first publication that documented some of the concerns and challenges addressed at the Color of Violence Conference, which began at University of California-Santa Cruz in 2000. Since then, there have been two more conferences, organizing campaigns and the SISTERFIRE tour of radical women artists. Now, this collective of women activists and their allies has released The Revolution Will Not Be Funded as their second anthology. This second collection of critical analysis and reflections offers a probing focus on the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) and the foundations that determine the agendas of many organizations and movements today.

The book begins by talking about the history of foundations, how foundations often act as tax shelters for wealthy founders and do not necessarily spend a significant amount of their budgets on funding organizations and how the money offered always comes with constraints. These constraints include adhering to a corporate model that starts not only to shift the political agenda of organizations away from research, education and self-empowerment, but these same constraints displace people who are working within these movements because they have not specialized in getting credentials or getting to know people in dominant power structures.

Non-profit organizations—also referred to as non-government organizations (NGOs) here—rely on more and more people who act as liaisons and trained organizers whose motives can be questionable. In spite of all the problems that foundation funding entails, there is a variety of perspectives here that explain what it means to limit accepted funding, to find alternatives to foundation funding and break away from the increasingly professionalized model of activism that relies more heavily on public relations, jargon and social services than addressing the roots of dilemmas rising out of a specific community.

The contributors are thorough in documenting their own experiences with non-profits. Some of them depart from the NPIC structure entirely. Some notable essays include the return to a volunteer staff by Sista ii Sista and how the young women in the organization determined the needs of the group, Madonna Thunder Hawk’s essay on organizing with AIM (American Indian Movement) during the Red Movement and Paul Kivel’s thought-provoking questions in “Social Service or Social Change?” Far from being anti-academic, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a well-thought out approach to finding alternatives to a funding system that, in many ways, reinforces the dominant paradigms of class, race, sexism, homophobia and international exploitation. Community activists should read this and ask themselves hard questions and rethink strategic planning.

Written by: Tara Betts, June 19th 2007