Nonprofit Leaders

The not-for-profit sector in America might better be called the sector of great expectations. Our non-profit organizations are at once expected to be caretakers, providing basic help to the neediest members of our society; risk-takers, testing innovative solutions to complex social problems; fund-raisers, discovering new resources to support operations and programs; and stewards, measuring out precious resources to achieve maximum impact with minimum waste. They do all this under the watchful eyes of donors and a sometimes-skeptical American public.

Nonprofit leaders work hard to meet these expectations. Yet they seldom have opportunities to step back, carefully examine the nature of the expectations directed toward them, and explore the deep questions that arise in their work–much less do so in the company of other similarly pressed leaders. Why does this work matter–and to whom? Are we leaders for something larger than our own organizations? Is it even possible to lead when you must beg for funds? What do we expect of those whom we serve? Does it matter whether we can prove we are doing good?

The practice of civic reflection can help nonprofit leaders carve out needed time for asking these basic questions in the company of colleagues. The group might be convened by a nonprofit center, grantmaker association, or community foundation. It might include leaders of different types and sizes of nonprofits within a community or region. It might bring together grantmakers and grantees within the nonprofit sector, a wonderful way to build relationships and understanding across the "funding divide."

Across these variations, nonprofit leaders who have participated in civic reflection programs report compelling common benefits:

• They feel a stronger connection to their local nonprofit community
• They are better able to place their work in the larger context of the nonprofit sector
• They have been introduced to new ideas, texts and practices of reading
• They feel both refreshed and reinvigorated, better able to think through and articulate the challenges and joys of their important work

A sampling of past civic reflection programs for nonprofit leaders follows.

Uplifting (Nonprofit) Leadership is a program of the Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida, in cooperation with the Florida Humanities Council. This program convenes 20-25 nonprofit leaders, including leaders in arts and culture, philanthropy, and human services, for a series of half-day retreats that take up questions at the heart of nonprofit leadership. View the reading list from the 2003 pilot Uplifting (Nonprofit) Leadership program.

Family Matters, a family-centered community organization in the North-of-Howard neighborhood of Chicago, will convene two civic reflection series. Family Matters staff will engage in quarterly discussions about leadership and the qualities of leaders, with help from texts by Rudyard Kipling and others, in order to strengthen programming in the area of leadership development. In addition, the Family Matters board development committee and youth representatives will engage in quarterly reflection on friendship, difference and the roles of youth and adults on the organization's board, drawing on stories by Abraham Rodriguez Jr. and others. Organizers hope that participants will gain new and useful insights into their activities and that a sense of community will be strengthened among participants and within the organization.

The Women Leaders Reflection Group, Porter County, Indiana, has been meeting regularly since 2000 to reflect on the hopes and challenges of their work in light of selected readings. Questions include: In what way are we as women leaders linked and distinct? How do we balance compassion with management, build bridges along with budgets? The conversations have allowed a growing group of women executives to think and talk about nonprofit leadership in new ways and have created relationships that had not flourished in other business gatherings.

The Women Leaders Reflection Group in Portland, Maine, convened a group of women from a variety of educational, business and nonprofit organizations who used civic reflection to help them plan a women's leadership institute for their state. This process allowed the newly formed group to develop