Nonprofit Leadership Quotes

But forest fires, as painful as they can be, bring growth. They spur growth that was impossible before the fire, when old trees crowded out new plants on the forest floor. In the midst of this fire, I already see new life—young people engaged as never before, and the media, the courts, academics, nonprofits, and all other parts of civil society finding reason to bloom.

I'd rather do more with the same, then the same with less.

I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.

In the short term, there is scant room for dreaming, for one must choose between being taken seriously and being visionary. In the long term, however, leadership cannot afford to overlook the wisdom of dreams, even the wisdom of playful dreaming. Vision that bounds higher than the barriers that confine us often spring from earnest playfulness.

Create and communicate absolute clarity of purpose.

let your caring actions be so loud and even in the most noisy rooms you will get the people's attention

Leadership isn’t just about deciding what to do, it’s also about knowing what not to do.

But I choose to be optimistic. Yes, the current president will do significant damage in the short term. Important norms and traditions will be damaged by the flames. But forest fires, as painful as they can be, bring growth. They spur growth that was impossible before the fire, when old trees crowded out new plants on the forest floor. In the midst of this fire, I already see new life—young people engaged as never before, and the media, the courts, academics, nonprofits, and all other parts of civil society finding reason to bloom.

As we lead organizations—businesses, nonprofits, and churches—size doesn’t matter as much as another crucial factor. The biggest difference between leaders of large organizations and small organizations isn’t their location, the size of their building, the scope of the vision, the number of staff members, or their talent. In fact, some of the best leaders I’ve ever met have small organizations. But in all my consulting and conferences, I’ve seen a single factor: leaders of larger organizations have proven they can handle more pain.

in my name to train young women for global leadership. Wellesley’s twelfth and thirteenth presidents, Diana Chapman Walsh and Kim Bottomly, embraced the idea and, over several years, helped put the pieces together. In January 2010, I traveled to Massachusetts for the inaugural session. The Albright Institute was founded on the belief that a student doesn’t have to major in international relations to have a global mind-set. By giving young women the chance to work in partnership with peers from a variety of disciplines and countries, we encourage them to see differences of perspective as a strength and even as a tool to help solve complex problems. To that end, we provide an intense course of study over a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters, complemented by summer internships. Of the hundreds of Wellesley juniors and seniors who apply annually, forty are selected. In the first two weeks of each session, we offer classes run by professors, former government officials, nonprofit leaders, and businesspeople. During the final seven days, the fellows work in teams to analyze and make recommendations regarding a thorny international problem. At the end, they present their findings, which we pick apart and discuss.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

A vast nonprofit-industrial complex and elite racial leadership class has arisen since the 1960s to define the parameters of acceptable political action and debate. As riots and rebellions return to the United States, the dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics has largely refused to question the alienated governance structures that create the need for "race leaders" in the first place rather than already-existing popular assemblies and other forms of decentralized decision making, within and when needed, between groups directly attacked by antiblack state violence, rape and sexual assault, deportations, surveillance, and extreme racial inequality. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation’s infrastructure is different from another’s, and so on. Yet whether we are considering any family, any institution, or any nation, for terrorism to hold sway the same three emotional prerequisites must always persist in that relationship system.    There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”    The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the terrorist—whether a bomber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.    There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.” From an emotional process view of leadership, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, these three emotional characteristics of a system are the differences that count.

André V. Chapman holds his Master’s in Organizational Management as well as a Certificate of Completion from the Harvard Business School program, Strategic Perspectives on Nonprofit Management. He is the Founder & CEO of Unity Care Group, Inc., and he started the Covid19-Black initiative as an educational movement to reduce the effect of the coronavirus on the African American community. Mr. Chapman is a Fell of the American Leadership Forum.

One of my clients, a consultant who develops leadership potential in universities and nonprofits, once joked that he didn’t suffer from attention deficit disorder (ADD) but from “attention abundance disorder (AAD).” He didn’t lack curiosity, he said. His problem was that he wanted to rein in his curiosity and focus on fewer ideas. He’s not alone. I imagine curiosity often stepping in to do wonder’s bidding. First, wonder steps back and takes notice. It gets curiosity’s attention and says, “Psst. Look at this. What’s possible here?” Then curiosity takes off on a wild pursuit to learn more. After a while, curiosity dashes back home and empties its pockets of found objects and bits of knowledge on wonder’s table.

Do your job well. Share your knowledge. Be an informal mentor. Be very visible in your organization for the right reasons. Stop and offer on-the-spot training whenever you can to whomever you can. Share your knowledge outside of your organization if opportunity arises. Attend local, regional, and national gatherings as often as you can. Share what you learn and how you learn with other people. Be nice to everyone.

the strongest learning cultures exist in those organizations where directors not only support training but also participate alongside members of staff in learning opportunities. They understand what is being offered, understand that their presence encourages others to take training and learning seriously, and gain a perspective not available to those who are disengaged from what is happening within their organizations’ learning programs.

the communities of learning she has joined: “The successful ones always seem to create diversity of opportunities—to offer different types of learning experiences as well as avenues for their members to create connections between one another and indicate their specializations. Successful learning communities are all about finding and sustaining a sense of shared effort and interest and also speaking usefully to an area of actual, practical need.

training needs to be part of the overall organization: “Training in a good organization should be work. It should be part of the expectation. [Otherwise] it’s stuck on the wall with chewing gum. Everything else you do and now you have to fit in training.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

Business school students seem to be particularly narcissistic, an important fact because many leaders in both the for-profit and the nonprofit world come from business school backgrounds, particularly in the more recent past.

Gillespie called the plan “REDMAP,” an acronym for the Redistricting Majority Project. To implement it, he took over the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a nonprofit group that had previously functioned as a catchall bank account for corporations interested in influencing state laws. All he needed was enough money to put REDMAP into action.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.

Look inward for solutions to your greatest challenges.

You cannot be a modern association without a contemporary board.

Knowledge is key, without knowledge, leadership, and action plans that fit the actual challenges, all of our businesses and organizations are lost. By providing training, offering moments to come together and exchange best practices all of us can stay on top of our field.

The future is dependent on the decisions you make today.

...nonprofit leadership is more challenging than leading a for-profit company of similar size and complexity. The primary reason for this is differences in the clarity of organizational objectives.

Something interesting and exciting happens when you begin contributing as a leader. You move from working in an organization to working on it...Whether you have a leadership title or not, when you begin working on your organization, you begin your journey as a leader.

author of this book is a student of governance, a consultant to boards, and a nonprofit trustee who has also served as a full-time administrator in nonprofit institutions.

This book is informed by research and enlightened by practice.

This, in turn, only reinforces the unrealistically low assumptions that kicked off the cycle in the first place. And so the cycle repeats itself. Over time, funders expect grantees to do more and more with less and less. These leadership and funding challenges intersect in troubling ways. Nonprofit leaders are typically under relentless pressure to raise money to support existing programs and, if they are truly fortunate, to innovate, improve, and do more. As a result, they’re perpetually in “sell mode,” externally focused and intent on persuading people to contribute their money, time, and influence. Even the most successful nonprofits usually have to raise the funds for each year’s operating budget anew. Their leaders never forget that if they come up short in that effort, the organization’s very existence may be imperiled.

A basic question tends to be posed at every possible moment: what can be done to make the setting and the lesson engaging?

He who is doing the talking is doing the learning.” This is the essence of the Socratic method of facilitation. Our adult learners bring with them vast amounts of knowledge and experience. Letting them share their wisdom with the group is what makes adult learning such a rewarding experience for us.

Too many times, a person comes back to their place of work and is never asked to discuss, demonstrate, implement … what learning took place in a session. If learning is not reinforced soon, much is quickly lost,

moving past the idea that training is what happens while the student is with us and embrace a larger and far more positive belief that training is an ongoing process drawing from the creation of communities of learning.

the best workplace learning and performance leaders are always open to ideas for the next learning opportunity they need to oversee, and they work hard to avoid being hindered by obstacles.

Elaine Biech, in Training for Dummies, writes that trainers should build interest in the session from the start. “Save the ground rules and the housekeeping details for later. Be creative with your opening. … Participants will want to know what’s in it for them: how what they learn will be useful to them personally or how it will make their jobs easier.

we know we are in a first-rate organization where collaboration and workplace learning and performance are valued and of value.

The trainer is there to create the exercises and to guide and encourage staff along the way, but the responsibility for learning is ultimately in the hands of the learner—where it should be. This self-directed approach to learning rather than training allows the learner to apply immediately what is learned in relation to the learner’s job or personal interests. This immediacy and this choice of how to apply what is being learned are what makes the learning stick.

I apply the materials, nobody says anything. If I don’t apply the materials, nobody says anything. That’s where I become apathetic. … There’s a dual message I hear: “You go to training, but we really don’t care.

what is missing from so many learning opportunities: the personal involvement and support of key players and stakeholders, and a personal and organizational commitment to creating the sort of workplace where, when learners return from formal lessons, they are encouraged to implement what they have learned.

to your direct reports you are the most important leader in your organization. … The leaders who have the most influence on people are those who are the closest to them,” they write. “You have to challenge the myth that leadership is about position and power.”2

Many leaders still regard the private sector with skepticism—an attitude inherited from the old “New Left.” They fear that they might lose focus or be co-opted if they partner with corporations. Some nonprofits play a corporate watchdog role and protest the excesses of capitalism and globalization—often for good reason. And a recent spate of corporate scandals hasn’t helped improve the image of business. “Among many nonprofits, there is a view that business is the enemy,” says Mike McCurry, who is on the board of Share Our Strength. On the other side of this debate, more pragmatic members of the social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility movements have long touted the benefits of cross-sector partnerships and of harnessing market forces for social change. They argue that companies’ bottom lines can benefit from social responsibility, while nonprofits

Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

…the joy you can find in being underpaid and overworked to save even the smallest part of the world

the principal barriers to achieving greater application of learning and subsequent business results lie in the performance environment of the trainees, not in flaws (though there may be some) in the training programs and interventions themselves.

Not satisfied with the status quo, fundraising leaders are change makers – they see ahead to what the organization could accomplish to fulfill its mission and set a path toward attaining it. They are influencers in the best sense of the word as they draw upon their communication skills to share their vision for the future.

Nicole Parsons is Board Director for the nonprofit, Choices for Youth. The organization works with at-risk youth throughout Labrador and Newfoundland. She joined Nalcor Energy in 2016 and built a career of more than two decades as a human resource specialist. Nicole lends her voice to advocacy efforts supporting women in leadership and gender equality. She leads through strong ethics and a mind for environments free of harassment.