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The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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And we learned, perhaps the hard way, that church isn’t static. It’s not a building, or a denomination, or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure is made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us.
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Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
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The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).
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Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
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A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
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Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't)
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Nowhere does this tendency toward artificial harmony show itself more than in mission-driven nonprofit organizations, most notably churches. People who work in those organizations tend to have a misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another. What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.
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Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
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I'd rather do more with the same, then the same with less.
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Justin Greene (Identifying and Realizing Operational Efficiencies In Non-Profit Organizations)
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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.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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Camp Patriot is a God-centered nonprofit organization that provides outdoor adventure excursions for wounded and disabled veterans.
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Robert W. Vera (A Warrior's Faith: Navy SEAL Ryan Job, a Life-Changing Firefight, and the Belief That Transformed His Life)
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Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic—work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don’t let the lies fence you in or hold you back.
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Sarah Bessey (Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women)
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I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.
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Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
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For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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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.
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John Carver (Boards That Make a Difference: A New Design for Leadership in Nonprofit and Public Organizations (JOSSEY BASS NONPROFIT & PUBLIC MANAGEMENT SERIES))
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Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.
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Teresa Odendahl (Charity Begins At Home: Generosity And Self-interest Among The Philanthropic Elite)
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from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom
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Ben Shapiro (The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration)
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Our country is a place where hope can be born and great companies, organizations and non-profits can spring up from an idea birthed on the back of a coffee-shop napkin.
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Todd Stocker (Dancing With God: First Year Thoughts on the Loss of My Daughter)
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Thanking your donor should be an opportunity to brag about the donor instead of your organization.
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Jeremy Reis (Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising)
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Donors don’t give to your organization, they give to make the world a better place.
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Jeremy Reis (Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising)
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Can we create soulful workplaces—schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits—where our talents can blossom and our callings can be honored?
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
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In 2014 a survey conducted by a nonprofit organization called Stop Street Harassment revealed that more than 60 percent of women in Buenos Aires had experienced intimidation from men who catcalled them.18 To a lot of men in Buenos Aires, women’s concern came as a surprise. When asked about the survey, Buenos Aires’s mayor, Mauricio Macri, dismissed it as inaccurate and proceeded to explain why women couldn’t possibly have a problem with being shouted at by strangers. “All women like to be told compliments,” he said. “Those who say they’re offended are lying. Even though you’ll say something rude, like ‘What a cute ass you have’ . . . it’s all good. There is nothing more beautiful than the beauty of women, right? It’s almost the reason that men breathe.
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Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance: An Investigation)
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The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future.
If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives.
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Eli Clare (Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure)
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The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession. The program, which was aimed at low-income areas, also paid students to take additional courses online.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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The key to competitive success—for businesses and nonprofits alike—lies in an organization’s ability to create unique value. Porter’s prescription: aim to be unique, not best. Creating value, not beating rivals, is at the heart of competition.
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Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
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For the third type of coping strategy, at the societal level, we need to ask how non-state actors (such as communities and nonprofit organizations) will respond to the consequences of the data revolution. We think a wave of civil-society organizations will emerge in the next decade designed to shield connected citizens from their governments and from themselves. Powerful lobbying groups will advocate content and privacy laws. Rights organizations that document repressive surveillance tactics will call for better citizen protection. There
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Eric Schmidt (The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business)
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is the head of a popular non-profit organization that helps children of currently incarcerated parents gain an appreciation for the justice system. Our sources tell us that this charity, Legal Buddies, was in some way associated with the charges brought forth this morning. Judge
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Danielle Stewart (Chasing Justice (Piper Anderson, #1))
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Templates of how we organize and govern such as partnerships, corporations, or nonprofits have not be updated in centuries, we still use many of the ancient rules and vernacular today, patching expanding gaps of trust and accounting all stemming from increasing modernized complexity.
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Richie Etwaru (Blockchain: Trust Companies: Every Company Is at Risk of Being Disrupted by a Trusted Version of Itself)
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You were meant to bring forth much fruit. You can be effective. Powerfully used. I’m talking to you. Not your preacher or Bible study teacher. Your legacy can still have an impact in a dozen generations if Christ tarries. You don’t have to look a certain way, receive a certain gift, attend a certain denominational church, practice a certain kind of ministry, or establish a nonprofit organization! All you need to be mighty in your generation is a shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit (the Word of God, Eph. 6:16–17). Through Christ you can absolutely, unequivocally do anything God places before you (Phil. 4:13).
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Beth Moore (Believing God)
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We had to begin to practice deep, authentic collaboration. This meant a shift in how we move financial and human resources—there are enough people out there to support the movement(s) we need, but currently, organizations are pitted against each other to access money (less and less money), rather than creating and investing together to maximize a diversity of resources from money, to people, to spaces, to skills. Because we are not investing in a shared network of resources, it is easy to let structural and ideological particularities create deep splits throughout the non-profit sphere, rendering much of our work useless.
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Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
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The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.
This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.
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Julian Assange (When Google Met Wikileaks)
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It’s difficult to overstate the enormity of this problem—it affects every organization, independent of the industry we operate in, the size of our organization, whether we are profit or non-profit. Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.
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Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations)
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After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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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.
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Samuel R. Chand (Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth)
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I didn’t realize Farrah Fawcett had died of anal cancer. There were references to her ailment as cancer “below the colon.” It was like my mother, when I was a kid, calling the vagina “your bottom in front.” Up through 2010, anal cancer had no nonprofit society, no one to organize fund-raisers and outreach, no colored awareness ribbon. (Even appendix cancer has a ribbon.)* Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus; people get it via sex with an infected person, and that seems like something they ought to know when making decisions about using a condom.
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
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When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead. This is true in corporations, nonprofits, universities, governments, faith communities, schools, families, and sports programs. If you think back on any major scandal fueled by cover-ups, you’ll see this same pattern. And the restitution and resolution of cover-ups almost always happens in the wilderness—when one person steps outside their bunker and speaks their truth.
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Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
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Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals--companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.
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Janet Poppendieck (Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement)
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In the factory era, the goal was to have the highest PERL. Think about it. If you can easily replace most of your workers, you can pay them less. The less you pay them, the more money you make. The city newspaper, for example, might have four hundred employees, but only a few dozen salespeople and columnists were hard to replace on a moment’s notice. The goal was to leverage and defend the system, not the people. So we built giant organizations (political parties, nonprofits, schools, corporations) filled with easily replaced laborers. Unions fought back precisely because they saw coordinated action as the only way to avoid becoming commodities. Ironically, the work rules they erected merely exacerbated the problem, making every union worker just as good as every other.
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Seth Godin (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?)
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landscape that makes political fodder of this liberationist legacy. With increasing frequency, we are party (or participant) to a white liberal and “multicultural”/“people of color” liberal imagination that venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries.
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Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
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This is the real estate state, a government by developers, for developers. It is not monolithic; there are plenty of disputes within it. Builders' desires are not always the same as owners', as reflected in the presence of separate developer and landlord lobbies in New York. Nonprofit developers follow a somewhat different model than for-profit builders. And of course government is still accountable to voters, who are by and large either renters or mortgage holders and continue to organize collectively against real estate's rule. But the parameters for planning are painfully narrow: land is a commodity and also is everything atop it; property rights are sacred and should never be impinged; a healthy real estate market is the measure of a healthy city; growth is good-- in fact, growth is god.
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Samuel Stein (Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State)
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In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
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I look around and see many shelters and services for survivors of domestic violence, but no large-scale movement to end male violence. I see many batterer intervention programs, but few men involved in challenging sexism. The loss of vision that narrowed the focus of men's work reflects a change that occurred in other parts of the movement to end violence, as activists who set out to change the institutions perpetrating violence settled into service jobs helping people cope.
[...]
Social service work addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence. Social change work challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence. In my travels throughout the United States, I talk with many service providers, more and more of whom are saying to me, "We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change. I meet more and more people who are running programs for batterers who say ,"We are only dealing with a minute number of the men who are violent and are having little impact on the systems which perpetuate male violence."
[...]
While there is some overlap between social service provision and social change work, the two do not necessarily go readily together. In our violent world, the needs and numbers of survivors are never ending, and the tasks of funding, staffing, and developing resources for our organizations to meet those needs are difficult, poorly supported, and even actively undermined by those with power and wealth in our society. Although some groups are both working for social change and providing social services, there are many more groups providing social services that are not working for social change. In fact, many social service agencies may be intentionally or inadvertently working to maintain the status quo. After all, the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) wouldn't exist without a lot of people in desperate straits. The NPIC provides jobs; it provides opportunities for professional development. It enables those who do the work to feel good about what we do and about our ability to help individuals survive in the system. It gives a patina of caring and concern to the ruling class which funds the work.
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Paul Kivel (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
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Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.
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Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There)
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Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.
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James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World)
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The charge of heartlessness, epitomized in the remark that William H. Vanderbilt, a railroad tycoon, is said to have made to an inquiring reporter, "The public be damned," is belied by the flowering of charitable activity in the United States in the nineteenth century. Privately financed schools and colleges multiplied; foreign missionary activity exploded; nonprofit private hospitals, orphanages, and numerous other institutions sprang up like weeds. Almost every charitable or public service organization, from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to the YMCA and YWCA, from the Indian Rights Association to the Salvation Army, dates from that period. Voluntary cooperation is no less effective in organizing charitable activity than in organizing production for profit. The charitable activity was matched by a burst of cultural activity—art museums, opera houses, symphonies, museums, public libraries arose in big cities and frontier towns alike. The size of government spending is one measure of government's role. Major wars aside, government spending from 1800 to 1929 did not exceed about 12 percent of the national income. Two-thirds of that was spent by state and local governments, mostly for schools and roads. As late as 1928, federal government spending amounted to about 3 percent of the national income.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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up with work I found meaningful. As a young person, I’d explored exactly nothing. Barack’s maturity, I realized, came in part from the years he’d logged as a community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling year he’d spent as a researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm immediately after college. He’d tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of people, and learned his own priorities along the way. I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law. In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?” I mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I be a teacher? A college administrator? Could I run some sort of after-school program, a professionalized version of what I’d done for Czerny at Princeton? I was interested in possibly working for a foundation or a nonprofit. I was interested in helping underprivileged kids. I wondered if I could find a job that engaged my mind and still left me enough time to do volunteer work, or appreciate art, or have children. I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to feel whole. I made a list of issues that interested me: education, teen pregnancy, black self-esteem. A more virtuous
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.
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Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
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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.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom of
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Ben Shapiro (The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration)
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How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10
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Sarah Lewis (The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery)
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Solving society’s most intractable problems begins with understanding what actually moves the needle. This allows resources and creativity to be focused where they have the most impact. Requests to support a social purpose are now regularly expected to include a solid demonstration of effectiveness. It may be a donor inspecting a nonprofit on a website like Charity Navigator, an impact investor evaluating a potential loan recipient, a citizen inspecting where his or her tax dollars go, or an investor evaluating socially responsible stocks. How impact is articulated may vary, but providing compelling evidence of results is now a make-or-break proposition for organizations seeking financial support.
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William D. Eggers (The Solution Revolution: How Business, Government, and Social Enterprises Are Teaming Up to Solve Society's Toughest Problems)
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Electronics: Spend money on upgrading your system instead of buying a new one. Donate computers, printers, or monitors (any brand) to a nonprofit or participating Goodwill location for refurbishing (some charities repair them and give them to schools and nonprofit organizations). For unrepairable cell phones and miscellaneous electronics, locate a nearby e-waste recycling facility or participate in a local e-waste recycling drive, or make a profit by selling them on eBay for parts. Best Buy collects remote controllers, wires, cords, cables, ink and toner cartridges, rechargeable batteries, plastic bags, gift cards, CDs and DVDs (including their cases), depending on store locations.
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Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
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Even organizations outside the business world can use blitzscaling to their advantage. Upstart presidential campaigns and nonprofits serving the underprivileged have used the levers of blitzscaling to overturn conventional wisdom and achieve massive results. You’ll read all these stories, and many more, in the pages of this book. Whether you are a founder, a manager, a potential employee, or an investor, we believe that understanding blitzscaling will allow you to make better decisions in a world where speed is the critical competitive advantage. With the power of blitzscaling, the adopted son of a Syrian immigrant (Steve Jobs), the adopted son of a Cuban immigrant (Jeff Bezos), and a former English teacher and volunteer tour guide (Jack Ma) were all able to build businesses that changed—and are still changing—the world.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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Women run a majority of nonprofit organizations with budgets under $1 million. But as budgets grow, the ranks of women shrink.
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David Cay Johnston (Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality)
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In Canada, after CBC producer Mary Lynk took the risky step of making the three-hour radio documentary Science under Siege based on some of the ideas contained in this book, a national discussion developed among scientists, journalists, and the public that brought politicians from the three opposition parties to the table to sign the Science Pledge of Evidence for Democracy, a nonprofit organization advocating for public policies to be based on evidence.
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Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
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Private foundations have very few legal restrictions. They are required to donate at least 5 percent of their assets every year to public charities—referred to as “nonprofit” organizations. In exchange, the donors are granted deductions, enabling them to reduce their income taxes dramatically. This arrangement enables the wealthy to simultaneously receive generous tax subsidies and use their foundations to impact society as they please. In addition, the process often confers an aura of generosity and public-spiritedness on the donors, acting as a salve against class resentment.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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International leaders in business, government, and nonprofit organizations whisper behind closed doors about the way visiting Americans live in their own bubbles without having much genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, much less the locals. One senior foreign policy advisor told Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, “When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can't take it in.”13 Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations, put it this way: “There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without.”14
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David Livermore (Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success)
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The assumption soon proved wrong. Instead, as critics had warned, more and more of the money flooding into elections was spent by secretive nonprofit organizations that claimed the right to conceal their donors’ identities. Rich activists such as Scaife and the Kochs had already paved the way to weaponize philanthropy. Now they and other allied donors gave what came to be called dark money to nonprofit “social welfare” groups that claimed the right to spend on elections without disclosing their donors. As a result, the American political system became awash in unlimited, untraceable cash.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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Back in 2012, the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation along with Consumer Reports, a highly regarded independent, nonprofit consumer organization, introduced Choosing Wisely,68–77 an initiative to reduce unnecessary medical tests and cut costs. When Choosing Wisely was first announced, nine medical professional organizations published their lists of five tests and procedures that they deemed were unnecessary. Of these forty-five recommendations for unneeded tests, twenty-five (56 percent) were related
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Eric J. Topol (The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands)
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the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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Most of the non-profit organizations are owned from the wealthy rich philanthropists but are managed and run from poor philanthropists.
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Zybejta (Beta) Metani' Marashi
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David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.
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Jean Case (Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose)
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An aligned organization is impossible to achieve if the strategy is not clear, because strategy is the endpoint to which the rest of the organization is directed. When leaders set about to align their organizations, they often discover that they are not resolved about their strategy. They may be very clear about their financial targets. They may have precise numbers representing their growth plans. They may be sure of the capital initiatives and other initiatives they have planned to pursue in the short- or long-term. But if your team cannot exactly articulate why customers choose you over others—or in the case of nonprofit organizations, what your beneficiaries rely on you to do that no one else does for them—then you are not yet capable of alignment. Everyone on the executive team and beyond should be able to state in explicit terms how you intend to be unique in customers' eyes.
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Reed Deshler (Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works)
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Now a self-sustaining nonprofit organization itself, NutritionFacts.org has more than a thousand bite-sized videos on nearly every conceivable nutrition topic, and I post new videos and articles every day.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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At first, I was troubled by my abilities—even skeptical of them—so I sought to have them verified. I applied to be tested so that I could volunteer as a medium for the Forever Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization aimed at helping those in grief, particularly parents who have lost children. The Forever Family Foundation is very protective of the people who come to them for support, who are at their most vulnerable, so their screening process is quite rigorous. I passed their tests and have been volunteering for the foundation as a medium since 2005. In 2011, I submitted to an eight-step, quintuple-blind screening administered by scientists at the Windbridge Research Center in Arizona. I became one of only a small group of Certified Research Mediums around the country. I’ve been working with scientists ever since, exploring the mystery of our interconnectedness and of how consciousness survives bodily death.
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Laura Lynne Jackson (Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe)
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Shavei Israel - Unique Non-Profit Organization
Shavei Israel is a unique non-profit organization dedicated to assisting descendants of Jews and the Lost Tribes of Israel to reclaim their roots. Shavei Israel reaches out to “lost” & “hidden” Jews around the world to help them reconnect with Jewish people & State of Israel.
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Shavei Israel
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Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief by David Winston and Steven Maimes
An in-depth discussion of adaptogens with detailed monographs for many adaptogenic, nervine, and nootropic herbs.
Adaptogens in Medical Herbalism: Elite Herbs and Natural Compounds for Mastering Stress, Aging, and Chronic Disease by Donald R. Yance
A scientifically based herbal and nutritional program to master stress, improve energy, prevent degenerative disease, and age gracefully.
Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients into Foods and Remedies That Heal by Rosalee de la Forêt
This book offers an introduction to herbal energetics for the beginner, plus a host of delicious and simple recipes for incorporating medicinal plants into meals. Rosalee shares short chapters on a range of herbs, highlighting scientific research on each plant.
The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry by Ann Armbrecht Forbes
In a world awash with herbal books, this is a much-needed reference, central to the future of plant medicine itself. Ann weaves a complex tapestry through the story threads of the herbal industry: growers, gatherers, importers, herbalists, and change-making business owners and non-profits. As interest in botanical medicine surges and the world’s population grows, medicinal plant sustainability is paramount. A must-read for any herbalist.
The Complete Herbal Tutor: The Ideal Companion for Study and Practice by Anne McIntyre
Provides extensive herbal profiles and materia medica; offers remedy suggestions by condition and organ system. This is a great reference guide for the beginner to intermediate student.
Foundational Herbcraft by jim mcdonald
jim mcdonald has a gift for explaining energetics in a down-to-earth and engaging way, and this 200-page PDF is a compilation of his writings on the topic. jim’s categorization of herbal actions into several groups (foundational actions, primary actions, and secondary actions) adds clarity and depth to the discussion. Access the printable PDF and learn more about jim’s work here.
The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life by Robin Rose Bennett
A beautiful tour of some of our most healing herbs, written in lovely prose. Full of anecdotes, recipes, and simple rituals for connecting with plants.
Herbal Healing for Women: Simple Home Remedies for All Ages by Rosemary Gladstar
Thorough and engaging materia medica. This was the only book Juliet brought with her on a three-month trip to Central America and she never tired of its pages. Information is very accessible with a lot of recipes and formulas.
Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family by Rosemary Gladstar
Great beginner reference and recipe treasury written by the herbal fairy godmother herself.
The Modern Herbal by Maude Grieve
This classic text was first published in 1931 and contains medicinal, culinary, cosmetic, and economic properties, plus cultivation and folklore of herbs. Available for free online.
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Socdartes
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What we gave mostly was wine. Especially after we made this legal(!) by acquiring that Master Wine Grower’s license in 1973. Most requests were made by women (not men) who had been drafted by their respective organizations to somehow get wine for an event. We made a specialty of giving them a warm welcome from the first call. All we wanted was the organization’s 501c3 number, and from which store they wanted to pick it up. We wanted to make that woman, and her friends, our customers. But we didn’t want credit in the program, as we knew the word would get out from that oh-so-grateful woman who had probably been turned down by six markets before she called us. Everybody wanted champagne. We firmly refused to donate it, because the federal excise tax on sparkling wine is so great compared with the tax on still wine. To relieve pressure on our managers, we finally centralized giving into the office. When I left Trader Joe’s, Pat St. John had set up a special Macintosh file just to handle the three hundred organizations to which we would donate in the course of a year. I charged all this to advertising. That’s what it was, and it was advertising of the most productive sort. Giving Space on Shopping Bags One of the most productive ways into the hearts of nonprofits was to print their programs on our shopping bags. Thus, each year, we printed the upcoming season for the Los Angeles Opera Co., or an upcoming exhibition at the Huntington Library, or the season for the San Diego Symphony, etc. Just printing this advertising material won us the support of all the members of the organization, and often made the season or the event a success. Our biggest problem was rationing the space on the shopping bags. All we wanted was camera-ready copy from the opera, symphony, museum, etc. This was a very effective way to build the core customers of Trader Joe’s. We even localized the bags, customizing them for the San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco market areas. Several years after I left, Trader Joe’s abandoned the practice because it was just too complicated to administer after they expanded into Arizona, Washington, etc., and they no longer had my wife, Alice, running interference with the music and arts groups. This left an opportunity for small retailers in local areas, and I strongly recommended it to them. In 1994, while running the troubled Petrini’s Markets in San Francisco, I tried the same thing, again with success, for the San Francisco Ballet and a couple of museums.
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Joe Coulombe (Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys)
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In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding. We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: it prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.
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Robert Kegan (An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization)
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The likes of you and I cannot “give” to the federal government, as under the Federal Acquisition Regulations this is considered to be a risk for exerting undue influence. But the CDC has established a nonprofit “CDC Foundation.” According to the CDC’s own website [419]: Established by Congress as an independent, nonprofit organization, the CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Likewise, the NIH has established the “Foundation for the National Institutes of Health,” currently headed by CEO Dr. Julie Gerberding (formerly CDC director, then president of Merck Vaccines, then chief patient officer and executive vice president, Population Health & Sustainability at Merck and Company—where she had responsibility for Merck’s ESG score compliance). Dr. Gerberding’s career provides a case history illustrating the ties between the administrative state and corporate America.
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Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
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The likes of you and I cannot “give” to the federal government, as under the Federal Acquisition Regulations this is considered to be a risk for exerting undue influence. But the CDC has established a nonprofit “CDC Foundation.” According to the CDC’s own website [419]: Established by Congress as an independent, nonprofit organization, the CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Likewise, the NIH has established the “Foundation for the National Institutes of Health,” currently headed by CEO Dr. Julie Gerberding (formerly CDC director, then president of Merck Vaccines, then chief patient officer and executive vice president, Population Health & Sustainability at Merck and Company—where she had responsibility for Merck’s ESG score compliance). Dr. Gerberding’s career provides a case history illustrating the ties between the administrative state and corporate America. These congressionally chartered nonprofit organizations provide a vehicle whereby the medical-pharmaceutical complex can funnel money into the NIH and CDC to influence both research agendas and policies.
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Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
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Rakesh Rajdev, through his non-profit organization, Kanuda Mitra Mandal, stands as a testament to the power of selfless giving and the impact it can have on society.
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Rakesh Rajdev - A True Philanthropist Carrying Forward A Legacy Of Giving From His Late Father
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One study of the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s found that grassroots nonprofits focused on combating crime had a significant impact. Using data spanning 264 cities and more than twenty years, sociologist Patrick Sharkey and his team at New York University observed that for every one hundred thousand city residents, the addition of ten organizations led to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.
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Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era)
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That’s not true at all. There’s literally a nonprofit organization that helps exonerate wrongly convicted people.
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Jeneva Rose (The Perfect Marriage (Perfect, #1))
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Autism Speaks organization. For the nonprofit’s first ten years, none of its board members were openly autistic, and at the same time, many autistic people vocalized that they did not want to be cured. Similarly, in 2009, the organization put out an ad directed by Academy Award–winning director Alfonso Cuarón titled “I Am Autism,” which depicted autism as a menacing force. “I know where you live and guess what? I live there too,” the voice-over said, adding that it worked faster than deadly diseases like pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined. “And if you are happily married, I will make sure that your marriage fails,” the voice went on, pledging to bankrupt families (there is some irony, of course, that a millionaire executive’s charity would put out such an ad). The ad ultimately faced massive pushback, and it was removed from its website.
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Eric Garcia (We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation)
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Solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. In the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to be single-issue oriented, framing their message around “deserving” people within the population they serve, and using tactics palatable to elites.
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Dean Spade (Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next))
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The key to competitive success—for businesses and nonprofits alike—lies in an organization’s ability to create unique value.
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Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
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Platforms such as DoneGood and Buycott steer customers toward businesses fairly compensating their workers. The nonprofit organization B Lab certifies companies that meet high social and environmental standards, scoring on the basis of worker compensation and benefits, job flexibility, potential for worker ownership, and a host of other criteria.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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THRIVEtoday is a nonprofit organization that trains individuals, families, and communities in the nineteen relational skills that transform relationships.
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Marcus Warner (The 4 Habits of Joy-Filled People: 15 Minute Brain Science Hacks to a More Connected and Satisfying Life)
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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.
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Lori Reed (Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers)
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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.
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Lori Reed (Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers)
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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.
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Lori Reed (Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers)
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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.
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Samuel B. Bacharach (The Agenda Mover: When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough (The Pragmatic Leadership Series))
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In 1996, Koch Industries created a nonprofit group called the Economic Education Trust. The group did not need to disclose its donors because it was not ostensibly a lobbying or campaign finance organization. Koch funneled money through the Economic Education Trust to state and federal campaigns in Kansas and other states where it did business. In October of 1996, the Economic Education Trust gave $1.79 million to a company in suburban Washington, DC, called Triad Management Services Inc. Triad was supposedly a political consulting firm, but it had a strange business model: it offered its services for free, to Republican candidates. A US Senate report in 1998 concluded that Triad was “a corporate shell funded by a few wealthy conservative Republican activists.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
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The most challenging governance issue always entails ensuring that the organization remains on task, generating profits if a for-profit or fulfilling its mission if a nonprofit. That means maintaining organizational focus, minimizing the potential for malfeasance (wrongdoing on the part of the organization or its leaders), and raising the costs of fraud or theft within the organization.
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Robert E. Wright (Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding)
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In a narrow decision, the Supreme Court determined that MCFL had violated the FECA by engaging in express advocacy with its treasury funds, but more importantly, that the FECA ban on independent expenditures amounted to an unconstitutional impediment to corporate speech. However, the Court held that only a narrow set of corporate organizations were exempt from the ban on direct corporate expenditures. Specifically, the Court formulated the “MCFL Test” that deemed only expenditures from nonprofit, politically oriented corporations allowable for express advocacy. For a corporate organization to fit this definition, the Supreme Court held that three criteria must be met: First, the main purpose of the organization must be “promoting political ideas,” and not “business activities.” Second, the group may have no shareholders that can take a part of its assets or income. Third, the group must not be affiliated with a business corporation or labor union, and may not accept contributions from those entities (see: Askin 2002).
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Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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Your group is decades out of compliance with IRS requirements for nonprofits. Everything I've seen from you suggests your nonprofit is a sham. And Butyl and Dowidge doesn't represent sham organizations." I paused, letting this sink in. "Even if you hadn't been trying to kill Reggie from the moment you first contacted my firm, you're still the worst client I've ever had."
As I spoke, Richardson simply stood there, processing everything. "How much trouble are we in with the IRS, exactly?"
"A lot," I said. "Though it's hard to say exactly how much. Best-case scenario, they'll dissolve your nonprofit." I shrugged. "When that happens, you'll be getting a bill for back taxes you won't be able to pay, given your nonprofit's annual budget. And the worst-case scenario..."
John Richardson leaned forward, hanging on my every word. Excellent. "What is the worst-case scenario?"
I waited a beat before answering so my next words would have maximum impact. "Worst-case scenario is the IRS finds that you intentionally withheld taxes you owed. You could face time in jail." There. The closest thing to a mic drop any accountant ever got. I leaned in closer, readying myself for the kill. "Unless, of course, you do exactly what I tell you to do."
Richardson narrowed his eyes at me. "And what might that be?"
Bingo. This was the part I'd been looking forward to the most. The part I'd practiced in a mirror the night before until I'd gotten the ferocity of my expression just right.
"What happens next is you are going to leave Reginald Cleaves alone, forever. If you do that, we will pretend we've never heard of you if the IRS ever comes knocking." I trailed off, letting my words hang in the air for dramatic effect. In the entirety of my time as an accountant, I had never once had the opportunity to do anything for dramatic effect. I could all but feel Reggie looking on, beaming with pride. "If you continue to harass Reggie, however, I tell the IRS everything I know.
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Jenna Levine (My Vampire Plus-One (My Vampires, #2))
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The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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A central economic problem of developed societies during the next twenty or thirty years is surely going to be capital formation; only in Japan is it still adequate for the economy’s needs. We therefore can ill afford to have activities conducted as ‘non-profit’, that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Routledge Classics))
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Families are finding that they are getting funding from a variety of sources. One typical family has counseling covered through their insurance for family counseling, and counseling funded by a federally funded adoption support program for their child. They receive respite care funded through the Division of Developmental Disabilities. They pay privately for Sibshop, a well-loved program for the siblings of their special needs children. Since the Sibshop is through a non-profit organization, it is particularly affordable. Their school district pays for tutoring. After they specifically requested a review, they received an adoption subsidy available to older children through their state. The cost of braces was partially reimbursed by the adoption support system, as well. The combination of resources and financial relief allowed the parents to enjoy some outings, plan a simple family vacation, and get some household help. They said, “Without this help, we would not have made it as an emotionally intact family. We would not have disrupted, but we would not have been the unit that we are today.
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Deborah D. Gray (Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents)
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Carlton Church: Japan Finally Acknowledges Negative Nuclear Effects
One of the leading sources of news and information, Thomson Reuters, has just reported about Japan’s acknowledgement of casualty caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant wreckage. However, it may be too late for the victim as the young man, an unnamed worker in his 30s working as a construction contractor in Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and other nuclear facilities, is already suffering from cancer since 2011.
The ministry’s recognition of radiation as a possible cause may set back efforts to recover from the disaster, as the government and the nuclear industry have been at pains to say that the health effects from radiation have been minimal. It may also add to compensation payments that had reached more than 7 trillion yen ($59 billion) by July this year. It can also cause a lot of setbacks from a lot of nuclear projects which were supposed to be due in the succeeding years.
A streak of legal issues and complaints are also to be faced by Tokyo Electric, mostly on compensations for those affected. According to further reviews, it is estimated removing the melted fuel from the wrecked reactors and cleaning up the site will cost tens of billions of dollars and take decades to complete.
Despite the recognition, a lot more people are still anxious. The recognition would mean acknowledgment of possible radiation effects still lingering in Japan’s boundaries. When it was once denied, the public are consoled of the improbability of being exposed to radiation but now that the government has expressed its possibility, many individuals fear of their and their families’ lives.
Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the chaos of evacuations during the crisis and because of the hardship and mental trauma refugees have experienced since then, but the government had said that radiation was not a cause. Yet now, it is different. The trauma and fear are emphasized more.
Anti-nuclear organizations, on the other hand, are happy that their warnings are now being regarded. Carlton Church International, one of the non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear proliferation, spokesperson, Abigail Shcumman stated, “I don’t think ‘I told you so’ would be appropriate but that is what I really wanted to say”. She added, “We are pleased that at last, we are being heard. However, we continue to get worried for the people and the children. They are exposed and need guidance on what to do”.
- See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot.com
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Sabrina Carlton
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In a previous age, all a preacher needed to be successful was a good Bible, a calling from God and strong lungs. But in today’s digital culture, where a typical American deals with as many as 5,000 media messages a day, how does the voice of your church, ministry, nonprofit organization or idea rise above the racket?
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Phil Cooke (Unique: Telling Your Story in the Age of Brands and Social Media)
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Another important question is to ask why the problem your new organization is addressing has not been solved already, or won’t be solved in the future. Ask yourself: Why hasn’t this problem been solved by markets? Why hasn’t this problem been solved by the state? Why hasn’t this problem already been solved by philanthropy? In many cases, the answers to these questions will suggest that the problem is very difficult to solve, in which case it may not be the most effective problem to focus on. In other cases, the answers might suggest that you really can make good progress on the problem. If the beneficiaries of your action don’t participate fully in markets and aren’t governed by a well-functioning state, then there is a clear need for philanthropy. For example, we should expect the interests of future people to be systematically underrepresented because they don’t participate in present-day markets or elections. For-profit entrepreneurship can be even more compelling as an option than nonprofit entrepreneurship. Though it generally will be more difficult to focus your activities on the most important social problem within for-profit entrepreneurship, there is a much greater potential to grow quickly, and there is the additional benefit of larger earnings that can be used for good purposes later on in life. Economists also suggest that innovative entrepreneurship is undersupplied by the market.
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William MacAskill (Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference)
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Leonard grew up to be an activist, traveling the globe for Greenpeace. Along the way, she made a short film about pollution and garbage called The Story of Stuff in hopes of teaching people about the consequences of buying and discarding more things than we truly need. It struck a nerve, a big one, and the video has now been viewed online at least 25 million times. The film became a book and evolved into a nonprofit organization. Stephen Colbert had her on his show and referred to her film as a “craze.” Children eventually joined
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Ron Lieber (The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money)
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Carlton Church: Australia in Doubt on Building Nuclear Plant
With the continuous trend of nuclear proliferation, the nuclear-free Australia is in critical dilemma on whether to start the industry in the country or not. On one end of the coin, the negative effects of nuclear generation will surely cause skepticisms and complaints. On the other side, nuclear fuel industry is worth exploring.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been reserved when it comes to nuclear talks but he did admit that “Australia should ‘look closely’ at expanding its role in the global nuclear energy industry, including leasing fuel rods to other countries and then storing the waste afterwards”.
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill set up a royal commission in March to undertake an independent investigation into the state’s participation in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Carlton Church International, non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear use, says there is no need for Australia to venture into nuclear turmoil as they already have an extensive, low cost coal and natural gas reserves. Other critics has also seconded this motion as it is known that even Turnbull has pointed out that the country has plentiful access to coal, gas, wind and solar sources.
During an interview, he also stated, “I’m not talking about the politics. We’ve got so much other affordable sources of energy, not just fossil fuel like coal and gas but also wind, solar. The ability to store energy is getting better all the time, and that’s very important for intermittent sources of energy, particularly wind and solar. But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely”.
A survey was also conducted among random people and a lot of them have been reluctant about the nuclear issue. Some fear that the Fukushima Daichii Incident would happen, knowing the extent of the damage it has caused even to those living in Tokyo, Japan.
Another review also stated, “We only have to look at the Fukushima disaster in Japan to be reminded of the health, social and economic impacts of a nuclear accident, and to see that this is not a safe option for Australians.”
According to further studies by analysts, 25 nuclear reactors can be built around Australia producing a third of the country’s electricity by 2050. But it also found nuclear power would be much more expensive to produce than coal-fired power if a price was not put on carbon dioxide emissions.
Greenpeace dismissed nuclear power as “an expensive distraction from the real solutions to climate change, like solar and wind power”.
- See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot
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Sabrina Carlton
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…an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public,”33 had documented that legal abortion improved the health of Americans.34
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David A. Grimes (Every Third Woman In America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation)
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Nonprofit organizations exist to help people help others — through giving money, time, effort, or material goods.
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John Mutz (Fundraising For Dummies)
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You were meant to bring forth much fruit. You can be effective. Powerfully used. I’m talking to you. Not your preacher or Bible study teacher. Your legacy can still have an impact in a dozen generations if Christ tarries. You don’t have to look a certain way, receive a certain gift, attend a certain denominational church, practice a certain kind of ministry, or establish a nonprofit organization! All you need to be mighty in your generation is a shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit (the Word of God, Eph. 6:16–17). Through Christ you can absolutely, unequivocally do anything God places before you (Phil. 4:13). That includes getting the enemy off your Promised Land.
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Beth Moore (Believing God)
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If your organization is barely surviving, I would argue that you’ve likely lost the ability to unearth or communicate your true story.
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Dan Portnoy (The Non-Profit Narrative: How Telling Stories Can Change the World)