What's Written Down Wins

When I practiced law we had a saying that if it ain't in the record, it didn't happen. A decision your record cannot support is not a decision. It is an intention that has been mistaken for one. That's the uncomfortable version. The useful one: the same principle runs in your favor, and it is the only reason the first story below has a happy ending.

A note: this NGN issue is much more steeped in legalisms than any other I have published before. I tend to shy away from the technical because it can be off-putting, but sometimes you need to look at the actual dang words (or lack of them, as shown below).

This week:

• A Tennessee senior center that is open today because the city tried to skip the paperwork..
• A Florida newsroom that wrote its AI policy during an emergency, then rewrote it four months later.
• A Hawai'i fund that moved one word in a payment clause and put $25 million into nonprofit accounts before any invoice.
• Three quick hits with deadlines attached: the Census rule, the federal grants freeze, the new 1099 threshold.
• Two AI prompts, both producing a document you probably do not have.
• A 30-minute board exercise on votes that do not count.
• A note from me on the policy you write afterward.

A Tennessee Senior Center Is Open Today Because the City Tried to Skip the Paperwork

On August 19, 2026, a Tennessee chancellor ordered the City of Clarksville to stop interfering with a senior center it believed it had lawfully taken over seven weeks earlier. The city may even have been right about the lease. It lost anyway, and the reason it lost is the subject of this issue.

The Ajax Turner Senior Citizens Center has operated out of 953 Clark Street since 1983 under a year-to-year lease at one dollar a year. It is run by a nonprofit, not by the city, though nearly 90 percent of its roughly $900,000 budget came from city funds. Section 11 of that lease let either party end it on 90 days' written notice. On March 20, Mayor Joe Pitts gave notice, effective June 30, and announced a city-run program in its place: a $1.286 million budget, Parks and Recreation staff, a July 20 grand reopening.

Read the lease alone and the city had a case. Whether Section 11 let the mayor act without a council vote is disputed; when a councilwoman challenged him, he ruled the challenge out of order under the charter, a motion to overrule him failed four votes to eight, and the city has since claimed attorney-client privilege over what authority it relied on. But that dispute belongs to a court, and the city did not wait for one. It took the building.

The nonprofit, meanwhile, was making the same mistake from the other side, and the record caught it twice.

In June its board voted in closed session to remove the executive director. Under Tennessee's Open Meetings Act, votes must be taken in open public session, and the center's own attorneys later conceded that vote was "void and without legal effect." On July 16, four board members who had been removed from the board on July 1 met, voted to hand the building to the city, and resigned. A different group met the same day and rescinded it; the nonprofit's complaint now calls the July 16 vote "a nullity." Everyone in those rooms knew what they wanted. None of it counted, because none of it could be shown in the record.

On July 28 the nonprofit sued the city, the mayor, and the four former board members, alleging that the lease-termination discussions had themselves happened in "closed, non-public sessions and informal assemblages," including two meetings in a first-floor City Hall hallway. Those allegations have not been ruled on. They are allegations, and the same statute had already been turned on the nonprofit's own board a month earlier.

What the chancellor has ruled on was narrower, and it is the principle this whole NGN issue rests on. On August 5, Chancellor Kimberly Lund wrote that "Tennessee forbids self-help eviction – no person may enter and detain lands except where entry is given by law." On August 19 she found the city's conduct was "self-help, which is strictly prohibited in Tennessee," that displacing roughly 1,400 seniors would cause significant harm, and that the city faced no substantial harm in return, given a lease worth one dollar a year. She did not decide what the lease means. She decided that the city does not get to decide that for itself. If it believes its reading is right, it brings the lease, the statute, and the dated filings to a courtroom, and someone who was not in any of those rooms reads them. In other words, words and the processes they describe matter.

The center reopened Monday, August 24. Its Adult Day Center, running since 2003, resumed the next day.

Here is what makes this replicable, and it is not "sue your city."

Pull your lease and find the termination clause today. Not the rent, not the term: the clause that says who can end it, on what notice, and whether anyone has to give a reason. If you occupy a building owned by a municipality, a church, a hospital system, or a founding donor, that clause is the single most consequential sentence in your organization's life, and there is a real chance nobody now on staff has read it. Section 11 was not hidden. It was unread until the day it was used.

Then spend an hour on the facility-loss contingency. Where the program goes for ninety days. Which services stop. Who tells the participants. Put it in the minutes with a date. The plan will go stale; the point is that your board will have had the conversation once, calmly, which is the only condition under which anyone thinks clearly about it.

And when a counterparty acts on its own reading of your documents, answer with the documents, not with your own version of self-help. The nonprofit's board lost two votes that month by skipping procedure. It won the building by following it.

One honest limit on the evidence. Two newsrooms have covered this in depth, and the deepest reporting comes from one of them. The building's ownership is contested in the record: the complaint says Montgomery County holds the deed; the center's director wrote in May that the city owns it. And the case is unfinished. An injunction is interim by definition, a contempt motion was filed in August against two former center leaders, and the most recent reporting I could find is dated August 26.

Sources: Clarksville Now, April 8, 2026 — "City terminates Ajax Turner Senior Center's lease, mayor says to 'stabilize' ongoing operations"; Clarksville Now, June 30, 2026 — "Senior center attorneys address allegations of open meetings law violation"; Clarksville Now, July 2, 2026 — "Pitts rules Ajax Turner decision challenge out of order; City Council upholds ruling"; Clarksville Now, July 23, 2026 — "Ajax Turner Senior Center board splits, takes conflicting votes, starts over"; Clarksville Now, July 28, 2026 — "Ajax Turner non-profit files lawsuit against City of Clarksville, Mayor Pitts"; Clarksville Now, August 19, 2026 — "Court rules in favor of Ajax Turner Senior Center"; Clarksville Now, August 24, 2026 — "Ajax Turner Senior Center reopens"; WTVF NewsChannel 5, June 1, 2026 — "Clarksville sets July timeline for senior center takeover"; WTVF NewsChannel 5, August 19, 2026 — "Judge rules city of Clarksville must stop interfering with Ajax Turner Senior Center operations"​

A Florida Newsroom Had No AI Policy on the Day It Needed One. It Has Now Written Two.

Suncoast Searchlight is a nonprofit investigative newsroom covering Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties, operating as a registered fictitious name of Community News Collaborative, Inc. It was seeded by the Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation and it does serious work — its "Power and Profit" series was a 2026 INNY finalist.

On November 11, 2025, its four staff reporters sent a letter to its board.

The letter alleged that the editor-in-chief had used AI editing tools on their drafts without disclosure, and that this had introduced hallucinated quotes and a reference to a state law that does not exist — a "Local Government Emergency and Recovery Management Act" — which the reporters said they found in Google Docs version history.

I am going to be precise about what is established and what is not, because the difference is the whole lesson.

What the reporters alleged is above. What the board said, in a public statement on November 25 signed by all six directors, is that "nothing published by the Searchlight team was created by generative AI," that it had "worked with staff and management to review how AI has been used in the newsroom," and that it "remains firmly behind the integrity of the journalism, the editorial processes and the leadership of the Searchlight team." One reporter, terminated the day after the letter reached the board and 33 days into the job, told Nieman Lab the board "did not ask to speak with any staffers nor examine the evidence we had." The board says it investigated. Those accounts cannot both be complete, and I have no way to adjudicate between them.

What is not in dispute is the sentence that should stop every executive director reading this:

Suncoast Searchlight had no AI policy — public or internal — on the day the letter arrived.

Not a bad policy. Not an outdated one. None. A newsroom whose entire product is factual accuracy, staffed by people who think about verification for a living, funded by a foundation that expects rigor, had no written answer to "may we use these tools, for what, and must we say so." The question arrived as an accusation instead of as an agenda item.

Six weeks later, on December 23, 2025, the organization published one. It named five principles — transparency, accuracy and human oversight, privacy and security, accountability, exploration — and, more usefully, a list of things it would not do. Some of those prohibitions are worth borrowing outright:

• "We will never enter sensitive or identifying information about our audience members, sources or our own staff into any generative AI tools."
• "We will not input any private or proprietary information, such as contracts, personnel information, email lists or sensitive correspondence into generative AI tools."
• "No Suncoast Searchlight content should be entered in any way that can be used to train their model."
• "We will not use Otter to transcribe a recorded interview of a confidential source."

That last one is the tell that a real person wrote this rather than a template. It names the specific tool, the specific task, and the specific circumstance where the general rule is not enough.

The structural piece is the one most boards skip. The policy created a standing AI committee of staff members, chaired by a named person, that meets regularly to review how approved tools are being used, evaluate requests for new ones, and watch what the rest of the field is doing. The policy also carries an approved-tools list, and the route to adding a tool runs through the committee. That converts AI governance from a document into a process with an owner.

And then the part almost nobody talks about, which is why I am telling you about a policy from December in September.

They rewrote it four months later. The full policy now carries "Last updated: 04/28/2026," and the disclosure language changed. The December version promised disclosure through "an editor's note at the bottom of an article or, for something more substantial, a separate 'how-we-did-it' story." The current version says it "may be a short tagline, a caption or credit, or for something more substantial, an editor's note or sidebar." The committee's own task list includes writing down how often it will meet and who sits on it — which it had not yet specified.

That is not a failure. That is what a first draft written under pressure looks like four months on, and it is the strongest argument in this issue for writing yours now, while nothing is on fire and you can be wrong cheaply.

Here is what makes this replicable. Your AI policy does not need five principles and a committee charter to start existing. It needs three sentences your board can adopt at its next meeting: what tools are approved, what must never be entered into them, and who decides when that changes. Ship that. Revise it in April.

Two disclosures the story deserves. Only one newsroom — Nieman Lab — reported the underlying dispute; everything else traces to that reporting or to the organization's own documents, so do not read broad press scrutiny into this. And one of the board members who signed the statement clearing the newsroom is Kelly McBride, Poynter's senior vice president and chair of its Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, who co-authored Poynter's own AI ethics guidance and is credited with guiding the policy that followed. That is not a conflict of interest; it is two roles in one signature, the fiduciary borrowing the ethicist's credibility, and it is worth naming — partly because it is also why the resulting policy is better than most.

Sources: Nieman Journalism Lab, November 19, 2025 — "Florida nonprofit news reporters ask board to investigate their editor's AI use"; Suncoast Searchlight Board of Directors, November 25, 2025 — "Board of Directors response to concerns about AI"; Suncoast Searchlight, December 23, 2025 — "Suncoast Searchlight adopts AI policy, forms AI committee"; Suncoast Searchlight — Full Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy, last updated April 28, 2026​

Hawai'i Changed One Clause in a Grant Contract. Ninety-Five Nonprofits Got Half Their Money on Day One.

Here is a sentence most of you could write from memory: We deliver the service, we submit the invoice, and the state pays us back — eventually.

No contract says it that way. What the contract says is that payment follows invoices for costs incurred — reimbursement — and it has been the default in government grants for so long that most nonprofit leaders treat it as weather. The word "eventually" is not in the clause. It is what the clause costs you when the approval queue runs three to eighteen months, as it has in Hawai'i, and during that gap the organization floats the state: payroll, rent, food, fuel, out of reserves it may not have, or a line of credit it pays interest on.

Last summer Hawai'i wrote a different sentence.

Act 310, signed by Governor Josh Green on July 9, 2025, put $50 million into an emergency fund for nonprofits hurt by federal cuts and the shutdown. The Office of Community Services ran it; Aloha United Way handled processing; a four-member legislative committee picked the recipients. In November, 213 applicants became roughly 95 grantees, from Hawai'i Foodbank at $5.5 million down to a Hilo church at $8,000.

None of that is the news. Hawai'i had done emergency grants before. The news is the payment term: grantees could receive 50% of the award up front, before a single invoice.

Family Promise of Hawai'i, which had just lost half of a $1 million federal housing grant, received just under $500,000 under Act 310. Its executive director, Ryan Catalani, put it plainly: "I would encourage more funders and government to look at this model." Michelle Ka'uhane, chief operating officer of the Hawai'i Community Foundation, called advance payment "one of the most meaningful shifts in how we fund the nonprofit sector" — and she said it as the person whose foundation has spent years bridging the reimbursement gap with its own money.

Kaua'i County had gotten there first. Its practice is 80% of a grant paid up front, benchmarked to progress reports and site visits, with the final 20% released on completion. Mayor Derek Kawakami's explanation is one sentence long: "Many of these nonprofits need that up-front support in order to get the work done."

Notice what did not change. The state did not spend more. It did not lower its standards; Act 310 grantees file monthly fiscal and program reports. It did not trust anyone more than before. It moved one term in the payment clause from after to before, and the same dollars did more work, because nobody had to borrow against them.

Two cautions, so you cite this correctly. The 50% figure comes from one newsroom — the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, via Hawai'i Community Foundation's account — and the other three outlets that covered Act 310 reported the awards, not the payment terms. And it is a one-time emergency appropriation; no one has said the state will pay this way again.

So what is written down here that you can use?

The clause. Pull your largest government contract and find the payment section. Read the words. If it says reimbursement, you now have a documented alternative to point at — a state, a county, a dollar figure, a named foundation executive and a named mayor — the next time a funder tells you advance payment is not how it is done. If you sit on the funder side of the table, the Kaua'i version is the one to copy: an advance, a benchmark, a holdback. It costs the funder nothing but a paragraph.

What's written down in the payment clause decides whether you run a program or finance one. Hawai'i just proved the clause can be rewritten.

Sources: Dan Nakaso, "Nonprofit leaders applaud up-front grant funding," Honolulu Star-Advertiser, via The Garden Island, January 12, 2026; Hawaii News Now, "State distributes $50M to 95 nonprofits impacted by federal shutdown, cuts," November 21, 2025; Spectrum News Hawai'i, "Act 310 grant program awards nearly $50M to local nonprofits," November 21, 2025; The Garden Island, "Special $50M state fund authorized to help Hawaii nonprofits," July 16, 2025; Aloha United Way, Act 310 program page​

Comment on the Census Rule That Would End Race and Ethnicity Questions — Before October 13

On September 10, 2026, the Census Bureau published a proposed rule at 91 FR 57524 that would do two separate things to the 2030 count.

The first rewrites residence criteria so that only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents are counted at their usual residence for apportionment; everyone else is "not counted for apportionment."

The second is the one that will reach your program data. Proposed § 70.2(a): "No question about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation shall appear on the short form decennial census questionnaire or any questionnaire used for the enumeration of the population." Demographic questions have been asked in every census since 1790.

Two precisions, because this is being described loosely. The rule expressly does not touch the American Community Survey: "The Census Bureau is not proposing any restrictions on its ability to ask demographic questions on the American Community Survey or other surveys that are not used for the enumeration of the population." And the ban covers sexual orientation alongside race and ethnicity, which most summaries omit.

Action: Three steps. First, list the places your organization currently relies on decennial race data — needs assessments, service-area demographics, grant applications, Title VI reporting, board dashboards. Second, decide whether ACS data can carry that weight for you, since ACS is unaffected but has larger margins of error at small geographies. Third, file a comment. Go to regulations.gov and enter USBC–2026–0628 in the search box, or mail comments to 4600 Silver Hill Road, Designation: ADDEMO/FRN, Washington, DC 20746.

ROI: A comment costs an hour. The rulemaking record is the only place an operational objection — "this specific dataset is load-bearing for this specific service" — counts as evidence rather than opinion. Agencies must respond to substantive comments; they do not have to respond to anything else.

Time: 60 minutes, including the data inventory.

Read the Termination Clause in Every Federal Award You Hold, Before December 11

In May, OMB proposed rewriting the federal grant rules so that an agency could terminate a discretionary award whenever it decides the award is "no longer in the Federal Government's interest," with similar changes for suspension. Nearly half a million comments came in. The continuing resolution Congress passed on September 2 blocks the rule, or any substantially similar one, through December 11, 2026.

Understand what that is and is not. The rule was paused, not withdrawn. The date is fixed by statute — it does not move earlier if Congress passes full-year appropriations, and it does not move later unless Congress acts again on this rule specifically. On December 12, OMB is free to finalize. Plan on it. The nonprofit sector will likely continue to fight against this change but there is no certainty that we will prevail.

Action: Use the next twelve weeks for document review and preparation:

• First, list every federal award and pass-through subaward you hold. For each one, find the termination clause and note whether it lets the agency end the award because it "no longer effectuates program goals or agency priorities" — since 2024 that language has to appear in the award's own terms if the agency wants to use it, and many awards carry it. Those are the awards already exposed, with or without the new rule.
• Second, model a 90-day payment interruption on your two largest awards, in case the new rule takes effect (or you already have that language in your contract).
• Third, bring the list and the model to your finance committee before Thanksgiving.

ROI: Free. The organizations caught flat in December will be the ones that treated the freeze as a full reprieve.

Time: 30 minutes per award; two hours for the cash-flow model.

Rebuild Your Vendor Tracking for the $2,000 1099 Threshold Before Year-End Close

For payments made after December 31, 2025, the reporting threshold for Form 1099-NEC and several Form 1099-MISC boxes rose from $600 to $2,000 — the IRS states it as "tax years beginning after 2025," which matters if you are on a fiscal year. That covers 1099-NEC Box 1a, and 1099-MISC Box 1 (Rents) and Box 3 (Other Income). Royalties stay at $10; direct sales stay at $5,000. The new figure is indexed for inflation beginning in 2027, so $2,000 is not permanent.

Your 2026 Forms 1099-NEC are due to recipients and to the IRS on January 31, 2027 — which is a Sunday, so under the IRS weekend rule the deadline moves to Monday, February 1, 2027.

Action: Three things. (1) Keep collecting W-9s at the same trigger you use now. The threshold is not a license to stop — you still need to document contractor status, and you cannot know at the first payment whether the year will cross $2,000. (2) Check your state. New Jersey's published guidance still requires 1099 copies at $1,000 or more under its own rule, and several states set thresholds independent of the federal one. (3) Reset the threshold in your accounting system before the final 2026 AP close, not in January, because the flag is applied as transactions post.

ROI: Fewer forms to issue, and a clean audit trail on the ones you skip. One thing worth knowing, because it is counterintuitive: Congress tied the backup-withholding trigger to the same figure, so payments below $2,000 now generally fall outside both regimes. For payments that do cross it, the duty to backup withhold when a TIN is missing is unchanged.

Time: 45 minutes with your bookkeeper.

Two prompts this week, each producing a document your organization probably does not have. Paste these into the assistant of your choice and edit hard — the output is a first draft, not a policy.

Draft the AI Policy Your Board Can Adopt in One Meeting

You are helping a nonprofit executive director write a first AI use policy that a volunteer board can read and adopt in a single meeting. It must fit on two pages. Ask me these questions one at a time, and wait for my answer before the next: (1) What does my organization do, and roughly how many staff and volunteers? (2) What confidential categories do we hold — client records, donor data, personnel files, legal correspondence, anything protected by statute? (3) What AI tools, if any, are people already using, including ones nobody approved? (4) Who would realistically own this — a person, not a committee of the whole? Then produce: an approved-tools list with each tool matched to permitted uses; a "never enter this" list written as specific prohibitions naming real categories rather than abstractions, including at least one that names a specific tool and a specific task; a disclosure rule stating when we tell people AI was involved and through what mechanism; and a named owner with a stated process for adding a tool. End with a one-paragraph board resolution adopting it and a review date six months out. Do not write aspirational principles I cannot enforce. Where you are guessing about my sector's legal constraints, mark the sentence GUESS so I can check it with counsel.

What makes it worth trying: most AI policy templates are values statements. This produces the two lists and the one name that actually govern behavior, and it forces the six-month revision date into the resolution — which is the thing the Florida newsroom above learned the hard way.

Read Your Own Federal Award the Way a Terminating Agency Would

You are a federal grants officer who has been instructed to find every lawful basis for suspending, modifying, or terminating the award I am about to paste in. You are not hostile to the grantee, but you are thorough and you are working from the four corners of the document plus 2 CFR Part 200. Identify: every clause permitting the agency to withhold, suspend, terminate, or unilaterally change terms; what notice, if any, the agency owes me; what costs I could be left holding; every reporting or certification obligation whose breach would give you an opening; and any pass-through-specific term that is stricter than the federal floor. Quote the operative language for each. Then switch roles and tell me, as my advisor, the three things I should do in the next thirty days to close the easiest openings. Where the award is silent and the answer depends on the current version of 2 CFR 200, say so explicitly rather than assuming.

What makes it worth trying: the ninety-day freeze above is a research window with a hard end date. This turns a 40-page award you have never fully read into a one-page list of what the other side can already do. Redact any personally identifying information before pasting.

The Void Vote — A 30-Minute Board Exercise

What it is for. Two votes in Clarksville this year were procedurally dead before anyone acted on them, and nobody in either room knew it at the time. This exercise finds out whether your board would know.

What you need. Your bylaws, your last twelve months of minutes, and one board member who has not read either recently. That last one is the instrument.

How to run it (30 minutes).

1. Pick three real decisions (3 minutes). The chair names three significant things the board decided in the past year. Not hypotheticals — real ones, ideally one financial, one personnel-adjacent, and one about property, a contract, or a partnership.
2. Hand the minutes to the outsider (10 minutes). The board member who has not read them takes the minutes and the bylaws. Working alone while the rest of the board waits, they try to answer four questions for each decision: Was there a motion and a second? Is there a recorded vote, with a count? Was a quorum present, and does the record say so? Does anything indicate whether the meeting was open or closed, and does our state law or our bylaws care?
3. Read the answers aloud (7 minutes). No defending. The person reads what they found and what they could not find. The rest of the board listens. Somebody will want to explain what really happened in the room; the chair should stop them, because that explanation is exactly the thing that will not be available in two years.
4. Ask the two questions (7 minutes). First: if a funder, a regulator, or a departing employee challenged one of these decisions, which one would we lose on the record alone? Second, and harder: who here believes a decision we all remember making is binding even if the minutes do not show it? Do not resolve that one. Find out who raises a hand.
5. Fix one thing, tonight (3 minutes). Not all of it. Choose the single worst gap and assign it — a corrected minute, a ratifying vote at the next meeting, a bylaws provision nobody has followed in years. Record the assignment with a name and a date, which is itself the behavior you are trying to build.

In-person: Give the outsider a separate table and let the silence be awkward. The discomfort while everyone waits is doing real work.

Virtual: Send the documents to the outsider twenty minutes before the meeting starts and have them present cold; do not let others open the files while listening.

Watch out for: Two failure modes. The first is the exercise becoming a referendum on the secretary, which is both unfair and beside the point — minutes are a board responsibility, not an administrative one, and the board approved every one of them. Say that out loud in step one. The second is a board that finds no gaps and concludes it is fine. Push once: ask whether the minutes record the reasoning, not just the outcome. A record that shows what was decided but not what was weighed will satisfy a regulator and will not help the board that inherits it.

You'll know it worked when: somebody who has been on the board for years says out loud that they did not know a rule that is in your own bylaws.

The Policy You Write Afterward

Every policy I have ever seen a nonprofit adopt in a hurry has the same fingerprint on it. You can tell, reading it later, exactly what happened.

The whistleblower policy that is unusually specific about one reporting channel. The travel policy with a paragraph about a category of expense nobody would think to mention. The social media policy that names a platform that stopped mattering years ago. Each one is the manifestation of a scar.

There is nothing shameful about this. Most organizational learning is scar tissue. An organization with no scars usually has not accomplished anything. But there is a predictable cost, and it is not the one people assume.

The cost is not that the policy is bad. Policies written after an incident are often better than the ones written in the abstract, because they are specific, and specificity is the whole value of the genre. "Do not use Otter to transcribe an interview with a confidential source" is worth twenty paragraphs about responsible innovation.

The cost is that you had to hold the conversation at the worst possible moment, with the least possible room, in front of people who were already frightened or angry. You did not get to be wrong cheaply. You did not get to say "I'm not sure, let me think about that" — because somebody had already been hurt, or fired, or was about to be, and every sentence you wrote was going to be read as a verdict on them.

That is the thing writing it early actually buys. Not better rules. Room.

I keep coming back to the detail that the Florida newsroom rewrote its policy four months later. Somebody could read that as evidence the first one was rushed, and it was. I read it as the healthiest thing in the story. They wrote something, used it, found where it was thin, and changed it — which is what a policy is supposed to do, and almost never does, because most of them are adopted once and then live in a binder as proof that the question was handled.

I want to be careful about one thing, because there is a version of this argument I do not hold. I am not saying write more policies. Most nonprofits I work with are over-policied and under-governed — thick manuals, thin practice, and a board that has never tested either. Adding documents to a shelf is not what I am asking for.

What I am asking for is narrower. Find the three questions your organization has not answered in writing and would have to answer badly, in public, within a week of something going wrong. For most of you right now, one of them is AI. One of them is likely what happens if you lose your building on ninety days' notice. The third one is yours and I could not guess it.

Then write the two-page version. Not the good version. The version your board can adopt at the next meeting and revise in April.

And forward this issue to one person — someone specific, with a name. The executive director who has been meaning to write an AI policy since March. The board chair who has never read the organization's lease.

If someone forwarded this to you: sign up here. It is free, it arrives Wednesdays, and that is the whole arrangement.

Then hit reply and tell me which three questions you picked. I read every one myself, and I would like to know whether I guessed the first two right.

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None of what you just read is about paperwork, which is the word we use to make this sound optional. It is about whether the thing your organization believes it decided can be demonstrated by anyone who was not in the room.

So: pull the lease and find the termination clause. Read the suspension clause in your largest federal award before December 11. Write the two-page AI policy. Hand your minutes to the one board member who has not read them.

Four documents. None of them takes a week. All of them are cheaper this month than they will be on the day you need them.

See you next week.

— Ted

P.S. Please help this newsletter grow in influence by forwarding it to at least one peer. I'm trying to give as much free advice to as many people as possible and that only works if you help me get the word out.

Founder and CEO Risk Alternatives, LLC 202.758.7572 (cell) ​Website​ Author of ​​Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience​​​ I help nonprofits thrive by providing practical tools and support to address uncertainty and improve resilience.

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