Three stories in this issue show where to draw the line between what you share and what you keep: a Washington theater holds the lease on a new arts center and brought in two nonprofit partners, a 108-year-old Youngstown foundation is handing its administration to the community foundation while keeping, in its words, "all grant decisions," and two Oregon clean-energy nonprofits shared one project while deciding whether to combine, and one is now folding its U.S. work into the other.
A shared arrangement has a line in it: on one side what both parties carry together, a building, a back office, a project; on the other what each keeps, its name, its programming, its vote. The Board Corner is about one item that belongs on a board's "keep" side.
This week:
- A theater evicted in 2024 that now holds the lease on an arts center shared with two partners.
- A foundation moving its back office to a peer on November 16 and keeping its grant committee.
- Two Oregon nonprofits that shared a Uganda project while one decided to fold its U.S. work into the other.
- Retirement-plan mistakes you can now fix without an IRS filing.
- The Maryland payroll rule that reaches one remote employee in January.
- A prompt that lists the outside apps holding keys to your systems.
- A prompt that asks a chatbot what it tells voters about you.
- A board exercise on the executive's card statement. And,
- A column on the part you cannot hand over.
A Theater Company Was Evicted in 2024. It Now Holds the Lease on a New Arts Center and Shares It With Two Other Nonprofits.
In April 2024, Theater Alliance, a professional company that had performed at the Anacostia Playhouse in Washington, DC for more than a decade, was forced out. Its statement at the time said the property owner had found the Playhouse's sublease invalid and that the Playhouse had stopped paying its own rent; DC Theater Arts reported it as an eviction. Shanara Gabrielle, now its executive artistic director, was eight days into the job, the Washington Post reported.
Six months later the company was performing in a concrete shell. Under the District's pop-up permitting program, which gives a vacant building a streamlined occupancy permit for temporary use of up to a year, Theater Alliance moved its 2024–25 season into the unfinished ground floor of a new apartment building at 340 Maple Drive SW. It had no bathrooms, no running water and not enough power, the Washingtonian reported; audiences used the preschool next door.
Last Friday, October 23, that floor opened as the Revada Arts Center: 9,000 square feet with a 140-seat black box theater, a 58-seat cinema, a rehearsal studio and a scene shop, named for the Revada Foundation, an Alexandria family foundation the Washingtonian reports was the largest donor. Theater Alliance signed a long-term lease with the developer, Hoffman & Associates, and ran a capital campaign it announced at $4.5 million; The 51st reported in October that it had brought in more than $5 million from individual donors, on top of a District arts grant and the foundation gift, neither amount disclosed.
The design is the part to study. Theater Alliance brought in two other nonprofits as partners: IN Series, an opera company that dates to 1982, and 4EYE Film Center, a film nonprofit founded last year. Theater Alliance "holds the lease and much of the risk," as the Post put it. The two partners hold multiyear agreements, American Theatre reported, and one of the terms is programming autonomy: each organization decides what it stages or screens. What they share, by The 51st's account, is costs such as carpentry and lighting equipment, and the use of the rooms. "We're all contributing to the cost of the rent the same way," Gabrielle told WETA, and when the space is rented to outside groups, "everybody shares the revenue profit."
The opening is the news. The arrangement is the lesson. Because on their operating revenue, it is hard to see any one of the three carrying this building alone. Theater Alliance's latest Form 990, for the year ending June 2025, shows revenue of $702,766. IN Series reported $1.3 million for the same period. 4EYE is too new to have filed. Three organizations of that size now hold a performance center in Southwest Washington, and each kept the decision that defines it: what goes on its stage or screen.
Gabrielle has called it, with a hedge, a new model; she told The 51st she thinks it "is really the first in the nation." I would not go that far. Shared arts buildings exist. What is unusual here is the shape: one organization took the lease and the risk, and its partners joined on written terms that Gabrielle told The 51st are "extraordinarily tight."
If you are weighing a shared space, put these questions in writing before anyone moves in. Who signs the lease, and what happens to the others if that organization fails? Which costs are split, by what formula, and which are each organization's own? When outside revenue comes in, who gets it? And what does each partner keep deciding alone? Theater Alliance's answer to the last one was programming. Yours may differ, but it has to be written down.
The record has gaps I want you to see. The center is five days old at send. What it costs to operate, what the rent is and what the build-out cost have not been published. The lease length is 15 years in The 51st and 29 in American Theatre, so I have not given one. The descriptions of how the three organizations decide together come from Gabrielle. And the 2024 eviction is told from Theater Alliance's side; I did not find the Playhouse's.
Sources: Elliot C. Williams, "A new 9,000 square-foot arts center is coming to Southwest D.C.," The 51st, October 7, 2026; Rudi Greenberg, Washington Post, October 21, 2026 (via Yahoo); Helena Getahun-Hawkins, "What to Know About DC's New Revada Arts Center," Washingtonian, October 22, 2026; Daniella Ignacio, "Revada Arts Center: A New Artistic Home in Southwest D.C.," American Theatre, September 28, 2026; Nicole Lacroix, WETA, October 26, 2026; DC Theater Arts, "Theater Alliance forced to leave Anacostia Playhouse," April 16, 2024; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Theater Alliance of Washington DC; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, The In Series Inc.
A 108-Year-Old Foundation Is Moving Its Back Office to the Community Foundation Across Town. Its Grant Committee Stays Put.
The Youngstown Foundation was created in 1918 and calls itself the largest and oldest grantmaking foundation in Ohio's Mahoning Valley. Its 2024 tax filing shows $152.5 million in assets. Its website says it awards around $4 million in grants a year.
The Business Journal reported on October 20 that on November 16 its administrative functions will move to the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, created in 1999 in the same city, which says it has facilitated more than 250 charitable funds. The Youngstown Foundation's distribution committee, the volunteer body that reviews requests and votes on grants, keeps that job in full. The foundation says it will remain fully operational and that the point is to spend less on administration so more goes out as grants.
"This transition provides continuity, efficiency and sustainability for the foundation while preserving the independent grantmaking process that has guided our efforts for many years," said Marty Bushey, who chairs the distribution committee. Casey Krell, the community foundation's president, said that "by combining administrative resources and expertise, we can help maximize the impact of charitable dollars throughout the community."
What makes this more than a press release is the shape of the thing being kept, and the shape is visible in the tax filing. It lists PNC Bank, N.A. as trustee, paid $753,002 in 2024; Lynnette Forde as president, the one paid officer shown; and the distribution committee members at zero. So the foundation has three parts: a bank trustee that holds the money, a small office that runs the process, and a committee that decides who gets a grant. The office is the part that is moving. Whether the trustee arrangement changes, and what happens to the president's position, is not in anything published so far.
Here is why a reader who will never run a $150 million foundation should care. The decision it kept is the one that makes it the Youngstown Foundation: which organizations in the valley receive money. The rest, the application portal, the acknowledgment letters, the compliance files, is work another institution in the same city already does for hundreds of funds. Your budget has the same split somewhere in it: a function that is yours because your mission is in it, and functions you perform because somebody has to.
Try the question on your own organization. For each administrative function you run, ask who else in your county already runs it for more organizations than you: a community foundation, a state association, a larger agency, a fiscal sponsor. Then ask what you would have to keep deciding yourself for the arrangement to still be you. If the answer is clear, you have the outline of a conversation. The Youngstown Foundation's answer took one sentence: the committee keeps making, in the announcement's words, "all grant decisions."
The limits are real. This is one release-based story, and neither foundation had posted anything on its own site by October 27. No figure for the savings has been published, which leaves the move's value unknown. Nothing is reported about staff. And the next distribution committee meeting is March 9, 2027, which means the first grants made under the new arrangement are more than four months away.
Sources: Business Journal Daily, "Youngstown Foundation Transitioning Administrative Duties to CFMV," October 20, 2026; Inside Philanthropy, The Philanthropy Wire, October 21, 2026; The Youngstown Foundation; The Youngstown Foundation, 2026 growth report, March 7, 2026; Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, The Youngstown Foundation
Two Clean-Energy Nonprofits Shared One Project While Deciding Whether to Combine. Now One Is Folding Its U.S. Work Into the Other.
Green Empowerment, a Portland nonprofit that works with partners in about ten countries to build community-owned power and water systems, lists Uganda among its countries with a first project in 2019, bringing electricity and clean water to health clinics. In 2025 it tried to expand there, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported last week, and the money it expected dried up.
Instead of shelving the work, it found a partner. blueEnergy, which worked for two decades on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, has a small U.S. arm, now in Eugene, and a French sister organization. The two groups ran one clean-water project in Uganda together with a local organization, The Water Trust, and an existing donor to blueEnergy France paid for it. That project is ongoing, and the organizations have discussed repeating it in Ethiopia.
The project became the test case. After talks that OPB says ran more than a year, blueEnergy's U.S. arm is formally in the process of merging into Green Empowerment, and blueEnergy France has signed a formal partnership with it. The organizations' own pages, both dated October 1, put it more bluntly: blueEnergy's U.S. entity "is winding down and integrating into Green Empowerment," while blueEnergy France stays independent. Andrea Johnson, Green Empowerment's executive director, and Mathias Craig, blueEnergy's co-founder, are the people working it through. By their account, Green Empowerment gains access to European funders; blueEnergy's U.S. work gains an administrative home and a future.
Scale matters here, and it favors the reader. Green Empowerment's 2025 filing shows $2.8 million in revenue; blueEnergy's U.S. arm reported $630,000 in 2024. These are not giants absorbing one another. Neither received federal funding, OPB reports, though both worked with partners that did, and both felt the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development through those partners.
What I take from it is the pairing. By OPB's account, the two organizations shared one project, funded by one donor who already trusted one of them, and the talks about combining ran alongside the work, so each side could watch the other operate before it signed anything. The details are still being worked out: no closing date has been reported.
If a peer organization and yours keep circling each other, this is a cheaper first step than a feasibility study. Pick one project both of you would run anyway. Agree in writing on who leads it, who is paid from it and who owns the results. Run it long enough to hit a problem. By then you will know things about each other that a due-diligence checklist will not surface, and you will have earned the right to the bigger conversation, or learned that you do not want it.
Two limits. This is one outlet's account plus the organizations' own pages, and the integration is in process, not complete. And the lesson rhymes with one this newsletter drew three weeks ago, that a large decision can start as a smaller arrangement; what is new here is that the smaller arrangement was a program, not a management contract.
Sources: Kyra Buckley, "Nonprofits with Oregon roots form alliance to overcome tough funding landscape," Oregon Public Broadcasting, October 22, 2026; Green Empowerment, where we work; blueEnergy France, "blueEnergy France et Green Empowerment," October 1, 2026; Green Empowerment, "Green Empowerment + blueEnergy," October 1, 2026; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Green Empowerment; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, blueEnergy
Ask Your Retirement Plan Provider Which Old Mistakes You Can Now Fix Yourself
On October 22 the IRS replaced the rulebook for fixing retirement plan errors. Revenue Procedure 2026-34, effective that day, lets a sponsor of a 401(k), 403(b), SEP or SIMPLE plan self-correct a wider range of "eligible inadvertent failures" without filing with the IRS, and the IRS lists plan loan errors among them. Under the new procedure, a plan does not need a favorable IRS letter to self-correct. A fix counts as timely if finished by the later of the end of the third plan year after the error or 18 months after you find it, and as a rule the IRS must not have found the error first.
Action: Three steps. First, email the company that administers your plan, the one whose name is on the statements, for the list of open issues on your plan: a missed eligible employee, a loan gone wrong, an unsigned amendment. Second, ask whether each item can now be fixed without an IRS filing under Revenue Procedure 2026-34, and what the fix is. Third, record in the finance committee minutes the date each problem was found and fixed, because the 18-month clock runs from discovery.
ROI: A known error fixed now costs the fix. The same error found by the IRS first generally cannot be self-corrected; it then costs a filing fee and a professional’s time at best, a negotiated sanction at worst, and until it is fixed it puts the plan’s tax-favored status at risk.
Time: About 20 minutes to send the email; the rest is the provider's.
Sources: IRS, IR-2026-126, "Treasury, IRS update retirement plan correction program and establish correction program for individual retirement accounts," October 22, 2026; Rev. Proc. 2026-34; Current Federal Tax Developments, October 22, 2026
If Anyone on Your Payroll Is Based in Maryland, Register Now; Withholding Starts January 1
Maryland's paid family and medical leave program, FAMLI, starts collecting money on January 1, 2027, and registration is open now. The state's rule is one sentence: "If you have at least one employee in Maryland, you are required to register." That reaches a remote employee working from home there and an employer based elsewhere. The contribution is 0.9 percent of each Maryland employee's wages up to the Social Security wage cap, split evenly between employer and employee; employers with fewer than 15 employees in total, counting staff in any state under one tax ID, remit the withheld employee half alone. The first payment, for January through March wages, is due April 30, 2027; employees get notice one pay period before withholding begins, the state says; benefits start January 1, 2028. To buy equivalent coverage from an insurer instead, Jackson Lewis reports the declaration is due by November 15.
Action: Three steps. First, count every employee on your payroll, in Maryland and elsewhere (contractors do not count), to see whether you are under 15. Second, register at paidleave.maryland.gov; the state says a third-party agent such as a payroll company cannot register for you. Third, set payroll to withhold 0.45 percent from each Maryland employee from the first January paycheck, add the employer's 0.45 percent at 15 or more employees, and give Maryland employees notice in December that the withholding starts.
ROI: An organization that starts withholding late still owes the full January-to-March amount on April 30, 2027.
Time: About 30 minutes, plus the payroll change.
Sources: Maryland FAMLI, employers; Maryland FAMLI, making contributions; Maryland FAMLI, home; Maryland General Assembly, HB 102 (2025) fiscal and policy note; Jackson Lewis, "Maryland Employers: FAMLI Contributions Begin Jan. 2027"
Both prompts concern something that exists about you without your deciding it: the outside software with standing access to your systems, and the answer a chatbot already gives about you.
List the Outside Apps That Hold a Standing Key to Your Systems
Act as an IT auditor for a small organization that uses Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and relies on an outside IT provider. I will paste the third-party applications, backup tools and vendor connections shown in our admin console and name the vendor that manages our systems. Produce three things. First, a table with one row per application: what it can do in our environment, in plain words (read our mail, change passwords, create accounts, copy our files); how it signs in (with a person's password, or with its own application identity that works without a person); and when anyone last reviewed that permission. Mark the rows you cannot fill. Second, five questions for our IT provider, written so a non-technical director can read the answers: does any of this run through a product with a security notice in the past month; which connections could be switched off for a week without stopping our work; who at the provider can see our data; what our logs would show if a connection were misused; how we would be told. Third, a policy under 150 words treating each vendor connection with its own login as a privileged account: approved by a named person, reviewed on a date, removed when the contract ends. Recommend no purchases.
What makes it worth trying: Microsoft said on October 21 that a China-linked group had used an AI tool, originally open source, that runs attacks on its own to attempt sign-ins to more than 2,250 organizations' Microsoft 365 accounts, according to CSO Online and The Hacker News. The route that worked was not a person's stolen password. It was the credentials that belong to software. ConnectWise had disclosed days earlier that application identities in its Cloud Backup product, a tool that outside IT firms, known as managed service providers, use to back up clients' data, had been accessed without authorization, BleepingComputer reported; Microsoft tied the Microsoft 365 sign-ins to the identities of ConnectWise cloud applications. In some cases the attackers held administrator-level access in under three hours; Microsoft said most of the targeting failed. ConnectWise put it plainly: "MSPs are in the middle of that chain." The apps your outside firm connected on your behalf are part of what you have shared.
Sources: Gyana Swain, "China-linked hackers used agentic AI in attack on 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants," CSO Online, October 22, 2026; The Hacker News, October 22, 2026; Ionut Ilascu, BleepingComputer, October 17, 2026
Ask the Chatbot What It Tells Voters About You
You are a resident of my community trying to make up your mind about an issue on the ballot or in the news that my organization works on. I will name the issue and my organization; use nothing else I tell you. Answer as you would for a voter who asked you cold, in three parts. First, what my organization does, who runs it, how it is funded and what it has accomplished, exactly as you would say it to the voter; then list each statement you are not certain of and where a voter could check it. Second, the two strongest arguments on each side of the issue, and whether my organization's name comes up on either side in what you know. Third, the five things a voter is likeliest to ask you about my organization or the issue in the next week, with your current answer to each. Then step out of the role and tell me, in one paragraph, which of your answers were out of date, thin or wrong, and what public document we could publish to fix each one.
What makes it worth trying: Few adults, about 8 percent, are using AI chatbots to find election information this year, Pew Research Center found in a survey released October 23. But look at what those people ask for: 76 percent want to know where candidates stand on the issues, and 71 percent are checking the accuracy of things they heard or read elsewhere. Among people who use chatbots at all, Pew notes, searching for information is the top use. A public charity does not back candidates, but it can take a side on a ballot issue within its lobbying limits, and it has a public record, a Form 990 and a listing on Candid, the nonprofit database funders check, and a chatbot is assembling an answer about you from whatever it can find. This prompt shows you one version of that answer before a voter sees it.
Sources: Ted Van Green, "Few Americans say they are asking AI chatbots for 2026 election information," Pew Research Center, October 23, 2026
The Card Statement — One Board Meeting, Thirty Minutes
Two cases from the past three weeks, both allegations. In Colorado, the former executive director of CASA of Adams & Broomfield Counties, a $1.7 million child-advocacy nonprofit, faces charges, announced by prosecutors on October 15, of stealing $110,354 and attempting to take $56,949 more. The Denver Gazette, reading the arrest affidavit, reports the alleged route: altered university invoices on a $94,741 donor-funded degree, a tuition refund requested in her own name, and about $5,500 on the organization's card, among other items. The board found it, the affidavit says, when it gave her a photo shoot as a gift in December 2024 and learned she had already charged one to the organization.
In Oklahoma, the former executive director of Mary Abbott Children's House, a $1.8 million child-advocacy nonprofit in Norman, was indicted on October 8 on seven counts of embezzlement, more than $219,000 alleged; the board says it found irregularities in April 2025, ordered an audit, and recovered what the audit identified. Neither has been convicted; the Colorado court date is November 9.
This exercise is not about guilt. It is about a duty that stays with the board however much it delegates: watching the person who spends.
Bring to the meeting. Twelve months of the executive director's organization credit card statements, unredacted. A list of the payments the organization made in the past year to vendors for the executive's benefit: tuition, conference travel, dues, a coach, a phone. The policy, if one exists, for gifts the board gives the executive.
Four parts.
- Read the statements (10 minutes). Two board members who have never seen the executive's card statements read the most recent three months now, line by line, in the room. They are not hunting for theft. They are noting each charge they cannot explain from the description alone. Write the count on the whiteboard.
- Trace the vendor payments (8 minutes). For each payment the organization made to a vendor for the executive's benefit, the treasurer answers two questions: who approved it before it was paid, and who confirmed the vendor received that amount? In the Colorado case, the affidavit says, the money left through a legitimate vendor the organization paid.
- Name two people (7 minutes). Decide tonight which board member or officer who does not report to the executive receives the executive's card statement each month, and who signs off on any payment that benefits the executive personally. Record the two names. If the executive also opens the mail or the bank portal, decide who else can.
- Price the gap (5 minutes). Ask the treasurer the limit on the insurance that pays if an employee steals (the broker will call it crime or employee-dishonesty coverage) and what it does not cover. Compare it to a year of the executive's card spending plus a year of the vendor payments. If the limit is lower, the difference is a rough measure of the organization's uninsured exposure, and it goes on next month's agenda.
In person: Printed statements, highlighters, the whiteboard. Virtual: The treasurer, not the executive, shares the statements on screen.
Where it goes wrong: The board treats the exercise as an insult. Read the Colorado sentence aloud first: the affidavit says the board found out because it tried to give a gift.
The sign it took: Next month's card statement reaches a board member's inbox without anyone asking.
Sources: Kyla Pearce, "Former child advocacy nonprofit director charged with embezzlement," Denver Gazette, October 15, 2026; Hayden Grubbs, "Former Mary Abbott Children's House executive director arrested," OU Daily, October 26, 2026; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, CASA of Adams & Broomfield Counties; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Mary Abbott Children's House
The Part You Cannot Hand Over
A sentence in the Washington Post's account of the Revada Arts Center has stayed with me all week. Theater Alliance, it said, "holds the lease and much of the risk." Three organizations share the building. One of them signed.
That is how the shared arrangements I have seen actually work, whatever the brochure says about partnership. Somebody's name is on the lease. Somebody's committee makes the grant. Somebody's board is the one the attorney general writes to. The sharing is real, and so is the thing that did not get shared.
I spent this issue looking at where three arrangements put that line. Theater Alliance kept control of its own stage and signed the lease. The Youngstown Foundation is handing its administrative work to a peer and keeping its grant committee. The two Oregon nonprofits shared one project while one decided to fold its U.S. work into the other, and the French partner kept its independence. What the organizations described, in the sources I read, were terms.
That is the right instinct, and it runs against the way these conversations usually begin. The usual one starts with values and relationship and ends, months later, with a lawyer asking who signs. Two of the three arrangements here turn on one written term, a lease or a committee's vote; the third shared a project while the paperwork was being worked out. Theater Alliance's leader calls its partnership documentation "extraordinarily tight," and two organizations did sign on to someone else's building.
Then there is the Board Corner, which asks the same question of a board: what do you keep? A board shares nearly everything with its executive: the budget, the strategy, the relationships, the public voice. What it cannot share is watching the person it has given all that to. In the Colorado case charged this month, the affidavit says, a board learned in December 2024 what it had not been watching, its director's spending, because it tried to give her a gift. I do not tell that story to mock the board. A board reading this may have its own version and not know it.
So let me put the question to you this way. Make a two-column table. In the first column, write what your organization shares right now: a building, a payroll service, a program run with a partner, a fiscal sponsor, a vendor who holds the keys to your systems. In the second column, write what you kept in each case, in one phrase. A blank second column means the other party has drawn the line for you, and you will learn where when it matters.
The second column is short on purpose. The Youngstown Foundation's entry would be one sentence: the committee makes the grants. That is not a sign of weakness. It is the sign of an organization that knows what it is.
Pass this issue to the person who signs your lease, your largest contract or your audit engagement letter, and ask them to fill in the second column.
If this reached you from a colleague, you can get your own copy here. It costs nothing and comes once a week, on Wednesday.
A lease, a grant committee, a project in Uganda, a card statement. Three places where somebody decided what to share and what to keep, and one where a board learned what it had not.
Before Friday, take one shared arrangement your organization is in and answer, in writing, who signs and what you still decide alone.
Until next Wednesday,
— Ted
P.S. What does your organization keep no matter what it shares? Reply and tell me. If enough of you answer, I will write up what the answers have in common.
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Founder and CEO
Risk Alternatives, LLC
202.758.7572 (cell)
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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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