A quick note before we dig in: a portion of every NGN Premium subscription goes to Rooted, a Madison-based food-systems nonprofit. Thank you for making that possible.
Last week's issue was about multipliers. This week's is about the layer underneath them. Before you can multiply anything, you have to ask whether the infrastructure you need already exists somewhere — built by someone else, sitting as surplus capacity, waiting to be plugged into.
The three stories in this issue are about nonprofits that asked that question and got the answer right. A Philadelphia literacy organization is running a choice-based food market out of a public housing development — because the housing authority already had the building, the families, and the trust. A Detroit youth services nonprofit is parking a 40-foot mobile unit in the middle of downtown every other Friday — because the downtown business district already had the foot traffic, the weekend energy, and the public square. A Tarrant County United Way is offering local nonprofits free access to enterprise-grade hardware, AI compute, and connectivity — because Dell and AT&T had the surplus equipment and the corporate appetite to deploy it.
None of these nonprofits built what they're using. Each of them found it.
A Literacy Nonprofit Is Running a Choice-Based Food Market Inside Public Housing — And the Partnership Is the Lesson
Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia-based literacy nonprofit founded in 2009, reopened the West Philadelphia Mighty Market on April 23, 2026 after a full remodel. The headline isn't the renovation. The headline is who Mighty Writers picked as its partner.
The Mighty Market lives inside a Philadelphia Housing Authority building. PHA provided the physical space, the routine community access, and the institutional trust of being a fixture inside the housing complex. Mighty Writers provided the inventory, the volunteer model, and the choice-based shopping experience.
The result is a market where families select food from shelves and refrigerators — using shopping baskets and walking the aisles with volunteers — instead of receiving a pre-packed box. Alongside the food, the market distributes diapers, formula, free books, and hygiene kits.
Why this matters. Mighty Writers is a literacy nonprofit. Tutoring, writing workshops, after-school programs across 11 sites in three states. Distributing diapers and groceries is, on paper, outside its lane.
But the Mighty Writers Distribution Program — the org-wide food and family-supply effort the West Philly Mighty Market is part of — reaches roughly 70,000 families a year, many of whom would never have walked into a literacy program first. The market is the front door. The literacy work happens after the families come in for the food.
This matters because most small nonprofits trying to expand wraparound services hit the same wall: they don't have a building, they don't have community foot traffic in the right neighborhoods, and they don't have the institutional credibility that a public agency provides. Building those three things from scratch takes a decade. Borrowing them takes a phone call.
Here is what makes this replicable. The Mighty Writers / PHA arrangement works because each partner brought what the other could not build alone.
PHA had buildings, residents, and a captive constituency that had every reason to be skeptical of an outside nonprofit walking in cold. Mighty Writers had food sourcing relationships, a volunteer base, books, and the operational discipline to run a market three or four days a week. Both organizations had something the other genuinely needed. Neither was doing a favor.
The structural elements that make a partnership like this durable are simple: a written use agreement that clearly assigns liability and operating responsibility; a public agency partner whose existing programs already serve the population you want to reach; and a service offering that does not duplicate something the agency already runs internally. PHA doesn't run a food market — Mighty Writers does. PHA didn't have to hire anyone or stand up new programming. They opened a door.
First steps if you serve a population that overlaps with a public agency's service area. Identify the public agency in your service area whose constituency you most want to reach — your local public housing authority, your county health department, your school district's family services office, your community college.
Then take three steps. Map their physical footprint: which buildings have community space they aren't fully using? Ask their community engagement officer one specific question — "Is there programming you would like to offer your residents but lack capacity to deliver?" Propose one service you can deliver inside their footprint, in a written one-page memo, with a 90-day pilot frame. The first meeting is a scoping conversation, not a partnership announcement.
If your nonprofit doesn't directly serve families needing food, the transferable insight is upstream: the institution sitting on the infrastructure you need almost always has a capacity gap you could fill. Public agencies in particular are starved for programming partners that bring their own operating model. You don't have to invent anything new — you have to find the agency whose door you can walk through.
If you are the space: what if your organization is the one with space but lacking programming to fill it? Why spend all the money and time piloting out and building an offering when you might find one with a willing participant?
Sources: Philabundance — Mighty Writers Reopens West Philadelphia Mighty Market. Mighty Writers — Distribution Program overview.
A Detroit Youth Services Nonprofit Just Parked Its Mobile Unit in the Middle of Downtown — In Partnership With the Downtown Business District
The Detroit Phoenix Center, a Detroit nonprofit serving young people experiencing housing insecurity, announced on May 19, 2026 that it will run "YouthUp Fridays" at Cadillac Square — directly adjacent to Campus Martius Park, the most heavily trafficked public square in downtown Detroit — on May 22, June 5, and June 12 from 6 PM to 9 PM.
The Detroit Phoenix Center is providing its 40-foot YouthUp mobile unit, which carries food, games, laptops, mobile hotspots, gaming space, and trained outreach staff. The Downtown Detroit Partnership is providing Cadillac Square, the foot traffic, the safety infrastructure already in place for downtown public events, and the marketing reach into the broader downtown community.
Why this is worth a careful read. The Detroit Phoenix Center serves youth ages 12 to 24, primarily young people experiencing homelessness or housing instability. The traditional model for outreach to that population is a drop-in center — the youth has to know it exists, has to find it, has to walk in alone. Drop-in centers are essential but slow. The population they need to reach is hard to find and harder to bring in.
Founder Courtney Smith — who herself spent time in foster care and experienced homelessness — solved the discovery problem by launching the YouthUp mobile unit in May 2025. The mobile unit was a year-old experiment with promise but limited recurrence: stops in different neighborhoods on different schedules, hard for any young person to count on. What the Downtown Detroit Partnership added in May 2026 is a fixed, predictable, high-visibility location — three Fridays this summer, at the busiest public square in the city.
That changes the math entirely. A young person in housing crisis who hears once that the mobile unit will be at Cadillac Square at 6 PM next Friday can plan. A peer telling a friend "they'll be at Cadillac Square" carries credibility a flyer never will. And every downtown visitor walking past — including the downtown employer, the donor, the foundation officer — sees that this work is happening, in public, with the city's most visible square treating it as legitimate civic activity.
Here is what makes this replicable. The Detroit Phoenix Center did not build a downtown square. They identified an organization that already had one and was looking for programming worth featuring.
Business Improvement Districts and Downtown Partnerships exist in nearly every U.S. city of meaningful size. They are funded by assessments on commercial property owners, and their charter is to make the downtown more economically and civically vibrant. Most are constantly searching for legitimate, sympathetic, public-facing programming to fill their event calendars. A nonprofit walking in with a mobile unit, trained staff, and a clear youth-services value proposition is offering exactly what those BIDs need.
Three structural elements made this partnership work: the Detroit Phoenix Center had operational infrastructure that did not require the BID to fund anything new (the mobile unit, the staff, the supplies, the protocols all already existed); the programming was visibly positive and family-appropriate for a public square environment (food and laptops and games, not crisis triage); and the schedule was bounded — three specific Fridays, not an open-ended commitment — so the BID could evaluate without committing to a year of programming up front.
First steps if your nonprofit does direct service in a city with a downtown BID. Identify your downtown's business improvement district or downtown partnership. They are usually nonprofit 501(c)(3) or (c)(6) entities with public-facing event calendars. Look at what they are currently programming on their public squares and ask honestly: would your service offering be visibly positive and civically appropriate in that environment?
If the answer is yes, request a 20-minute meeting with their programming director. Bring a proposal that names what you would provide (staff, supplies, structure), what they would provide (the space, the marketing reach, the existing event infrastructure), the dates you are proposing (start with two or three pilot dates, not a season-long commitment), and a clear value proposition for them (a youth services activation in their square is positive press, draws families, and gives them a programming story for their next funder report).
If your work isn't visibly appropriate for a public square — for instance, if you do confidential health services or sensitive family work — the transferable insight is still real: identify the institutional partner in your service area whose chartered job is to fill space with positive activity. Libraries, parks departments, downtown alliances, neighborhood associations, faith institutions with underused community rooms. They are all looking for credible programming partners. You don't have to lease space. You have to find a partner whose job is filling it.
Sources: WCSX 94.7 Detroit — Detroit Nonprofit Partners With Downtown Group To Launch Free Weekly Youth Program. Detroit Phoenix Center YouthUp — mobile unit and program details. EMU Today — Courtney Smith biographical context. — coverage of the partnership launch.
A Tarrant County United Way Just Became a Tech Utility for Local Nonprofits — By Borrowing Dell's Hardware and AT&T's Connectivity
The United Way of Tarrant County opened the United Way Institute Powered by Dell Technologies in April 2026. It is a physical hub in Fort Worth providing local nonprofits with access to AI tools, integrated data infrastructure, AT&T's Connected Learning Center, individualized technical assistance from data specialists and subject matter experts, and cohort-based programming on emerging technologies.
The crucial detail is who paid for what. Dell Technologies provided the enterprise-grade hardware and computational infrastructure most nonprofits cannot remotely afford. AT&T provided the Connected Learning Center, which delivers connectivity and digital literacy resources. UWTC provided the physical building, the staff to run the programming, and the relationships with the local nonprofits the Institute is designed to serve. None of the three partners built the others' contributions. Each brought what it already had in surplus.
Why this matters now. Most small nonprofits are running on consumer-grade laptops, no cloud strategy, and zero ability to evaluate emerging tools without burning weeks of staff time. The AI adoption gap inside the nonprofit sector — covered in Issue #24 under "The 7% Problem" — is not primarily a knowledge problem. It is an infrastructure-and-time problem. A small nonprofit ED who hears that AI could automate her grant compliance calendar has no realistic path from that idea to working software inside her organization. She doesn't have the budget, the IT capacity, or the test environment.
What UWTC's model does is collapse that distance to a phone call. A Tarrant County nonprofit can now go to the Institute, work with a data specialist on her actual problem, use the hardware to test approaches, and leave with a working prototype she can deploy. The technology is borrowed. The expertise is borrowed. What UWTC provides is the organized capacity to use those borrowed assets to solve real nonprofit problems — and the focused attention on ALICE households (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), the population UWTC is chartered to serve.
Here is what makes this replicable. Every county in the United States has at least one corporate employer sitting on surplus IT capacity — refresh-cycle hardware that gets thrown out on a schedule, cloud compute that is paid for and underused, employee technical talent that the company would love to deploy on visible community work. Most counties also have at least one community foundation or United Way with the operational discipline to organize a hub.
The structural elements that made the Tarrant model work: the corporate partners brought infrastructure they already had and could deploy without breaking their commercial commitments (Dell isn't giving away its product line — it is contributing surplus capacity at a level that costs them comparatively little but transforms what local nonprofits can do); the United Way brought the local nonprofit relationships, the building, and the staff to run the programming, which the corporate partners did not have to develop themselves; and the Institute has a clear primary focus (ALICE households, workforce mobility, financial stability, literacy, health access) that lets the partnership be evaluated on outcomes that match each partner's interests.
First steps if you sit on a community foundation or United Way board. Identify the three largest corporate employers in your county. Look at their published corporate social responsibility commitments — most explicitly fund technology access programs, workforce development, or specific local geographies. Match those commitments against the gaps your local nonprofit ecosystem has been quietly running with for years.
Then propose a hub model — not a one-off grant. The pitch is not "fund our program." The pitch is "we will become the layer that lets your hardware, your connectivity, and your employee volunteers reach the 40 nonprofits in this county that cannot afford any of those things on their own." The corporate partner gets visible, durable impact in a region they care about. You get an asset class for your nonprofit constituency that you could not raise general operating dollars to build.
If you sit on a single nonprofit's board, the move is different. Ask whether your local United Way or community foundation has begun a conversation like this. If they have not, propose it as a board-led initiative — not a request for funding from the United Way, but an offer to help structure the partnership and bring in the corporate side.
Sources: Fort Worth Inc. — coverage of the United Way Institute launch with Dell Technologies. Fort Worth Report — UWTC launches Institute. United Way of Tarrant County — Institute overview and partner list.
Audit Your Email List Segmentation Before Your Next Appeal Send
Most small nonprofits send the same email to everyone on the list — every donor, every lapsed donor, every event volunteer who handed over an address three years ago. The result is exactly what the data predicts: open rates collapse, unsubscribe rates climb, and donors stop reading entirely. According to Double the Donation's 2026 fundraising data, personalized emails see open rates more than 82% higher than generic emails. Segmentation is the cheapest way to get there.
Action: Open your email platform and pull your current list. Look at how many segments you currently use. If the answer is one or two, you have work to do.
Build three segments before your next major send. First: active donors in the last 12 months. Second: lapsed donors who gave 13 to 36 months ago. Third: never-given subscribers (event attendees, newsletter signups, list-builds from other sources). Write three short variants of your next appeal email — same core ask, different opening sentence, different specificity about how the recipient has engaged. The active donor variant references their last gift. The lapsed variant names the gap. The never-given variant invites a first step.
If you have donor history in your CRM, layer one more segment: donors who gave $250 or more in their most recent gift. That segment gets a separate, higher-touch variant.
ROI: A nonprofit raising $100,000 a year through email appeals typically sees 15–25% revenue lift from baseline segmentation. That is $15,000 to $25,000 in additional annual revenue for under an hour of setup per appeal. M+R's annual benchmarks have consistently shown that segmented programs outperform unsegmented ones by a meaningful margin, and the gap widens as program size grows.
Time: 45 minutes for the initial segmentation in any modern email platform. 30 minutes per appeal for the variant writing.
Document Your Volunteer Hours Before You Submit Another Grant Application
Most small nonprofits have some how idea many volunteers they had last year and no idea what those hours were worth. They leave that number out of grant applications, annual reports, and board presentations. The grant reviewer reading two competing proposals — one that says "the program is delivered by volunteers" and one that says "the program is delivered by 47 volunteers contributing 6,200 hours valued at $224,000 at the Independent Sector rate" — will rate the second program as materially stronger every time. The data is the same. The presentation isn't.
Action: Pull your volunteer hour logs from the last 12 months. If you don't have logs, this is your forcing function to create them. For each volunteer, record total hours and the function performed (direct service, administrative support, board service, or skilled professional service).
Multiply your total hours by Independent Sector's published value of volunteer time — currently $36.14 per hour for general volunteers (the 2025 figure, released April 21, 2026 by Independent Sector and the University of Maryland's Do Good Institute), with state-level rates ranging from $17.99 in Puerto Rico to $54.77 in DC, and higher rates published for skilled professional service (legal, accounting, IT). The result is the dollar-equivalent contribution your volunteers made. Add the figure to your annual report, your next grant application, and your next board financial dashboard.
Going forward, log hours weekly. A simple shared spreadsheet is sufficient — you don't need volunteer-management software for this. The discipline is the point.
ROI: A nonprofit with 50 active volunteers averaging 2 hours per week represents roughly 5,200 hours per year, worth approximately $188,000 at the general Independent Sector rate. That number, plainly stated in a grant application or board report, materially changes the perception of your organizational capacity. For many federal grants and foundation programs, documented volunteer hours also count as match for required cost-share — turning previously unrecognized work into eligible funding.
Time: 90 minutes to assemble the prior year. 15 minutes per week to maintain going forward.
Run a One-Page Strategic Plan Progress Check Before Summer
Most nonprofit strategic plans are written for a three-year horizon, approved by the board, and then quietly stop driving decisions about six months later. By June of any plan year, the staff is responding to grant deadlines and program crises rather than the plan. A 20-minute mid-year check — run by the ED, presented to the board — catches drift before it becomes the end-of-year scramble.
Action: On a single sheet of paper, list the three to five strategic priorities from your current strategic plan. For each, write one sentence describing the metric you committed to and one sentence describing actual progress against that metric as of today. Use real numbers where you have them.
Below the priority list, write one paragraph identifying which priorities are on track, which are behind, and which need either re-resourcing or a candid acknowledgment that they are no longer realistic for this year. Bring the page to your next board meeting. Walk the board through it in ten minutes. Ask one question at the end: "Should we adjust resourcing on any priority, or shift expectations on any priority, before the end of the year?"
That single conversation does more for strategic discipline than the annual planning retreat — because it forces a confrontation between the plan and reality at the moment when correction is still possible.
ROI: Strategic plans that are reviewed mid-year are materially more likely to produce documented outcomes than plans that are not. BoardSource's Leading with Intent research has consistently documented that boards engaged with strategic plan monitoring throughout the year report higher confidence in organizational direction than boards that touch the plan only annually. For an ED, the cost of letting the plan quietly fail is a 12-month gap on the board's strategic agenda — and the predictable September call from a board member asking "what is our strategy?"
Time: 45 minutes to write the one-page check. 10 minutes to present it to the board. 90 minutes to audit and rewrite the templates. 30 minutes to configure CRM automation. Under 2 hours total.
Audit Your Backup System Before You Discover It Doesn't Work
Most nonprofits believe they have a backup system in place. They have a vendor invoice, a cloud subscription, an external drive in a desk drawer — something. Almost none of them have actually tested that they could recover the organization's data if a ransomware attack, a hardware failure, or a malicious insider destroyed the primary systems tomorrow. The first time you test your backups is the worst possible moment to discover they have not been running.
You don't run this prompt because you think a disaster is imminent. You run it because the comfort of knowing your backups actually work is the comfort that lets you focus on the work you came to do.
Act as a senior nonprofit IT consultant with deep experience auditing the backup and disaster recovery posture of small to mid-size US nonprofits (budgets under $5M). I'm going to describe my nonprofit's current setup: [paste a description of your IT environment — the systems you use for accounting, CRM, donor database, email, document storage, and any custom databases; what you currently have set up for backups including any vendors, schedules, and storage locations; and the last time you actually performed a restore test, if ever]. Based on that description, produce a Backup System Audit with: (1) the three most likely failure modes in my current setup, ranked by probability; (2) a list of specific data assets that should be backed up but probably aren't (be specific to nonprofit operations — donor lists, grant compliance records, board minutes, IRS-required documents); (3) a 30-day plan to verify each backup actually restores cleanly, including the simplest test I can run myself this week; (4) a question I should ask my IT vendor or board treasurer before the next board meeting that will reveal whether they understand my backup posture; (5) one budget-neutral improvement I can implement this month that materially reduces my ransomware exposure. End with the single most important data asset my nonprofit cannot afford to lose — and a one-sentence reason why.
Write a Standard Operating Procedure for Your Most Vulnerable Single-Person Workflow
Every small nonprofit has at least one workflow that lives entirely in the head of one person. The bookkeeper who knows the manual reconciliation steps. The program director who has personal relationships with every government caseworker. The development assistant who knows the donor database quirks. When that person leaves — and they will, eventually — the workflow leaves with them. The cost of the silent dependency is invisible until the moment it isn't.
This prompt is not glamorous. It is the most quietly important thing you can do this month.
Act as a senior nonprofit operations consultant with 20 years of experience helping small to mid-size nonprofits document workflows they have never written down. I'm going to describe one critical workflow at my organization and the person who currently owns it: [paste a description of the workflow — what it produces, why it matters, the steps the current owner takes (to the best of your knowledge), the systems and accounts involved, and the people they coordinate with; also note the owner's role and how long they've been doing the work]. Based on that description, produce a Standard Operating Procedure document with: (1) a one-paragraph statement of what this workflow exists to produce and why it matters to the organization; (2) a numbered list of the actual steps, written so that a competent person who has never done this work could follow them; (3) a section identifying the accounts, passwords, system access, and external relationships required, noting which of those would need to be transferred if the current owner left; (4) a "watch out for" section naming three specific places this workflow has historically broken down or required judgment calls; (5) a recurring cadence for refreshing the SOP, with one named person other than the current owner who should review it annually. End with the three questions I should ask my current workflow owner to surface knowledge that almost certainly isn't in the description I provided.
Audit Your Whistleblower and Anonymous Reporting Pathway Before You Need It
Most nonprofits have a whistleblower policy in their board minutes from sometime in the past five years. Almost none of those policies are functional — meaning a staff member who saw something concerning today would have no realistic, anonymous, trusted pathway to report it.
The IRS Form 990 asks whether you have a whistleblower policy; it does not ask whether your staff actually believes the policy would protect them. The gap between those two questions is the gap that turns small problems into board-level crises.
The reason to run this audit is not that you suspect wrongdoing. It is that the comfort of having a functional reporting pathway is what lets your board govern, your ED lead, and your staff trust each other.
Act as a senior nonprofit governance and compliance consultant with experience advising the boards of small to mid-size US nonprofits on whistleblower and anonymous reporting infrastructure. I'm going to describe what my nonprofit currently has in place: [paste a description of your current whistleblower policy text, the year it was last reviewed, the named recipient or pathway for confidential reports, any third-party reporting hotline if you use one, and what your staff has been told about reporting concerns]. Based on that description, produce a Whistleblower Pathway Audit with: (1) the three most likely failure points in my current setup, with a one-sentence explanation of each; (2) a specific gap analysis: would a staff member who saw a financial irregularity, a harassment incident, or a conflict of interest violation today actually have a workable pathway to report it without fearing retaliation? Be candid; (3) the minimum viable functional pathway for a small nonprofit (under 25 staff) — including who receives the report, who investigates, how anonymity is preserved, and what budget is needed; (4) the three specific changes I could make this quarter to close the largest gaps; (5) one question I should ask my board chair before the next meeting that will reveal whether the board understands its oversight obligation here. End with one paragraph framed for my ED on why this matters more than the policy text on file suggests.
Act as a volunteer engagement strategist with 20+ years working with US nonprofits. I'm going to give you: [name the specific volunteer role, time commitment, what the volunteer will actually do week-to-week, what skills they need, what they'll get out of it, and the mission context]. Produce a 200-word volunteer recruitment pitch with the following structure: (1) opening hook — name the specific problem this volunteer role helps solve, with a concrete example; (2) what the volunteer will actually do — three to five sentences naming the work, the time commitment, and the supervision; (3) what they'll get — skill development, network, lived experience, with one specific named outcome; (4) the call to action — what to do next, with one named contact and a deadline. Avoid generic "make a difference" language. Make it forwardable: write so a current volunteer reading this could share it with a friend and the friend would immediately understand what they'd be signing up for.
The Strategic Partner Inventory — A 20-Minute Exercise to Find the Infrastructure You Could Be Borrowing
What makes it worth trying: Most boards spend their strategy time talking about programs they could add. They rarely spend time on the prior question: what assets, infrastructure, or relationships already exist within reach that we could plug into without spending? This exercise produces a board-generated list of specific institutions, by name, that the organization could partner with — and one board member taking ownership of one outreach conversation before the next meeting.
It works because the answers come from the board's collective network, not from the staff's existing relationships. The board's most underused asset is the rest of the board's address book.
How to run it (20 minutes):
1. Setup (before the meeting, by the board chair): Distribute a one-page handout with four categories listed across the top: Public Agencies (housing authority, health department, school district, public library, parks and recreation); Anchor Institutions (hospitals, universities, large employers, banks); Civic Infrastructure (downtown partnership, community foundation, United Way, faith institutions with community space); and Corporate Partners (companies with CSR programs, employee volunteer programs, surplus equipment programs).
2. Round 1 — silent inventory (5 minutes): Each board member privately writes, under each category, the specific organizations in your service area that they personally have a relationship with or could credibly approach. Names only. No discussion. No filtering. The point is range, not quality.
3. Round 2 — surface and cluster (10 minutes): Each board member reads out their lists in order. The board chair captures all names on a shared flip chart or screen, clustering by category. Duplicates get a tally mark — the organizations that come up from multiple board members are the highest-confidence outreach candidates. Single-name entries get a single mark — they are leads, not duplicates of weakness.
4. Round 3 — assignment (5 minutes): From the clustered list, the board collectively identifies the three organizations where a 30-minute exploratory conversation could surface a real partnership opportunity. For each of the three, one board member volunteers to initiate the conversation before the next board meeting. The chair writes down the three names and the three accountable board members.
In-person: Physical handout with categories pre-printed. Sticky notes for each name, clustered on a flip chart. Verbal reveal in Round 2.
Virtual: Shared Google Doc with the four categories as headers. Each board member adds names under their own initials in Round 1, with cameras off so the inventory stays private. Cameras on for Round 2 and 3.
Watch out for: The board member who treats this as the staff's job. The point is to surface relationships the staff doesn't have. The chair should frame the exercise at the start: "We are not asking what the ED should do. We are asking what we, the board, can offer this organization that we are not currently offering."
The other failure mode is the board that produces an impressive list and never makes a single phone call. The 5-minute assignment round is mandatory. No exercise without commitments.
You'll know it worked when: Within 30 days of the exercise, at least two of the three accountable board members have completed an exploratory conversation and reported back — and at least one of those conversations has produced either a follow-up meeting or a clear "not a fit, here's who else to talk to." If 30 days pass with no outreach completed, the exercise failed at the assignment step. The fix is to shorten the timeline and re-assign at the next meeting.
The deeper signal is whether the board returns to this inventory at every meeting. Most boards do this exercise once and shelve the list. The boards that build durable institutional partnerships review the inventory every quarter and add new names as the network grows.
There is a question hiding inside every nonprofit budget meeting: are we trying to build something that already exists somewhere we haven't looked? The three organizations in this issue answered differently. But it's something to sit with: What capacity is sitting next door to your organization that you could be borrowing instead of building?
See you next week.
— Ted
P.S. Thanks again for supporting Rooted with your subscription.
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Founder and CEO Risk Alternatives, LLC 202.758.7572 (cell) 608.709.0793 (office) Website
Author of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience
We help nonprofits thrive by providing practical tools and support to address uncertainty and improve risk management.
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