#nonprofit-response

#nonprofit-response

I'm incredibly proud of the firm and what we've accomplished in the last year. We had certainly, the year before, a historic year financially, and this year was also historic in being one of our best financial years in history.

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.

The study frames each of the models as 'emerging strategies' that can either complement or serve as alternatives to well-known sustainability certification schemes such as Organic, Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance.

Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.

Why do I get to be the runner, and these guys get to be the homeless guys on the corner? Why can't we all be runners? She didn't have an answer. It would've been easy to let that question dissolve with her footsteps. Most people would have. But Mahlum saw something in those men that others had missed.

Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.

I've always thought it would be good to acquire an old warehouse in every town throughout the land and convert it into low-rent community workspaces for artists, local charities and small businesses getting off the ground. A kind of people's WeWork. What would others do with a humungous, but not unlimited, pile of dosh to benefit society? Roland Freeman, West Yorkshire Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

At 79, he's been a smoker most of his life but quit a decade ago, the day he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He was struggling to breathe to such an extent it was impacting his ability to work his director of conventions sales job at the local visitors' bureau, unable to show potential clients around venues.

Pennsylvania is a state of many firsts: It was the nation's first capital, the " birthplace of oil production," home to " America's first superhighway," and the state that monopolized the production of steel in the 20th century. More recently, it has been positioned as one of the leading states in "AI readiness," a term that loosely refers to how equipped companies and governments are to adopt and integrate AI into their systems and daily operations.

In the environmental nonprofit sector, "centering frontline voices" has become a familiar slogan, often detached from how decisions are made or resources allocated. It appears in grant proposals, conference agendas, and organizational values statements. And yet, too often, those voices are still positioned as illustrative rather than authoritative-invited to animate strategies already decided, asked to translate lived experience into language legible to funders, or flattened into narratives that travel more easily than the truths they carry.

"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.

The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.

Over the years, I've worked as a consultant on numerous federal grant projects from the US Department of Agriculture and elsewhere that focused on local economic development and were granted to nonprofits serving their communities. But since the 2024 elections, the focus of my work-and that of the small New Mexico-based consulting firm, Prospera Partners, that I lead-has shifted to help nonprofits develop strategies to sustain themselves despite federal cuts in funding and to programs that once supported their work.

I've seen this before-many times, in fact. What you're describing is not unheard of in the nonprofit sector. Founder energy is one of the most powerful forces driving new missions into the world. It can also be one of the riskiest. Many organizations, especially those built from lived experience, passion, and necessity, begin with little more than a vision, a problem to solve.

In his "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination," Robin D.G. Kelley explains that "a map to the new world is in the imagination." There are so many emergencies right now-ICE abductions, decriminalization of anti-Black racism, the political hijack of the struggle against antisemitism and anti-Blackness, unauthorized military aggression abroad, a climate crisis accelerated-that it's hard to know where to direct our resistance.

Dear Transparency-Committed Reader, You're not alone. So many of us want decision-making to reflect our collective values (like transparency, care, and shared power), but it's hard to actually put those values into practice. That gap between what we believe and how we decide can be frustrating. And getting stuck in the process is a common concern I hear from groups. I am happy to share, though, that decision-making doesn't have to be a nightmare.

When they meet, share stories and learn together, they build empathy and understanding that lasts a lifetime, Linda Cowie and Meg Grant said of the children who participate in the schools linking network they help run. The project, which now operates in 26 local authorities, pairs schools so pupils from different faiths, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds can meet, spend time together and discover what they have in common.