Working Hard or Hardly Working? Please.
If you work for a nonprofit, you hear the chatter.
“Must be nice not to have to produce.”
“Oh, it’s about our balance sheet — you wouldn’t understand.”
“Guess you don’t work too hard, huh?”
Yeah, if only. I worked in higher education for a decade, and now, as a freelancer, I do contract work for universities and other nonprofits, and I’ve seen firsthand the sweat and effort that go into making those institutions run well. Just because an organization doesn’t produce a quarterly income statement doesn’t mean it can ignore the need for such basics as strategic-minded senior leadership, sound fiscal policies, and effective management.
What makes nonprofits unique is their focus on mission, not revenue. But many of the same strategies and tactics used by the corporate world to make Wall Street happy can and should be used by schools, charities, foundations, hospitals, and the like to create value for their unique stakeholders.
With an M.B.A. and a background in nonprofits, I like to explore the intersection of mission and business. And I enjoy putting the lie to the perception that the only people working hard are the ones struggling to push a share price up by 25 cents.
So welcome to the 501(c) Files, b5media’s new blog on the role of nonprofits in today’s business world. Delve in, dear reader, and check out what some of your peers are doing right … and wrong. Get some tips along the way. And the next time you’re at a party and some corporate drone needles you about your cushy nonprofit job, ask him if he’d be willing to work as hard as he does for half the pay and half the resources because he believes in something more fulfilling than the bottom line.
That, my friend, is hard work. | 501(c)
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Tactical Philanthropy » For-Profit Philanthropy Blogging
Oct 30, 2007 at 11:47 am
[…] newest b5media blog is The 501(c) Files. Introducing the blog in his first post, author Tom Durso wrote: I worked in higher education for a decade, and now, as a freelancer, I do contract work for […]
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