Remember the old saying “Think globally, act locally?”

I was recently pondering a new twist on that sentiment. The sector is made up of both small, grassroots, local organizations that are intensely focused on a small-scale problem, such as poverty in a particular neighborhood, and large, sophisticated, national organizations focused on a regional or national or even global problem, like climate change.

But we are all in the same world, more or less, because we want to change the world.

What can small, local nonprofits learn from the bigger ones, and vice versa?

All nonprofits struggle with the same issues: building a great board, managing staff, delivering programs, and raising money. When I was an executive director, my organization’s budget and staffing grew many fold over my 16-year tenure. What had initially been (to us, as a small nonprofit) a significant annual funding gap of $10,000 became, as we grew, a chasm of several hundred thousand dollars: same problem, just more zeros behind it.

As a consultant I deal with many small nonprofits whose executive director must recruit, orient, and motivate the board. I also have a large national client that has a staff position solely dedicated to supporting the board. Yet all of these clients have the same board struggles.

The point is that small and large nonprofits face the same problems, perhaps at different scales, and probably with different levels of resources to apply to them, but still the same problems. By sharing the solutions they have come up with, nonprofits–large and small–can learn from and help each other.

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Consulting for Nonprofits, Nonprofit Sector, Organizational Effectiveness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.