The Non-Profit Times

I've been reading the Non-Profit Times for, gosh, for awhile now. What I've learned has come from a personal immersion study of non-profit arts management for which, my mother sadly reminds me, I don't get college credit.

I respect and even understand where she's coming from; I love you Mom. After 12 years of working in non-profit arts (8 years in management, HI MOM!), I've found myself lucky enough to work for an organization (going on 5 years in January) that now has the potential to become even more than it is and help shape it through it's planning and growing. It's funny, 54 years after it's birth - this organization finally has wings. Flexing those wings now, we are strategically planning (and funding) our organization's transformation. I attribute my boss to the vision and most (98%) of the staff to embracing his ideas and finding a way to make them possible.

Baby Steps.

Shortly after I first arrived I thought I'd jumped from one sinking ship to another. Thankfully, almost 4 years later, the right man is in the job to lead the staff forward. Instead of micromanaging our daily lives, he gave us encouragement. Instead of pitting staff member against staff member, he made us a team. We were able to prove this this past weekend for co-presenting a festival for 15,000 people.

You should know, we're small. We have a full-time staff of only 6 people, 2 part-timers and 1 consultant. Only 3 of us worked directly on the project until crunch time before we added another person. Mostly, we planned, we planned and we planned. We never said; this isn't going to work but rather how are we going to make this work. Sure, we could have done some things better. Can't everyone improve?

However, ask anyone else and we rocked. Not only did our artists have fun and the organization we worked with to present the festival loved us but... WE had fun! We had fun working together and people had fun working with us. The last day, people from the other organization were hugging me liked they'd worked with me for years. We had also done something for them that they couldn't have done for themselves. Success!

What does this have to do with The Non-Profit Times? I was thinking... because it helped me while I was planning this big, huge project with my co-workers. Thankfully, I wasn't lead on the project but I did a lot of advising. Some of the things I found myself saying and talking about I had once read in the old publications of The Non-Profit Times.

Regardless, ignore my babel if you wish but at least click the title. It's a link to The Non-Profit Times' How To section. It's worth it.