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UPDATE: From October 2018 to December 2019, I was the Healthy Food Access Project Collaboration Manager for Community Action. The final Healthy Food Access report/community assessment is now available.

Further details on the project are below.

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Cultivate Your Next Board Leaders

Wednesday, December 12,  8:00 – 9:30am

Presented by Ingrid Kirst

Hosted by Cause Collective

It isn’t enough to have every seat filled on your nonprofit’s board. A great board has strong leaders with diverse skills and perspectives, who are willing to step up and grow the organization. Learn to build a stronger board by filling the right seats with the right people and cultivating leaders within. You’ll take back practical ideas to grow your organization. The training is targeted at board chairs and executive directors.

Workshop fee: $15 for Cause Collective Members, $45 for not-yet-members

It can be hard to assess how you compare to other nonprofits. As with any human endeavor, we want to compare ourselves to bigger and better nonprofits, without really knowing the story behind their success. Instead, you are better off steadily improving your organization to be stronger and more resilient based on best nonprofit standards.

The Nonprofit Association of the Midlands provides its Guidelines and Principles for Nonprofits free of charge to Nebraska and Iowa nonprofits.

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Executive Transitions Workshop

Wednesday, December 5, 8:00 – 9:30am

Presented by Ingrid Kirst

Hosted by Cause Collective

Every executive director is going to leave their position. It could be in 6 months, it could be in 16 years. No matter when it is, the transition process will be much smoother if the organization has consistently planned for it.

This training will benefit executive directors and board members, starting by helping you initiate the conversation and proceeding through a full plan for the organization. We will cover all the steps an organization needs to take now to prepare for future transitions whether they are sudden or planned months in advance.

The workshop will include:

• Types of successions
• The key parts of a comprehensive succession plan
• Tools to use to prepare for a transition
• Answers to your questions
• Resources and templates to use for developing your own plan

Workshop fee: $15 for Cause Collective Members, $45 for not-yet-members

Term limits for nonprofit boards can be a touchy subject, most especially if your board was created without them. Although board members are technically elected, either by the membership or by their fellow board members, if there aren’t term limits for a board member, one person can stay on for years longer than they should. It takes a strong board to be willing to address the issue, and vote them off if necessary.

In general, experts recommend that a board member can serve two terms, each three years long. Six years is plenty of time to learn the ropes and make a significant contribution to the organization, without getting worn out.

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Here’s some tips on how you can be the best candidate for an executive director position, based on my experience interviewing hundreds of people over the years. These tips will be valuable to anyone applying for a job at a nonprofit organization, not just the executive director position.

As an ED, you face situations every day that require you to be at your best. Hopefully, none of these situations sound familiar:

• The board chair doesn’t want to meet regularly and doesn’t run meetings well, but no one else will take on the position.

• Your board is made up of the executive directors of your partner agencies, but you also manage funds for those same agencies, causing inevitable conflicts
• After you are hired as an ED, you find out that your predecessor had neglected to pay the IRS payroll taxes for quite a while.

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Even in nonprofits, it is hard to avoid bias in hiring. We want to be better than for profit companies and give everyone an equal chance, but the truth is that we are all human and have opinions about other people. If you grew up in an all-white environment, you have to put in more effort to relate to someone of another race. If you have never known someone who is deaf, you won’t know how to communicate with a potential deaf employee.

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You can expect weekly posts on a wide range of topics about successfully running small nonprofits. This will include the areas of recruiting and training board members, online tools to make your work easier, rules and regulations for nonprofits, fundraising, grant writing, event planning, and much, much more!

After 20 years working in nonprofits, I can share a wide range of information that will save you time and energy. For eleven of those years, I was the Executive Director of an organization called Community Crops, in Lincoln, Nebraska, which helps families grow their own food through a network of community gardens. When I started at Crops, it was a project hosted by another nonprofit. Since we had grown larger than that organization, I completed the process of incorporating the organization and filing to be a 501(c)(3). From there, the organization grew to a twelve person team with a $400,000 budget serving hundreds of families. As a result, I have experience with every aspect of running an organization, from the beginning when I did everything, to when I left when I was managing the higher level aspects of the organization.

I’m excited to start blogging to share my expertise with other organizations so they can avoid mistakes and function more efficiently.  I’m also available for consultations to nonprofits in the Lincoln area, or elsewhere by phone/e-mail.

I welcome your feedback on this or any other post on the blog.

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