Investing in talent: How and why foundations are supporting professional development

Anyone who knows anything about the nonprofit sector knows that nonprofits attract passionate, committed, caring people – but that those people must operate on a shoestring budget, where needs perpetually exceed resources. This “nonprofit starvation cycle” is described by the...

Seven tips to help you facilitate an effective meeting

You’re fretting about that upcoming meeting you’re facilitating. You’re scared you’ll lose control, that you’ll go overtime, or that no decisions will be made. Bad meetings are unfortunately very common in the nonprofit and charity sector. This is despite the...

All about mentoring: Nonprofit mentoring programs are taking off all across the country

Want to enhance your HR department’s status, save on budget and simultaneously create happy staff? The answer may lie in one concept: Mentoring. With the advent of new software technologies as well as a philosophical shift in how employees can...

Sparking innovation in your organization with professional development

In early March, my executive director invited my colleagues and I to take part in our organization’s first ever professional development day. Each staff member was to follow a day-long program of their own design made up of any task...

An umbrella for the east coast

Last year, CharityVillage reported on the imminent arrival of an official umbrella organization for nonprofits in Nova Scotia. Late in December 2012, it finally happened. For the genesis of the story, readers can go back and read here and here....

The relationship between your work and your mental health

Alison’s 20-hour per week job at a public-funded organization started out well enough. There was a variety of things to do and she got along with her boss, who seemed to respect her as an experienced mid-career professional. But it...

Teamwork: Collaboration or catastrophe?

Are you a team player? I’m all for teams, when there’s a good reason to bring people together to accomplish something, and we manage to do more, or better, en masse than we could on our own. But sometimes the...

Act II: An update on the Ontario Not-for-Profit Corporations Act

Some 50,000 Ontarian nonprofits are still waiting eagerly for the province to proclaim the new Ontario Not-for-Profit Corporations Act (ONCA) into force after more than two years since it received royal assent at Queen’s Park. As CharityVillage reported in July...

Governance Q&A: Going forward and managing governance and ethics decisions

With this column I bid you farewell as the author of a regular monthly column on the CharityVillage site. This column began in November 2003, and I sincerely thank you for all your questions and feedback over the years. I...

Imagining the future: An update on Imagine Canada’s Standards Program

One of these days, someone in the for-profit sector is going to look at what the folks over at Imagine Canada are doing with their new Standards Program and wonder why nonprofits are the envy of organizations everywhere with respect...