“Most people don’t say ‘When I grow up I’m going to be the CEO of the local United Way’ or ‘I’m going to be the program director of Women’s Services at the YWCA’ or ‘What is the career path for someone who wants to become the executive director of Volunteer Calgary?'” So notes Martha Parker, the recently retired executive director of Volunteer Calgary. Yet with the looming retirement of baby boomers, the nonprofit sector needs to promote itself as an employer of choice and strategically prepare and mentor emerging nonprofit professionals.

Promoting the nonprofit sector as an employer of choice

Since 2000, Community Experience Initiative (CEI) has provided business students with three-month internships in the nonprofit sector so they can experientially learn about the sector while applying their business skills. Half of the funding for the intern positions comes from a funding partner secured by CEI, the other half is provided by participating nonprofit organizations. For summer 2005, 350 students from across Canada applied for one of 16 internships. In addition to internships, CEI hosts career events in conjunction with business schools in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

CEI is unique and important. According to CEI’s co-founder Kariann Aarup, “When I was teaching at McGill, I got a sense that students were relieved to know that they could actually care about social and environmental issues while still being business students, business people. Somehow they had believed that doing so was an impossibility – as though it were mutually exclusive. Through CEI, they are being given a new assortment of choices of possible careers and it is very exciting to them.”

Career paths in the nonprofit sector

Anne Mitchell is executive director of the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, one of the organizations that accepts CEI interns. She and Iana Nikolova, their Summer 2004 intern and current project employee, both affirm how unknown the nonprofit career path often is. The internship program helps emerging leaders realize there is another sector to the Canadian economy. Says Mitchell, “Some of our interns are here because they are doing environmental studies or a related field at university. Here they realize they are making a real contribution to environmental policy in Canada. They are realizing that you can have a career path in the nonprofit sector. You don’t have to go into industry or government with your environmental background. There is a nonprofit sector and you can use your advocacy skills and public awareness skills if you are passionate about change.”

More than just exposing young leaders to a potential career path, Mitchell encourages her interns to ask questions and raise issues. “Because it is an open concept office,” says Nikolova, “you are mentored constantly because we always talk about issues. It’s ongoing.” She finds this very helpful because she realizes that the skill set required for the nonprofit sector is slightly different than in other sectors and mentoring helps her develop those skills and guides her career path. Interestingly, Nikolova now finds herself mentoring new interns that come to the organization.

Giving back and promoting professionalism

Tania Little, CFRE, manager of major gifts for Invest in Kids says she would have loved the chance to have a mentor early in her career. While that never happened for her, for the last two years she has made it happen for others by volunteering as a mentor through the Toronto Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). Toronto chapter members who have worked in the advancement profession for less than three years can apply for this mentor program and then go through a matching process.

Little learned that although she had a clear vision of what she expected in a mentoring relationship, it didn’t necessarily match with what the participant needed or wanted. “With my first match, he just wanted someone to bounce ideas off of on an informal, as needed basis.” Their mentoring relationship evolved and Little’s advice to others is to define at the outset what the needs are, because “it’s not just about my needs or my definition of mentoring.”

For Little, mentoring is a way to meaningfully give back while applying her expertise. Plus, as a mentor she can help set the bar high and emphasize standards, ethics, accountability, and professionalism. “It’s about exposing, coaching, protecting, challenging, modeling. And if I’m a good mentor, hopefully they’ll put their hand out in the future and mentor someone else – it’s a cycle,” she says.

Choosing a mentor

Mentoring is the focus of a number of community leadership programs operating across Canada – an initiative of the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. The community leadership programs are unique educational experiences for the rising generation of decision-makers from all of the different sectors in a community: private, public and voluntary. Wayne Stewart, an executive coach, sat on the curriculum committee that set up the mentoring process at Leadership Victoria. He found that the best way to identify a mentor is to present participants with an idea of what to expect a mentor would do and then let them go and find one. “Very often, young people will pick someone two or three levels above them. That’s the wrong way,” advises Stewart. “Mentors, I think, are life coaches. So, it’s important to pick one that is from an area where you have no experience.”

Leadership Calgary, another one of the community leadership programs, was formed in 1998 by Volunteer Calgary during Parker’s time with the agency. The comment she heard from some of the Leadership Calgary participants was that organizations were not letting these keen and energized emerging leaders through the door. Parker recalls that participants found “that a lot of our established organizations were quite bureaucratic and not nimble and open to the skills sets these emerging leaders had to offer. I’m not trying to be critical though, because I think the lack of resources in our organizations is making it difficult to be nimble, quick and innovative. We don’t have a lot of room to make these ideas happen.”

Parker also cites studies reporting that 50-70% of executive directors in the U.S. and Canada will change jobs in the next five years. This prompts her to ask, “Are we grooming the folks coming up behind?” There are certainly some challenges to address, but the nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly aware of the need to strategically and deliberately look at succession planning and how to prepare and mentor young people into higher levels within the sector. And with more and more mentoring programs emerging all the time, the chances are good that emerging nonprofit professionals will be well-equipped for their careers in the sector.

Louise Chatterton Luchuk is a freelance writer and consultant who combines her love of writing with experience at the local, provincial and national levels of volunteer-involving organizations. For more information, visit www.luchuk.com.