7 Paths Blog

Recently I talked with a nonprofit exec who said, “I’ve been in this business for thirty years and this is the first time I’ve been worried about survival [of an organization].”

When Evergreen Leaders was founded in 2003 we focused on leadership development for nonprofits. We still help nonprofits with leadership issues but when nonprofits begin to wonder if they can survive, fundraising becomes paramount.

The exec knows that their organization needs to ramp up their fundraising but they can little afford to hire a consultant. After listening to her, I described the current project that we are working on at EGL: raising funds to write a free ebook on sustainable fundraising, provide free online resources campaign job descriptions and forms, and once the ebook is published, and offer 90-minute conference calls for 6-8 readers of the ebook at $29 a person.

I could see her wheels turning as she recognized that potential value of the project for her nonprofit.

As I listened to her pain at having to make staff cuts, it deepened my passion for making this project succeed. Our communities depend on nonprofit’s like hers to provide crucial services to the most vulnerable among us.

To a lot of community nonprofit execs, it feels like pain and passion are in a race in their organizations. Let’s do our best to help passion win.