Quote of the Day

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Paul C. Light: Baby Boomers Retiring From the Workforce Presents a Golden Opportunity

From an Op-Ed in today's Washington Post (my emphasis):

"The [new] president will...oversee a federal workforce that is increasingly frustrated and demoralized -- with good reason. Asked to do more with less, it is close to doing everything with almost nothing. Federal employees do not get the resources necessary to do their jobs; they rate their leadership as barely competent at best (and getting worse) and give their hiring and disciplinary processes failing marks. Turnover is up at all levels, while customer service ratings are down.

The next president will also be responsible for recruiting thousands of new employees. However, many of the most talented young Americans consider the federal government a career of last resort. They understandably wonder whether government service would give them a chance to make a difference and acquire the skills they need in an unforgiving economy. They are not saying "show us the money" but "show us the work." And federal work has not been showing well lately.

...Tinkering will not fix these problems. A faster hiring process merely hastens the day that frustrated young employees leave; deep cuts in the number of presidential appointees merely shift the layering to civil servants. Although both ideas make sense on their own, they will not have much impact without a complete overhaul of the federal machine.

The retirement of baby boomers from the federal workforce could provide the needed impetus for such an effort. If current projections hold, almost half the federal workforce will retire in the coming decade, including many who entered government during the glory days of the 1960s and '70s, when the call to service was bright.

Viewed as an opportunity, the boomers' retirements could produce long-overdue reform, particularly if the vacancies were not automatically filled by the next federal employee in line. Evaluating each job as its occupant left would create opportunities to thin the government hierarchy and fulfill the promise of meaningful work for talented young Americans."

- Paul C. Light, author of "A Government Ill Executed" and a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service

What do you think about Paul's viewpoint that the retirement of baby boomers from the federal sector could bring about needed change in the 'federal machine' by incoming young people? Are there any lessons we can apply in the nonprofit sector?

The Poetry of Passion

Photo by Matthew Fang

Over the weekend in New York, I was fortunate to see a stunning performance by a beautiful poet named Toyia Taylor, who is not only a talented artist, but a fierce community activist in NY. She spoke to me very powerfully because I'm a poet also, though I'd never thought to share anything as personal as she did with our group of women leaders. She performed a breathtaking piece about her mother being abused by a man she was with. Her mother had been beaten so badly while she was pregnant that Toyia's sister only lived to be one year old. Toyia shared this poem to illustrate to the group that no matter what our past looks like, and when we think we can't go another step, we can always draw on our strength to get us through. She said that telling our stories is what helps us to heal.

What struck me about Toyia's performance was that she clearly showed us why she has a strong conviction for her work she does in the nonprofit sector. Toyia is the Urban Leaders Program Director at Girls for Gender Equity in NY. Here is a woman who has found her voice and is sharing it with the world. And no one can deny that kind of authenticity.

You all know that I've been thinking a lot about the way we communicate in the nonprofit sector...and I wonder what would happen if we all shared with each other our passion more than we do now. When we met people, what if the question wasn't "what do you do?" but "why are you here?" I suspect we can all be inspired much more everyday and keep us moving in this social change work, despite our sector's challenges.

I want to hear your song. Why do you do this nonprofit work? What's the passion that keeps you going on the days when your paycheck is as short as bills are long?

Share your comments or email me at rosettathurman@gmail.com. I'd love to tell your stories to as many people as possible.

Quote of the Day

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center. "
-Kurt Vonnegut

Generation Y Needs to Speak Differently to Be Heard

Photo by Joseph Gilbert.org

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of brainstorming with many Baby Boomer age women leaders in the business and nonprofit sectors. I asked them how young professionals can be more effective in getting our ideas across to older generations. How, exactly, should we communicate when we're not speaking to the choir of our friends, peers, and colleagues our age?

I got a lot of feedback on this one...the most important being that we have to listen before we speak. This goes back to the advice of Dr. Audrey Alvarado, now retired Executive Director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, to give to the next generation:

The one skill that I have found that works in almost every situation is to LISTEN before you speak and withhold judgment until you get the full story or try to understand where a person is coming from. If we dismiss people because they don’t understand how to hyperlink to a webpage (this may be way too self-revealing!) you may lose the opportunity to learn something from them because you discount them altogether. Look for ways to learn from them and appreciate what they may teach you (because I sure appreciated learning how to hyperlink).

So the first thing is that younger generations have to listen, even if we think we know the answer, and can predict exactly what's going to come out of our older colleagues' mouth. I also learned from the older women I spoke to a few other key things that Generation Y needs to remember whenever we're communicating across generations:

• Many older professionals with 20 years of experience in a field resent young mavericks that are doing it all at such a young age, while they had to wait years for the credibility and respect in their profession
• Older people want to be respected at work and don't want hear their Gen Y employees whining and reminding them of their immature kids that are the same age
• Baby Boomer leaders feel than Gen Y brings a sense of too much entitlement and righteousness to our work
• Baby Boomers want to be asked for help in reaching our goals, want to know their experience is respected enough for us to learn from
• Gen Y should not seek to tell older leaders what they should do, but instead ask for their help in creating shared solutions to the issues we are all facing in the workplace and in our professions
• Gen Y should not announce their age unless asked directly - no matter how much we've accomplished, older people are often put off by young people who claim to be experts in anything (this is regardless of education and the fact that we may hold significant leadership or organizational responsibility)
  

These one-on-one conversations were very helpful to me. Sometimes, the entire outcome of a conversation can be transformed simply by saying the same thing a little differently, taking these concepts into account. While most of the research on generational shift may bear many of these concepts out, there's nothing like hearing firsthand what the older generation thinks when Gen Y opens their mouths. I hope to incorporate all these juicy insider notes as I move forward in my work to promote the next generation as viable change agents in this country.

Is there anything that you've learned about communicating across generations that you could share with the Perspectives community?

When You're Not Speaking to the Choir

This weekend is a whirlwind of learning new skills & making fantastic connections at a women's leadership program I'm attending in NY. So far, I've learned so much from so many beautiful, ambitious, strong women like Gayle King (editor of O! Magazine), Marie C. Wilson (President & Founder of the White House Project), Angelique Kidjo (Grammy-winning African singer), Cheryl Dorsey (President of Echoing Green), Linda Babcock (professor/negotiation researcher at Carnegie-Mellon & author of Women Don't Ask & Ask for It), and Alison Fine (author of Momentum) and all the other women that are here.

We're all asking ourselves some hard questions: what kind of change do we want to make in the world and how are we going to do it? Most of us are struggling with setting priorities & timeline goals for businesses or nonprofits, time management & life balance, fundraising & seed capital, and communicating our mission or vision effectively to others. My main challenge in coming to the weekend was how to leverage my blog & other social media to engage more young professionals in accelerating social change while at the same time changing the mindscape of what nonprofit leadership looks like. And my main goal was to learn more about communications - mainly, how to get your message across when you're not speaking to the choir?

That's why I was so glad to get this comment from Anonymous on my blog post last week about not being afraid to fail:

Do you think the issue of folks "not getting" what you are saying stems from them not being open to change or how you frame the solution or change that needs to happen?

I personally think it is super important to understand the audience you are speaking to, and frame the issue as well as propose solutions in ways the audience will understand and be receptive to. That will make all the difference.

As a gen y, I can say I love ya Rosetta and what you are trying to do, as well as I wish you the best of success, but when I heard you speak, I think in your eagerness to create change you spoke at people in the audience and not to them--in their place--where they were at.

I'd been struggling with this piece that my reader pointed out...but hadn't come up with any solutions to try out yet. So I'm most grateful that this weekend I've learned a lot about my own communications style and gained some clarity around how I need to tweak my message when I'm speaking to a mixed audience so as many people as possible "get it". None of the folks here know me or my cause at all, so it's a great learning experience being able to practice my messages on them and get some really good feedback. Other questions I'll grapple with on the train ride back to DC from NY: how do you maintain your authenticity as you "frame" your issues as much as possible...

Luckily I get to check in with myself and with you all on this blog as I go through this process of becoming the best nonprofit leader I can be!

Quote of the Day

"You can fall, but you can rise also."
- Angelique Kidjo, at the opening celebration for the Women Rule! Leadership Program in NY

The Best Way to Get Ahead is to Fail

Photo by Hamed Saber

"I wasn't going to be one of those people who died wondering what if? I would keep putting my dreams to the test - even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there."
- Alex Haley

My older counterparts will get all hyped up about the radical differences between Baby Boomers and Generation Y: our obsession with technology, global social networking, putting our entire lives out there on the web, and demanding higher wages and flexible working conditions. But there's one thing about Generation Y that's not so radical that I'm not really proud of. Young people are afraid to risk failure for the sake of the greater good.

It may seem counterintuitive because as young people, we're actually expected to make mistakes: in our early careers, in romantic relationships, in pursuing educational goals, financial snafus that could send us running back home to our parents...but when it comes to making the kind of real social change we came into the nonprofit sector to be a part of, we seize up.

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Nonprofit Congress about the need for greater individual responsibility in the nonprofit sector and the real lack of courageous leadership in many organizations. In many ways, nonprofit organizations have evolved from their founding by a passionate, courageous leader who sparked incredible change in a time of great social chaos (i.e. during the Civil Rights and Women's movements) to simply maintaining the status quo in this age of businesslike operations and extreme diplomacy in the face of hostile political environments. In the 60s & 70s, young people played a major part of nonprofit impact, acting as radical catalysts for change. Think about the brave black college students who sat in at lunch counters in order to desegregate restaurants:

In 1960 four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro strolled into the F. W. Woolworth store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. They were not served, but they stayed until closing time. The next morning they came with twenty-five more students. Two weeks later similar demonstrations had spread to several cities, within a year similar peaceful demonstrations took place in over a hundred cities North and South. At Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the students formed their own organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick"). The students' bravery in the face of verbal and physical abuse led to integration in many stores even before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Nobody really knew if their tactics would work, if nonviolence and perseverance would be successful. But everybody thought that getting arrested (i.e. failing) was worth the fight for freedom. Yet these days, I'm not sure that Generation Y believes strongly enough in any cause enough to risk failure for. We're passionate about ending homelessness, fighting poverty, gaining greater rights for the disenfranchised, and we are getting more involved in politics. But we're cautious of rocking the boat within our organizations when we have ideas that could accelerate change. At the Congress, I also talked about our opportunity to take advantage of innovative ideas from young people. I think we have incredible new approaches to solving problems, but most of the time we don't speak up to share them with our big bosses, our intimidating boards, or the surrounding community. I hate to say it, but after traveling this year and speaking to hundreds of young people through this blog about leadership, one of our main challenges is not that Baby Boomers are holding us back, but that we are not strong enough to make our voices heard. Instead we shut up and do as we're told because we're afraid we won't get promoted or we won't get a good recommendation when we leave, or that people just won't like us anymore.

Now I'm not bashing my peers, I'm just sharing my observations. I've found that when most young people say they want to build their leadership skills,what they are really asking is for someone to help them be courageous enough to speak up for what they think is right. And I think that is the most distinguishing characteristic of leadership: your willingness to try when there's a very real possibility that you could fail. We forget that some of our most celebrated leaders failed many, many times before they got it right.

I've struggled with this one a lot lately. I'm a proud member of Gen Y, an overachiever, and so passionate about the change I want to make in this sector. But I've always thought that if I prepared long enough, or studied as hard as I could, or got as many bullets on my resume as as possible, I would have "made it" and everything would work itself out. I'm finding that is not the case. All the education and preparation in the world doesn't mean a thing unless you're brave enough to use it when it really matters to say what needs to be said or to do what needs to be done. As you all know, I am in this nonprofit sector because I believe in the power of what we can all do together to change this world. But I don't think it benefits anyone for me to follow the path already laid out. I could just do my job as others tell me to and probably move up in this field after getting years of experience in...just doing my job. But I don't want to just do my job, I want to make a difference. And sometimes that means doing things outside of your job description or quitting your job altogether if your organization is not making any impact with its work.

I heard on the radio recently a quote from one of the DJs: "Experience is what you get when things don't turn out the way you want them to." But how many times have I, have you, obsessed over getting it just right, and being crushed when it all goes to shit? That happened to me in Minnesota last week. My co-presenter and I had planned a great session for 400 leaders, and it didn't turn out the way I wanted. But I got the chance to try out some of my ideas. Some worked the way I wanted them to, and some didn't. At first I was upset that some folks just didn't "get it". After a year, I'm still learning how to improve my speaking skills to get a clear message across to crowds of all ages around issues that are pretty touchy for our sector. So sometimes I will not make a slam dunk. But each time I will learn from it.

Cameron Schaefer makes a great case for stacking up failures in order to gain experience. Because I may not have 20 years of working, speaking, leading in the nonprofit sector, but I'm learning from each time I fail. And honestly, I don't think there's any other way to find out what works. In many ways, I'm trying to become the kind of leader I can respect - one who is not afraid to step out on a limb given their own values and beliefs.

Quote of the Day

No guts, no glory

No pain, no story
You think the world owes you somethin’, but it don’t owe you nothin’.

- Lyfe Jennings featuring Wyclef Jean, “If You Think You’ve Got it Bad”

Blogging Leadership Development & the Intergenerational Leadership Experience

Yesterday was a big day. I had the opportunity to be in the room with some of my favorite nonprofit thought leaders - Jon Pratt, Ruth McCambridge, Bao Vang, Trista Harris, Ron McKinley, and Jeanne Bell in the pre-conference session here at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits. We talked about the work and the field of leadership development. Some thoughts that came up:

• We need to make the move from individual to community-based leadership in some cases where we build leaders from within the community to solve problems unique to their region
• Individual needs will always have to be addressed to help others build their own skills
• People are often more in need of the "soft skills" of leadership - how do you develop your own agency and power within community and political networks? This is not taught at the graduate level
• We develop those soft skills best when we're in an environment we can't control, and that's hard to simulate, but the experience is necessary
• There's a big difference between leadership for the sake of "being the boss" vs. leading in order to serve the mission and create social profit

Unfortunately, I had to leave the pre-session early to figure out how we were going to do the opening plenary without my co-presenter Frances Kunreuther from Building Movement Project. She had missed her flight to Minnesota and we needed a new game plan. This turned out to be a wonderful learning moment for me...once the stress was over. As a young person and an introvert, public speaking doesn't really come naturally for me, especially speaking to a crowd of 400. Frances was going to set me up with her research piece, then I would come into the second half and talk about moving forward together as generations all have something to offer. We ended up getting her conferenced in by phone to give her presentation via satellite and PowerPoint. It wasn't the best thing, but the best we could do. Yesterday was a lesson learned that you need to expect the unexpected for any speaking engagement and be prepared to take over for your co-presenters in the case of a snafu. But that wasn't the juicy part...I just wanted to give you a sense of how I'm learning so much from each experience I have the opportunity to be a part of.

I opened up my half of the presentation as I often do now, with the story of my personal journey into the nonprofit sector. I've observed how much more powerful it is to tell stories to people instead of listing facts. My agenda was to have the audience "try out" a real intergenerational conversation and then take what they learned back into the nonprofit community and their organizations. Our conversation covered 3 areas:

Creating a Shared Experience
After I told my story of getting involved in the nonprofit field, I invited the audience to write down their story and share it with their neighbor. This was the most powerful moment of the day, as people got so engaged with each other and all the generations - Baby Boomers, Veterans, Gen X & Y were actually listening to each other. During the report outs, people stood up and shared what they had heard from their tablemates. The idea was to illustrate that our passion for social change is what brings us together, no matter what generation we belong to. I think the exercise really softened folks up to begin to dig deeper into the issues together as professionals with more in common than they thought.

Developing a Shared Agenda
Then I shared some of the challenges we face in the workplace and the tensions that different generations feel in relation to the others. I asked everyone to think about five key challenges and discuss one of them at their tables, share experiences, and brainstorm solutions. In essences, this would become the shared agenda for this intergenerational group in Minnesota. The topics were: engaging young leaders, advancing your own leadership, working across generations, working for a baby boomer, and leadership transitions. We had asked participants in a survey beforehand what they were most concerned about, and these covered all the bases. Each topic group shared insight and it was clear that some good connections were being made around how everyone could play a part in solving these issues in their workplaces.

Pay Yourself First, Then Pay it Forward
The last thing I did with the participants was to challenge them to make a commitment to themselves and the group. I emphasized the responsibility that everyone had to not keep our conversation in those four walls, but to go out and share what they learned with others. I encouraged them to reflect on one thing they could do to increase their individual leadership skills and one thing they could do to help someone else build their own leadership. The room was so quiet as everyone wrote down the two things they would do to follow-up our great dialogue.

I'm grateful to the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits for allowing me to come and speak to this wonderful group of 400 leaders wanting to just get better at what they do and how they do it. It was a great learning experience for me to try out some of my ideas and test how the different generations could communicate better despite their differences. I hope to get the chance to do more of this and learn in other cities in the future!

Quote of the Day

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Blogging the Future of Leadership at Minnesota Nonprofits

Today is the first day of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Future of Leadership Conference. I got into town late last evening and appreciated all the time I had on the plane from DC to read and sleep. This morning I found that I was really eager to get the party started when I showed up for the first session an hour early, forgetting about the one hour time difference. This morning we will talk about doing leadership development as practitioners, and I can't wait to hear what other people are doing in their organizations. Some of you may know that I'm directing a new leadership development program at my organization called the Future Executive Directors Fellowship. Our pilot class will be 25 of the DC region's best and brightest nonprofit professionals who want to become a nonprofit CEO in the future. And my dear fellow blogger Michele Martin is going to be our lead faculty! I'm TOO excited. The deadline for applications was May 30, and they just kept pouring in. All told, we received 113 applications! So the selection phase will be a busy one this next month. I also began teaching my first nonprofit management course at Trinity University. I have seven students over the summer and we're learning all about nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Many of my students want to learn about this kind of marketing, but they can't see themselves actually doing it for a living. A sad shame, but you've heard the story before: one young woman raised her hand last week and said, "I would like to work in a nonprofit doing communications, but the money issue is a big downside for me. " Hey, believe me, I know we all need to pay our bills! But I took that opportunity to tell her about the kinds of positions that actually could pay a fair salary in our sector. Hopefully she will give one of our local nonprofits a shot. We could use her talent.

And speaking of talent, our friend Loryn Wilson, (fellow blogger from the nonprofit compensation show I did on BlogTalkRadio) finally found a job! Loryn is now working as a Communications Associate for the Center for Progressive Leadership.

While I often rail about the challenges facing our sector, I also like to celebrate when we do find our way and make space for real change to happen for our communities. So I couldn't be more excited about all of the changemakers I will meet here in Minnesota. I can't convince the whole world to work in a nonprofit, but I can keep telling our story, one that Frank Lopez shared with us so beautifully at the Nonprofit Congress last week:

There are three truths in life.

1. I was born; no one can deny the fact that I was born.
2. I will die; no one can change the fact that I will die.
3. I have a choice of how I want to live my life, and how I live it can make the world better or worse.

I choose to make it better.

Quote of the Day

"Don't quit before you have a chance to be someone's miracle."
- Jennifer McDaniel, former drug addict and client at Friends of Guest House, a nonprofit who helped her turn her life around, speaking at the Nonprofit Congress

How to Create a Stronger Nonprofit Sector: It's the People, Stupid

This week I've been at the Nonprofit Congress, a national conference of nonprofits from Hawaii to Jacksonville. We talked about everything from intergenerational leadership to advocacy to fundraising in the many breakout sessions that were presented. It's been an exciting and inspiring two days, and I wanted to share with you some of my comments from the closing session yesterday, Our Future: A Stronger Nonprofit Sector.

I've been at a number of conferences over the past year where everyone agrees that we all could benefit from a renewed focus on leadership development for our sector, but there's a lot of moaning that it's going to take this huge pool of financial resources to make it happen. And most of the time, that's where the conversation stops. I think it's a shame that we tend to forget all of the progress that's been made thus far with the social movements of the 60s & 70s - not with big foundation benefactors, but with a critical mass of passionate people who were sick and tired of how the world looked. The Civil Rights Movement didn't achieve the goals that it did because of a 5-year grant from the Annie Casey Foundation. The Women's Movement didn't procure the right to vote due to a million dollar gift from Rockefeller. To rephrase what someone once said, "It was the people, stupid." And the great news is that we don't have to wait for any big pile of cash because we still have those people, those same kinds of people who care about changing this world so deeply that they take enormous pay cuts to work in underresourced organizations, that forgo work/life balance for the sake of giving themselves to the cause. And the one thing I would like to urge us to do going into the future is not to discount the power of our people, and in fact do more to empower them to do what it takes to make a difference.

I think there are three enormous opportunities we have to make our sector stronger going into the future:

A Renewed Sense of Individual Responsibility
I was born in 1982, so I'm an 80s baby & a proud member of Gen Y. But every generation has a context & a personal experience that led them to want to work for social change. And the context of my experience was that in the 80s the crack epidemic was beginning to hit where I lived in the public housing projects of Cleveland, Ohio. So a result of that was my mom had to raise me by herself because my father got caught up in the drug game and couldn't get out. He was a dealer and eventually became an addict himself & I lost him when I was six years old. My family was so poor that every year, a woman from a local nonprofit would come and take me shopping for school clothes because my mother could not afford to. We were so poor, we were eligible for every government assistance program you could think of. So I experienced that growing up. And it gave me a charge, a responsibility to do what I could to help others in similar situations. But we've all got a context, a personal experience that gave us some kind of calling into the nonprofit sector. What's yours? We need to keep reflecting on our values and the sense of responsibility we do the best we can to make this country a better place.

Yet we often behave as if our "organizations" are these independently responsible entities that have nothing to do with individual actions. Organizations can be ineffective, but the reasons behind that stem from the actions of the individuals within them. So when we say, "or board wouldn't allow that", or "our executive director would never let us try that" what we're really doing is hiding behind our business cards and refusing to take responsibility for the mission. What really needs to happen is that we bring ourselves out of excuse mode and pointing the finger at those big mean funders and slow-moving leaders and step up our game right out of the gate for the sake of our mission. This means taking risks as a nonprofit employee to get the job done by any means necessary. But I'm not talking about serving more people, I'm talking about actually solving the problem and putting ourselves out of business. Think about it.

What would it be worth to you if you could actually end teen pregnancy or homelessness or unemployment in your community? Or do whatever it is that your mission is. Isn't that why you took a pay cut to work for a nonprofit anyway? To make a difference? I'm just saying that we all need to stop blaming our organizations, our funders, and various other external factors that interfere with our end goal: to eventually put our nonprofit out of business because we have successfully achieved our mission.

Accomodation of Innovative Ideas
In an increasingly crowded nonprofit environment where competition for resources and community support is fierce, the public will be looking at what kinds of leaders and nonprofits can fix the problem the best. Funders and donors especially are already more and more hungry for new approaches to social change since clearly the techniques we've been doing for a million years haven't made enough of a dent on the issues so far. Instead of being skeptical of new ideas, it's important to realize that new ideas are the only thing that will help nonprofits to survive in the coming years.

I've been in the nonprofit community for six years and from where I sit, it seems like we've been doing things pretty much the same way for many years, with not a lot of large-scale progress in terms of tangible social justice in this country despite the billions of dollars that come into the nonprofit sector each year. But on the other hand, I'm in this work because I feel so strongly that we're the only sector that can take up this challenge - the government can't do it without us.

Am I saying that nonprofits should be acting like businesses? Not at all. What I'm saying is that we need to be taking responsibility that the work that we are doing is actually helping communities. And if we find that it's not, then we need to stop wasting precious resources on failing ventures. Individually, we can all take personal responsibility for doing our work better and with more innovation to do what we say we are going to do for our communities.

A More Inclusive Model of Leadership
We've all got skills and talents and ideas. For nonprofit professionals with incredible idealism and passion, it seems that the only thing standing between the problems and the solutions is getting the chance to lead. Right now, there's a lot of buzz and energy around the idea of a leadership crisis in our sector. But I think most of us are realizing that the crisis is not that we don't have enough people to lead, but we're not supported the people who do want to take on leadership roles in nonprofits, no matter what generation they belong to. So we're moving from crisis to action in many respects. The action step for current leaders is that you need to be strong enough to give young people the space to lead. Mark Light has said:

The coming leadership deficit will force us to hire more and more young people at a time when we need more experience dealing with greater competition and uncertainty. Although every generation fears for the future and thinks that younger leaders won’t be able to take the stress or understand the complexity, somehow they always do.

And we also need to recognize that young people have done great things to change this country. MLK became an activist at the age of 26, when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In most nonprofits, there are young, educated people who are ready just to get the chance to prove ourselves, but the problem is that our sector is not seeing their incredible potential beyond stuffing envelopes or setting up websites. Going into the future, we need to give different kinds of people the chance to make a difference.

The other untapped area of leadership we need to look at going into the future are people of color. The current state of affairs is that:
• 82 percent of nonprofit CEOs are White
• 94 percent of foundation presidents are White
• 86 percent of board members are White

...despite research in Ready to Lead? by the Meyer Foundation, Annie Casey & others that suggests that people of color are more willing to lead than our White counterparts. These statistics among the sector’s top leadership highlight the enormous disparity between what our clients and communities look like in comparison to our leaders, given that less than 70 percent of the U.S. population is White.

The next generation of nonprofit leaders are going to be younger and more racially diverse. And to harness this kind of available talent, the nonprofit sector will need to learn how to tap into different networks and promote and respect diversity within our organizations.

I think we're moving into a time of increased dissatisfaction with how the nonprofit sector is operated. The current generational shift is one aspect of this amazing time where we have different generations working to bring about change in our organizations. The other thing is the increasing dissatisfaction of the concerned public about how this country is run & how many social problems we still have yet to solve in 2008. As we all know all too well, what we don't have as a nonprofit community is this mystical pot of cash that we're all going to find at the end fo the rainbow once we get our houses in order. The bad news is indeed that there's no big, neverending grant out there with any of our names on it as a reward for having the best financial management system or the best HR manual or having all the right marketing & communications tools. I'm not saying these kinds of things aren't important, I'm a student of best practices & now I teach these concepts tograduate students at Trinity University. What I am saying is that we're always going to have those challenges and will have to figure out ways to constantly improve. But the one thing we have that no other sector can brag about is the fierce personal commitment that we have in our people, our staff that are on the front lines of social change every day. We may not have the money to do all of this, as many say, but we do have all of the passion of our people to get this thing done, which is priceless.

With each courageous step we take individually, together we can all turn this crazy world right side up.