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...
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...
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...
Back in my grad school days, I was in a seminar called ‘Public Intellectuals, Institutional Critique’ where, among many other things, we grappled with the embrace of all things “excellence” in the academy. As I delve deeper into my work...
How many times have you heard about climbing the career ladder? In the nonprofit sector, the top rung is most often the executive director. The typical nonprofit executive director is the expert generalist - they design, build and evaluate successful...
2012 will go down as something of a mixed bag of events and happenings for Canada’s nonprofit sector. Numerous changes, both proposed and now-enshrined, in law and policies for charities made for an interesting year. The good news is, we’re...
For a young person starting out in the nonprofit sector, the role of executive director can seem to be many things: impressive, exciting, inspiring. It may also appear daunting, exhausting and riddled with inefficiencies — a job one must become...
Leveraging funds. Capacity-building. Community-driven action. Enabling populations. Collaboration. Participatory action. Anti-oppression. Just some examples of a multitude of terms regularly thrown around by professionals in the nonprofit sector, these buzzwords can be reasonably categorized as industry speak, or just plain...
In the Dr. Seuss classic, the Grinch dresses like Santa, slinks down chimneys and makes off with all the gifts under all the trees and fireplace mantles in Whoville. This story came to mind last week with the news that...

