March Issue of On Our Minds Features Dennie Palmer Wolf, Thomas Wolf, and Victoria Plettner-Saunders

More than forty years ago, I was teaching a course called “Administration of Nonprofit Organizations.” I had a student body made up of staff and board members of local nonprofits along with a few undergraduate and graduate students who were taking the course for credit. At the time, I could not find a book that worked for my proposed curriculum so I wrote my own materials for every class.

In time, I was approached by a publisher who asked me whether I wanted to turn my notes into a book and in 1983, a volume appeared under the title The Nonprofit Organization. I learned a lot from that first effort and when the publisher asked me to prepare a second edition, he suggested a new title, Managing a Nonprofit Organization, so it would be clear that this was a book intended for practitioners, not academics. As an afterthought, I also added study questions at the end of each chapter, which, to my surprise, turned the volume into a popular textbook for college and university courses.

Several decades and some 150,000 copies later, I have been asked to come up with a fifth edition of Managing a Nonprofit Organization to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The book will still keep its basic structure with an introductory chapter on understanding nonprofits and additional chapters on boards, staffing, personnel policy, finance, fund raising, marketing, planning, sustainability, leadership, and evaluation, but this time I want to add a chapter where readers have the opportunity to hear from nonprofit staff and board members themselves. The target audience for the book remains the same – staff and board members of small to medium-sized nonprofits (generally budgets of $50,000 to $5 million) as well as students wanting to learn about the nonprofit world, though over time, I’ve found that others also make use of the volume (especially junior staff in large nonprofits wanting to advance).

So here’s where you come in. I am looking for help in any or all of three areas:

1. What are the burning issues that are facing nonprofits today that may not have been present a decade ago? No, I am not talking about the fact that most of them need money to survive (that has always been the case) or that finding good board members is challenging (again, not a new issue). Send me a paragraph or two on what you think is a NEW issue or challenge or opportunity that is important to consider in 2020.
2. What new skills do nonprofits need in their work force and on their boards? 
3. Finally, can you nominate an outstanding executive director, board member, or senior staff member of a nonprofit who you think would be able to offer articulate insights on the chapter topics I mentioned above? I’d like to offer a few guidelines for nominations: 

• You can nominate more than one person and it can be someone from your own organization.
• I not only am looking for people who can discuss strategies for effectiveness in managing a nonprofit but also those who can talk articulately about a challenge they face and possible ways of addressing it.
• I am especially interested in identifying people who are not from the arts world (I already have plenty of those) who might come from the worlds of education, social service, religion, health, international aid, recreation, research, philanthropy, and so on.
• I am also especially interested in identifying individuals who bring a different geographic perspective including rural areas, non-coastal western states or the mid-west (I already have plenty of people from urban centers on the east coast). 
• Please include why you think the individual(s) would be good candidates and if there is a particular issue or challenge that they would be most qualified to discuss. I cannot guarantee that I will follow up with everyone nominated but I will very much appreciate having your suggestions. 

Please use this form to share topics and nominations. If you are interested in assisting and would like to see the current edition of the book, I am willing to send a free copy to the first 25 people who respond (please include your mailing address) or you can purchase a kindle edition on Amazon for $13.99. Many thanks.

Human Resources Topics at the California Association of Museums’ Conference
Victoria Plettner-Saunders

As I write this, I am reflecting on my first day at the California Association of Museums’ conference in Los Angeles. My particular interest in attending this conference is its inclusion of a session track on human resources issues, a topic that has not received much (if any) airtime at other arts and culture professional conferences I’ve attended.

Museums in California, however, have had to confront the rise in employees unionizing and the implications of AB-5, which extends employee classification status to gig workers. There is a lot to talk about. The topics have ranged from recruitment for diversity, equity and inclusion; to addressing #metoo; to strengthening employee retention.

One of the intentions I set for my participation in the conference was to listen and learn. What I heard were HR consultants and those in larger organizations that have HR staff talking about the importance of using HRIS (aka human resource information systems) and analytics for HR management. But in another session, I watched as they took a poll and found that only one or two people in the room were HR professionals, and that the majority were tasked with HR but not trained in it. This got me thinking about how having an HRIS or tracking analytics is so much farther up the hierarchy of need than most organizations currently reside. There has to be a foundation on which to build organizational HR capacity which is hard to do when someone without training is performing those duties. We need access to training for staff who take on HR duties without being HR professionals.

At the same time, I listened to a case study presented by The Broad Museum about how they effectively reduced barriers to participation in their Diversity Apprenticeship Program and sat in on a moving and honest roundtable discussion about how museums can support and better engage with transgender visitors, colleagues, and job applicants. I learned that we all have so much to do to be inclusive and inviting, not only with our visitors and audiences but with our workforce recruitment efforts as well.

On Friday, I participated in a roundtable discussion with conferees about their concerns with maintaining sustainable careers in museums, and another on the recent rise of labor unions in museums. These conversations required honest and open dialogue and were met with the facilitation needed to allow that to take place. We need to enable real dialogue and communication around these issues of importance.

What’s on my mind tonight is figuring out how we can encourage other professional conferences to include an array of breakout sessions on human resource related topics that speak to arts organizations at a variety of levels in the process of professionalizing HR and make conversations like I experienced this week more common place.