Giving Compass' Take:

• Victoria Shadle initiates a blog to shape conversations about the inherent nature of collaboration in nonprofits, which form an essential safety net in the U.S.

• How might changing the conversation shift the attention from competition to collaboration within nonprofits? What can you do to alter your perspective about nonprofits and view them as an interwoven security blanket in the U.S.?

• Learn more about how you can positively change the narrative around nonprofits.

What started out as an interest in working in the performing arts ended up as my introduction to the well-known but misunderstood nonprofit sector. Through formative college internships at nationally renowned dance nonprofits, I learned the basics of how nonprofits operate and are structured. After an early lay-off from my first full-time nonprofit job, I quickly learned the importance of fundraising and began my career in development.

In grad school I became fascinated with the power dynamics, frustrated with the overhead myth, and embroiled in ethical debates from tainted money to white savior complexes.

I was shocked to learn that one in ten U.S. employees works for a nonprofit and that there are roughly 1.5M nonprofits in the country. But despite the breadth of the sector, it is incredibly top-heavy with 87% of total expenses coming from just 5% of organizations. Basically, most nonprofits have budgets less than $500,000 while mammoths like Harvard have $40B in its endowment.

Most recently, I’ve begun to see the sector not as a collection of unrelated entities bound together by tax status, but as an interwoven social safety net and cultural backbone of this country. While there are obvious overlaps in mission and services, though, I constantly see pressures and norms that position nonprofits as being in competition with one another rather than potentially our greatest collaborators.

Through talking with people with varied backgrounds and experiences, I hope to use some of these topics and more as fodder to uncover, discuss, and debate this sector that touches so many lives and has a huge impact on American society. I hope to connect these individual perspectives to forge a larger understanding of the broader trends, commonalities, and challenges of nonprofits.

Read the full article about collaboration in nonprofits by Victoria Shadle at Medium.