Six core principles, drawn from STEM education, can help new nonprofits assemble a diverse team, raise funds successfully, and learn to use the gathered resources for strategic growth.

Nonprofits are started for a variety of reasons. While countless startup guides exist—telling you to do the research, think through a business plan, network to find strong leadership, and start the formal registration process—little guidance can be found that tells you how to reach your vision when navigating the first few years of a nonprofit. In the early stages, the challenges at hand involve bringing together a group of individuals with different skills and networks and then leading that group to a common goal.

In my day-job improving STEM education for all students, I had used these principles to implement new, more equitable programs and broaden participation in STEM education. If these six principles could help grow our STEM programs, it stood to reason that they might just be able to be implemented in expanding our foundation as well. The following lays out the six principles as well as indicates how LLF applied them to improve as an organization.

  1. Make the work problem-specific and user-centered.
  2. Address variation in performance.
  3. See the system that produces the current outcomes.
  4. We cannot improve at scale what we cannot measure.
  5. Anchor practice improvement in disciplined inquiry.
  6. Accelerate improvements through networked communities.

Read the full article about nonprofit principles by Dr. TJ McKenna at Blue Avocado.