These nonprofit leaders are finding innovative ways to take on society’s toughest problems.

Norman Atkins
Relay Graduate School of Education
New York

In the late 1990s, Norman Atkins co-founded the North Star Academy Charter School in Newark, which was soon celebrated for improving academic achievement for poor minority students. Now Mr. Atkins is taking on an even bigger task: transforming teacher training in the United States.

The nonprofit Relay Graduate School of Education, which he co-founded in 2011, puts practice ahead of theory. Classroom veterans do the teaching, and students immediately start working full-time in schools. They squeeze in their formal education in the off hours. Certification depends on their success improving student performance. This school year, Relay is serving 3,000 current and aspiring teachers across 15 campuses.

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Greg Bloom
Open Referral
Washington, D.C.

No single charity can provide all the services a person in crisis might need. But without up-to-date information about which groups provide what services, making referrals becomes a difficult, time-consuming task.

Greg Bloom saw that when he worked at Bread for the City, a social-service organization in Washington, D.C. Now he’s trying to solve the problem with Open Referral, an effort to build open-source, cooperative technology systems nonprofits and government agencies can use to track such data. The first big test: Jewish Community Services of South Florida, which runs the county’s "211" information service, is working with Open Referral to open up its service. The partners aim to start testing the system in 2018.

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Yolanda Coentro
Institute for Nonprofit Practice 
Needham, Mass.

Yolanda Coentro would like to see more people of color and people from modest economic backgrounds in positions of authority in the nonprofit world. Since 2016, when she became CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice, she’s focused on making that happen by providing low-cost leadership training through the organization.

"People who have experience with the issues that we’re grappling with today know what’s worked. They know what hasn’t," she says. "They have a perspective that can ensure that people and organizations are really being sensitive to the full spectrum of the issue."

Read the full article about the 15 people changing the nonprofit world by Nicole Wallace at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.