Service to Others is the Highest Good

How Nonprofits Grow

Five Steps to Ensure Adequate Funding

Mission: Congruent with founding core beliefs.

Guiding Principles: Animating work to ensure mission fulfillment.

Strategic Plan: Aligned with mission and guiding principles; reviewed regularly.

Plan of Work: Tactics to fulfill strategic plan.

Philanthropically Ready: Being financially accountable and transparent.

Growing upon the foundation of these five steps and understanding the dynamics of the philanthropic spirit, is much more art than science and much more theology than ideology.

Lukenbill & Associates is a consulting practice whose mission is to help small nonprofit organizations grow.

In our daily lives we are called to service, and for many of us that service involves providing leadership--executive or governing--to a community organization whose mission is something we care deeply about.

Some of the most difficult aspects of nonprofit work include: the spiritual and physical toll it can take on us, the difficulty in finding and sustaining financial support, and the often endless array of problems confronting the communities we are trying to help.

The well of faith, moral strength, spiritual refreshment, and increased organizational capacity is a well drawn on with some effort. Our work revolves around reducing that effort, while increasing the richness of the well you are able to draw upon.

"Millions of people, who, spurred on by the social Magisterium, have sought to make that teaching the inspiration for their involvement in the world. Acting either as individuals or joined together in various groups, associations and organizations, these people represent a great movement for the defense of the human person and the safeguarding of human dignity. Amid changing historical circumstances, this movement has contributed to the building up of a more just society or at least to the curbing of injustice." (Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, Introduction)

"It is hard to imagine making any important change in life without an inward journey. Think of Christ going into the desert for forty days. It was in the desert that he dealt with his own doubts and temptations and from which he emerged having chosen his freedom and his destiny. It is in our own internal deserts that we remember what really matters. It is on the inward journey, taken over time, that we develop the capacity for intimacy with ourselves and with others, with the environment, and with the world. It is deciding that we are deep human beings with inner lives that defines who we are and brings our ideals back into focus." (Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, p. 76)

"A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people's hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further - if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person - then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision." (Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, p. 206)