Service to Others is the Highest Good
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Nonprofits
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Mission
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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.
Small Nonprofit Organizations
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Most small nonprofit organizations, especially those whose work involves transforming the lives of suffering human beings, grow from an idea and the passion of a visionary founder and embraced by others who join in the work.
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Small nonprofit organizations traditionally work only the mission, and it is from those mission-driven groups that the deepest community help is given, human dignity protected, and hope encouraged.
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Nonprofit organizations often serve unpopular causes; helping the poor, the dispossessed, the distressed, touching the untouchables, bringing hope to the prisoner, and comforting the alienated. They are driven by passion, spirit, an abiding sense of their mission, and they are staffed by people who deeply believe in what they are doing, often working for wages most would scoff at.
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In their growth, small nonprofit organizations rebuild the broken spirits and help develop productive, hard-working citizens; and more often than most of us know, in the process of their work become the saintly souls, like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, who walk and work among us.
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At the highest level, small nonprofit organizations are built on faith, deep and abiding faith that sees the tragedy of the suffering world as an opportunity for sharing their healing work, and the fear of failure as a spur to even deeper effort.
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Small nonprofit organizations are the most difficult organizations within the nonprofit sector to develop and sustain, yet they promise the most effective vehicle for human transformation. They work classically within the framework of one person to one person. They develop friendships and relationships that nurture and strengthen the suffering human being. They are truly organizations of meaning, and at their best, the epitome of learning organizations.
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Eventually, the effective grassroots organization becomes a community institution and even a national presence, bringing their transformative ideas and founding passion to the larger world, a world always seeking the wonder of healing work.
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