Fast-Growing Network for Young Professionals Names Executive Director

The Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, a national membership organization of about 50,000 charity staffers in their 20s and 30s, has named Jamie Smith as its new executive director. She will take the helm in January 2017.

Ms. Smith, 31, had already been serving as co-interim executive director alongside Amber Mohring since January. The pair succeeded Trish Tchume, the organization’s inaugural executive director.

Her top three priorities will be fundraising and development, expanding capacity at the national and chapter levels, and managing the organization’s growth, Ms. Smith said.

“Over the last two years, our network has almost doubled in size in the number of chapters,” she said. “We have gone from 25 chapters to 42 chapters. And we think we will be at 50 by the end of next year.”

Among her first moves, Ms. Smith said, will be to hire an associate director of development and communications. Up until now, YNPN has operated on financial support from grant makers like the American Express Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The list of sources of support and money must grow, she said. Ms. Smith and her colleagues are already exploring additional revenue streams, including shared fundraising with chapters and newsletter advertising, among others, she said.

The group had total revenue of $359,039 in 2014, according to its most recently available Form 990. That year, Ms. Tchume, the then-executive director, earned a salary of $74,644.

Rapid Growth

YNPN started in 1997 with one chapter in San Francisco. It grew quickly, formally receiving 501(c)(3) status in 2004. Today, it has 50,000 members.

Dedicated to developing and elevating the voices of young nonprofit leaders, YNPN chapters put on networking events, professional-development workshops, and volunteer opportunities, among other things. The national organization and its board also convene an annual national conference.

Through most of its history, YNPN was run on a volunteer basis by its young members, who squeezed in planning calls and meetings amid day jobs and other obligations. In 2011, the national board hired Ms. Tchume as its first executive director.

In some ways, YNPN has been ahead of other bigger, better-funded nonprofits. Under Ms. Tchume’s leadership, for example, the group publicly committed itself to openly addressing issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion within the organization and its membership. It pledged to recruit diverse members, collect data on its progress, and develop a curriculum on the history of privilege and power to be used by its chapters and members, among other things.

A number of foundations are now taking similar steps.

‘Exciting Time’

Ms. Smith said that while she and her fellow YNPN leaders take no credit for changes underway at institutions like the Ford Foundation and Meyer Memorial Trust, it is nevertheless exciting to see.

She and her colleagues at YNPN will continue to advocate for nonprofits to be more diverse and equip emerging leaders to work across differences and to apply an equity lens to their work, she said.

“This is a really exciting time to pay attention to what YNPN is doing and to invest in what YNPN is doing,” Ms. Smith said, noting that the group is one of the nonprofit community’s biggest capacity-building networks. “We are growing in numbers, and we have made significant investments in our infrastructure that are going to help our network be more connected and more effective.”