February 24, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
Resolving Conflict in Nonprofit Organizations: The Leader’s Guide to Finding Constructive Solutions
By Marion Peters Angelica
Conflict in a non-profit organization isn’t necessarily bad, writes the author.
“Handled respectfully, diversity and conflict are tools for weaving a net of community-relevant programs and activities and fishing for the best ideas,” says Ms. Angelica, an assistant professor at Hamline University’s Graduate School in Nonprofit Management, in St. Paul.
She offers eight steps designed to help officials at non-profit groups channel conflict into productivity. She explores the causes of strife between board members and managers, volunteers and staff members, and grant makers and grant recipients, and provides several exercises intended to defuse potential disasters.
Ms. Angelica urges readers to scrap the notion that non-profit groups are less prone to conflict than businesses or government agencies. Employees of all kinds have to deal with office politics, turf wars, and money chasing, she writes.
But in non-profit groups, she says, individual qualities that can create conflict — such as creativity and passion — can also make an organization excel.
Publisher: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, Publishing Center, 919 Lafond Avenue, St. Paul 55104-2198; (651) 659-6024 or (800) 274-6024; fax (651) 642-2061; books@wilder.org; http://www.wilder.org; 176 pages; $28 plus $4 postage and handling; I.S.B.N. 0-940069-16-4.
