April 23, 2009 | Read Time: 4 minutes
About two of every three senior-level nonprofit jobs filled in the past 18 months were taken by people who already worked in the nonprofit world, says a new study of hiring patterns by the Bridgespan Group, which provides management consulting and executive recruitment for nonprofit clients.
Many of today’s charity leaders — like Kelley Scott, executive director of Clarehouse, a Tulsa, Okla., organization that provides care to terminally ill people — learned on the job. Ms. Scott, a veteran nurse, volunteered for the grass-roots Clarehouse for two years before eventually becoming its paid leader.
“I didn’t know anything about running an organization,” she says. “All of that executive-management kind of role is something I’ve grown into over the past seven years, and I’ve surrounded myself with people who knew what I didn’t know through my board of directors.”
Her organization, with 24 staff members and an annual budget of $530,000, sets money aside for continuing education for its employees, sending workers to training and helping to defray the costs of tuition and books.
But in tough economic times, professional development is often among the first line items to be slashed by charities, especially smaller organizations. And few grant makers, say charity leaders, are picking up the slack by supporting nonprofit groups’ efforts to help their workers advance.
Support for Training
In the wake of Bridgespan’s 2006 study of the nonprofit leadership gap. which predicted that organizations would seek 640,000 additional leaders by 2016, the financialservices company American Express began making grants through its foundation to help develop emerging leaders at nonprofit organizations. (The foundation also commissioned Bridgespan’s new leadership survey.)
In 2008 the corporate grant maker committed $4.2-million to that cause (with plans to increase that amount this year), supporting both providers of such training and specialized programs at charities such as Girls Inc. and the United Negro College Fund.
Last year the company opened the American Express Nonprofit Leadership Academy, a project that brings two dozen up-and-coming nonprofit managers to the company’s New York headquarters, where they spend a week receiving guidance in business and leadership skills from American Express executives.
Nonprofit participants also each receive a “360 degree” performance evaluation from their supervisors and subordinates in their own organizations, and get one-on-one executive coaching for one year. The first session was held last June, and the second, one of two scheduled for this year, starts this month. The foundation plans to expand the program into other countries in 2010, says Timothy J. McClimon, its president.
Charities pay travel expenses for participants, while American Express picks up the other costs, which run about $200,000 per academy session, says Mr. McClimon.
He would like to see more corporate and private grant makers support efforts to prepare nonprofit talent to take on senior jobs. “You can’t just build endowments or facilities or programs,” he says. “You’ve got to build the leaders to lead all those things.”
A New Approach
Nonprofit organizations, he says, have themselves traditionally not paid enough attention to developing the leadership skills of their workers, particularly in comparison to businesses and government agencies.
“In nonprofits, the model has been, ‘Create your own nonprofit. Create another organization if you don’t like what’s happening within your own organization,’” says Mr. McClimon. “But we can’t continue to do that. We can’t continue to create hundreds of thousands of organizations. We have to focus on the ones that exist.”
Paul Schmitz, chief executive of Public Allies, an organization in Milwaukee that prepares young people for careers in social change, sent his group’s vice president of programs to last year’s American Express Nonprofit Leadership Academy. “It was not just going away for a couple of trainings,” he says. “It was a very robust experience.”
For-profit companies and the government, Mr. Schmitz says, invest much more than charities do on their employees’ professional development.
He thinks more grant makers should follow American Express’s example and help charities provide substantial professional-development opportunities, especially when many financially strapped organizations are trimming in those areas.
“At a time when the sector’s cutting back, the question I would have is, ‘How can more businesses think like American Express and use resources they’re already using?’” he says.
“If you’re a nonprofit whose idea of a training is two hours in, usually, the basement room of a church or something, the idea of going to these corporate trainings that are just spectacular is really an incredible opportunity,” Mr. Schmitz says. “If more companies did that, it might help solve the leadership deficit.”
Eman Quotah contributed to this article.
