Linking a Network to Connect and Nurture Young Charity Workers

BRAINSTORMS

By Sandy Asirvatham

In 1997, at the height of the dot-com economy in the San Francisco area, young Bay Area nonprofit workers felt culturally and professionally isolated. Even for those people stalwart enough to stay committed to nonprofit work in the face of tempting tech-industry salaries, there seemed to be a significant lack of support, career guidance, and social opportunities.

“You felt drowned out,” recalls Jenny Girard, 32, who manages the youth-service program at the Volunteer Center of San Mateo County and has long worked at youth and health-care charities.

In this frustrating environment, a small group of nonprofit professionals began to create a peer network to help provide some of that missing sense of community. Bill Tucker, then a 26-year-old director of training for CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a management-consulting group that serves charities, would join with colleagues for brainstorming events at happy hours. They would call a few friends, and as many as 40 people would show up. “We knew we’d hit on something,” he recalls.

Out of those informal discussions was born the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, a volunteer-led, grass-roots group serving charity employees age 35 and under. Having started in the summer of 1997 with a couple dozen people, the network now boasts a membership of nearly 1,500 and is about to spawn affiliates in New York City and Austin, Tex. Members connect through an e-mail discussion list, which they use for an endless variety of communication — everything from job and apartment listings to heated ethical debates — and gather at the network’s frequent social events around San Francisco. And while the network does not yet offer full-fledged career education or a formal mentors program, Ms. Girard, co-chair of the group’s advisory board, says it has enabled isolated individuals to feel connected to a larger group of like-minded people, which may in turn help them avoid burnout and remain committed to nonprofit work.

Mike Nellis’s situation is a case in point. As a former social worker trying to build a new career in nonprofit management in the late 1990s, he realized his native Pittsburgh was a dead end for him. At that time, he says, the city’s nonprofit workforce was not cohesive. There were no well-established professional networks, especially not for young people in search of career advice and support. In 1999, a Web search landed the then-24-year-old Mr. Nellis a job as a project coordinator at the Tides Center, in San Francisco, a charitable organization that provides financial support and management services to small nonprofit groups. Soon after his cross-country move, he found out about the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. He eventually went on to share chairmanship duties of the advisory board with Ms. Girard.

“It was kind of bizarre,” he says of his involvement with the network, “because I had this ideal in mind, and it really came to fruition.”

By that time, the network had grown to several hundred members and its advisory board was already in its “second generation”: Many of the founding members had already left the board or had become less active. Mr. Tucker, for example, moved on to graduate school and left the board, although he continued to play host at occasional dinners for subsets of the membership — for example, those thinking of seeking business degrees.

Other founders have already come and gone even as the network expands. Yet, unlike so many efforts that lose steam once the originators have moved on, the organization has kept growing. Mr. Tucker attributes this success to a number of key factors:

Sharing responsibility. The founders were careful to recruit a core group of about a dozen people who would commit to building the network, so that it would not depend upon the efforts of one or two people.

Staying free of unnecessary hierarchies. Run as a coalition, the network doesn’t have a single “boss,” which can mean at times that consensus builds slowly. (For example, Mr. Nellis says, the group only recently adopted a set of bylaws.) But the network’s members made a decision to keep their organization flat and informal. In their day jobs, Mr. Tucker says, many of the founders had already run into institutional obstacles, such as unresponsive boards and bureaucratic delays, that hindered their passionate sense of mission. “There was a real feeling that we didn’t want this to be another institution,” he says.

Lining up appropriate institutional support. “To really make it easy for people to connect, a little bit of infrastructure is important — a meeting space, a Web address, a phone number to call,” Mr. Tucker says. Early on, he was able to garner those things from his employer, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services. CompassPoint also provided the services of a college intern for a few months to help set up the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network’s discussion list, and ultimately secured a $3,500 grant from a local foundation, the Evelyn & Walter Hass Jr. Fund, on behalf of the group. The consultants did not, however, try to co-opt what was meant to be a completely grass-roots endeavor. CompassPoint’s executive director, Jan Masaoka, supported the network well, Mr. Tucker says. “She knew that for them to get too involved would turn it into a CompassPoint project and ultimately kill it.”

Ms. Masaoka says she recognized the need for a project like the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network and was glad to offer help. She says many of the opportunities to make professional connections and obtain continuing education are now focused mainly on senior charity staff members, leaving out younger employees.

“Most executive directors are baby boomers who entered the workforce under extremely different circumstances” than the younger generation, she says. “They don’t really know how to help these people. That’s why we wanted to try to grow those kinds of ideas from the bottom up rather than the top down.”

She feels that while job listings and other practical information may be the network’s backbone, the more free-form e-mail discussions it sponsors form its heart. Recently, the list held a lively debate about the ethics of accepting grant money from certain kinds of companies, such as drug manufacturers. Within charities, Ms. Masaoka notes, such discussions are usually only held among board members and senior management.

“Those debates are very healthy,” she says, “and help make the network a great leadership-development organization.”

As the network grooms tomorrow’s leaders, the organization itself grows steadily but cautiously. Today, Ms. Girard says, the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network runs on $2,500 a year, which comes from local foundation grants and membership fees.

“It would be nice to have some money to pay for staff time, but for now, we’re lean, we’re taking it slowly, and thinking about how to sustain the network,” she says.

Meanwhile, nonprofit professionals in other parts of the country are beginning to catch on. Nicole Curvin, a 33-year-old academic adviser at Parsons School of Design, in Manhattan, who aspires to start a charity aimed at counseling college-bound high school seniors, is working with Ms. Girard to get an affiliate started in New York City in the next few months.

To create a team of founders, she hopes to recruit people just coming out of college. “I’ve found lots of professional networks [in New York] that are linked to organizations like the Urban League, but they don’t necessarily last long,” Ms. Curvin says. “YNPN offers us an opportunity to keep something going, because it’ll provide an established hub.”

Ms. Girard has also received inquiries from people in Chicago and Fresno, Calif. She plans on providing guidance to them and anyone else who thinks the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network model is right for their city.

Mr. Nellis recently moved to Austin, where he has begun to contact charity employees to start a local network there. “Austin is a pretty progressive city but it does not support its nonprofits,” he says. “We’re trying to find those young leaders who’ll really make the difference in the next 10 or 15 years, and give them a voice and platform.”

The Young Nonprofit Professionals Network can be contacted through its Web site, http://www.ynpn.org. To learn more about the network being launched in New York City, e-mail nicolecurvin@hotmail.com. For the Austin network, e-mail mnellis@hotmail.com.

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