New Efforts Under Way to Recruit the Next Generation of Charity Leaders

Alarmed by the number of longtime charity leaders who will soon be leaving their organizations, some

foundations and other organizations have begun working to increase the number of qualified applicants for departing executives’ jobs.

“When an organization is looking for an executive director, finding the right fit is so hard,” says Denice Rothman Hinden, a Silver Spring, Md., consultant who helps charities with succession planning and recruitment. “I sit in interviews with executive director candidates and they are not great leaders because they haven’t been developed well.

“We need to ensure that the pool of candidates is bigger, better, and more diverse.”

Among the efforts now under way:

• American Humanics, a Kansas City, Mo., group that works with more than 70 colleges and universities to steer graduates into nonprofit careers, is forming a coalition that includes representatives from grant-making foundations and nonprofit groups such as Girl Scouts of the USA and People For the American Way. The coalition will explore ways to recruit and enhance the skills of nonprofit leaders.

  American Humanics has received grants from the UPS and Hearst Foundations totaling $225,000 to pay for research on the nonprofit work force and other efforts; each member organization joining the coalition will also pay annual dues.

  Among the approaches the new coalition is considering: encouraging grant makers to require that charities have succession plans, promoting government or foundation-financed subsidies to support young people who work at nonprofit organizations, devising a new marketing campaign to promote careers at charitable organizations, and training executive directors in management.

• Bridgestar, a nonprofit group in Boston, has been working to help charities recruit new executives, particularly the senior officials, such as finance directors and chief operating officers, who report to executive directors.

  “We really want to focus on the second bench of key leaders,” says David Simms, a Bridgestar consultant.

  The organization, which provides executive-recruiting services, also maintains an online job listing. To date, Bridgestar has assisted 50 organizations in finding new executives and posted more than 400 senior positions on its site.

• The Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, in San Francisco, plan to sponsor focus-group meetings, beginning next month, with charity employees in their mid-30s and older.

  The goal is to find out how nonprofit groups can retain such people, and make sure that they don’t end up leaving charities to work for government or business. The foundations said they are worried that as the baby boomers start retiring in big numbers, competition for workers will increase so much that nonprofit groups could lose potential leaders.

• Public Allies, which links young people — mostly minorities — with community-service jobs, is offering new professional-development grants and training to the people it works with who become charity leaders. The Milwaukee charity is also starting a consulting division to help other nonprofit organizations recruit employees from diverse backgrounds.
• The United Way of New York City has spent $456,000 over the last two years to create and help pay tuition for two new fellowship programs at Baruch College.

  The fellowships provide training to potential nonprofit leaders who are identified by executive directors of New York charities.

The first, aimed at people who are three to five years into a nonprofit career, provides 30 hours of training to 50 students each year. The second, tailored to nonprofit employees with five to seven years of experience, provides graduate-level courses in nonprofit management to up to 25 people annually.

To date, 107 students have graduated from the training programs. One of them is Anne Rascon, a former deputy director who completed the advanced fellowship before becoming chief executive of her organization, Nontraditional Employment for Women, which prepares women for construction jobs.

She says that her courses in board governance, planning, and budgeting were useful.

“At the time I didn’t think some of these were important,” she says, “but in retrospect I see the value now.”

Aspiring leaders, she adds, “need to understand financial accountability, performance milestones, and the role of the board of directors, but a lot of staff members are not thinking about that.”