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The question always comes up: “Who’s on your board and why did they join?” Some of the worst answers are often the most common: “They’re a few friends of the founder. . . the executive director just went out and appointed some people. . . they joined years ago, nobody knows what motivated them.” Nonprofit boards are too important to be left to this kind of random “personal roundup.”

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author, says that for humans to make it into the next chapter of our story, we need two things: resilience and the capacity to embrace and survive the big changes we will face. Resilience isn’t a dreamy concept, it’s a real thing. It’s the ability to “bounce back” after an injury or accident or catastrophe. Here are some ways to help people, and nonprofits, get back up after the knockdown blows of 2020.

You invested in a strategic planning process and everything seemed to line up—until your world got turned upside down by the pandemic and its aftershocks. These are five things your nonprofit might do to stay the course. Since you can’t rely on the old habits or the old assumptions, now’s a good time to renovate the way you go about your business.

Evaluation ought to be a part of the DNA of a nonprofit. It’s the way you know you are on the right track and all of the targets and goals are clear, realistic and appropriate. If you want to get to a destination, one of the first things to know is how you’ll recognize it when you arrive.

Collaborative efforts can offer more comprehensive responses to community challenges than any one organization alone can deliver. When the muscle and know-how of multi-talented teams focus on a mutual concern, there’s a real opportunity for impact. Laying out a coordinated approach in a collaborative grant proposal is powerful and highly competitive.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued the 2020 version of the Compliance Supplement (CS) to the Uniform Guidance codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Like its predecessors, it is a massive 1,554-page tome. Here are some highlights to help you navigate.

A capacity-building grant is a specific type of award meant to strengthen an organization’s systems and thereby increase its effectiveness. The term is a little confusing, so it’s not uncommon for grantseekers to think the purpose of these grants is to increase service capacity and expand programming. While strengthening internal systems can eventually result in expanded service capacity, that’s not the immediate focus here.

Administrators and board members must make extremely difficult and unpopular decisions as they work to sustain the organization through to the other side of the storm. They have to think in terms of triage, bottom-lines, core mission, and doing the least harm.

Identifying the specific social-change outcomes you hope to achieve is challenging, but it’s critical that the outcomes you propose accurately reflect your organization’s values and views along with an understanding of how social change works

This forced hiatus from the office is an anxiety-filled nightmare of handwringing and handwashing. The worries are real, but we can’t get frozen in place, we’ve got to discipline ourselves to be productive and prepare to rebound.