This topic gets trotted out a lot, so maybe that just means it's worth having again. We discuss it in one of my graduate seminars, but a blog post is probably a good place to gather up people's reactions in the comments section. Really, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In my last blog post, I suggested that the idea of "sector" has taken hold, which means that we need a way to refer to all the organizations that fall inside such a sector. Clearly, to me anyway, the frontrunner is "nonprofit organizations" operating in a "nonprofit sector." The word nonprofit is in the Lodestar Center's full name, it's in my job title, and it's in the name of my professional association. If our goal is to communicate clearly, then nonprofit sticks because most people know what we mean when we use it.

The problem is that this isn't always the case. At a dinner party, when you tell somebody that you work for a nonprofit organization, there's a fair chance that your drinking buddy will react something like, "Oh, yeah, a nonprofit organization. Those things that can't make a profit." Well, no... the defining characteristic of the nonprofit organization is that it returns all of its surplus income ("profit") to furthering its…

A passion of mine for the last 13 years has been working with high school teens through my church youth group. During my last year as a student at ASU, I completed a youth ministry internship at the All Saints Catholic Newman Center on the Tempe campus. After that, I was released into the "real world" and went on to pursue a career as a youth minister. I spent the next six years coordinating youth ministry programs for two different churches within that time.

I loved my job and felt so fed by the work I did and the teens I encountered — which made my next step feel more like a step backward rather than a step forward. Almost exactly one year ago, I resigned as Coordinator of Youth Ministry for St. Vincent de Paul Church in Phoenix. Why? Well, mainly because I wanted more for the teens of St. Vincent de Paul. It wasn't that I felt inept to perform the duties of the job; I felt like I was being held back. And what was holding me back? Myself. I was afraid of burn out.

See, early on in my career I was made well aware of the high turnover rate for youth ministers. It's not uncommon for many to only last two years before they burn themselves out. This phenomenon was explained more fully in an article from the Catholic Sun in April 2007. At that time, I found myself nearing the end of my third year in the profession and being a mother to a 7-month-old baby…

Welcome to Research Friday! As part of a continuing weekly series, each Friday we invite a nonprofit expert to highlight a research report or study and discuss how it can inform and improve day-to-day nonprofit practice. We welcome your comments and feedback.
"Citizens should seek opportunities to create and share public knowledge and discuss public issues; expect their governments to be open, transparent and collaborative; volunteer to the best of their ability; and create and share knowledge about the networks and relationships in their communities."

How many times have we heard a pronouncement starting with, "Never before have we needed ____ more?" I'm not sure that never before have we needed civic engagement more, but I do suggest that reviving civic communication will contribute to healthier communities. And I could argue that such might energize a greater level of civic engagement, which could contribute to a strengthened democracy.

This thought is not original; it is outlined in a recent policy paper by Peter Levine of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. Levine's paper, Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication, commissioned by the…

We at the ASU Lodestar Center have been wanting to do a major overhaul of our newsletter for quite a while. As many of you are undoubtedly aware, the Lodestar Center Nonprofit News is a hugely useful newsletter with gobs and gobs of valuable information. It is one of our Center's "flagship" offerings, and we constantly receive positive feedback about it. However, it can be argued that the very things that have made the newsletter valuable to so many members of our community are paradoxically the things that can also make it seem overwhelming and inaccessible. In a word, the newsletter has outgrown its current format and needs some serious attention from Extreme Makeover, Weight Loss Edition.

We have some exciting changes in store for the Lodestar Center Nonprofit News. For example, later this fall we are preparing to launch a new, interactive, searchable job board that will eventually take the place of the Job Opportunities section of the newsletter. We will still link to job postings from the newsletter, but the new jobs site will be much more user-friendly and effective than our current format.

So, in the spirit of collaboration and transparency, we would love to hear from you, our readers, about what kinds of changes you might like to see in our NEW newsletter. While we obviously will not be able to accommodate every request, we will do our best to acknowledge and implement the feedback we receive from our readers.

…

If you're reading this, you've probably already been indoctrinated into the idea that nonprofit has some particular useful meaning. Not everybody thinks so, or has thought so for very long.

The quibble is that this "sector" is really a whacky collection of radically different organizations. Who would put hospitals in the same bucket as credit unions, and then throw operas in, too? Who thinks social service organizations should fly under the same banner as those that organize the public for political change?

So, these things are all defined under one section of a messy tax code. Is that really a reason to study, talk about, and define a professional identity of a "nonprofit sector?" Better maybe, for the different pieces to keep to themselves, with their own methods, language, and professional development programs? Maybe. My favorite historian, Peter Dobkin Hall, wrote a defining essay in one of his…