​REST, a Seattle-based organization that has been supporting victims of sex trafficking for the last 15 years, has announced the appointment of Elizabeth Hodges as their new Chief Executive Officer. Elizabeth is an experienced nonprofit leader that will bring positivity and commitment to the organization to further help sexual exploitation victims find the support they need through REST’s programs and services. 

​After an extensive search, KNKX Public Radio has announced the appointment of David Fischer as their next President and General Manager. Their former leader, Joey Cohn, announced his retirement last spring after 37 years with the station, prompting the search. Joey will remain on board temporarily to ensure a smooth leadership handoff to David before his official start date on November 18.
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This leadership change ushers in a new era for the station, and David is certainly up for the challenge! As the long-time leader of Tacoma Arts Live and the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, David has worked with a multitude of jazz and blues artists and press personalities, demonstrating his love for not only the music but the people involved in the business. For these reasons, he was seen as a natural fit for the role. 

As a nonprofit Executive Director, Board President, or Director of Development balancing fundraising challenges is becoming more difficult as the giving landscape continues to change. Nonprofit leadership is asking questions like:

• How can we continue receiving the funding we need to operate when giving is down compared to previous years?
• Where can we find new supporters for our mission, outreach efforts, and programs?
• Are our old fundraising methods still going to work in the future, or do we need to take a new approach?
• What are top organizations doing and what can we learn from them?
• How can we think about fundraising more holistically to better align our efforts? ​

​The Nonprofit Association of Washington (NAWA) has selected Neal Mizushima as their new Executive Director (ED) after an extensive search to find the right person to fill the unique role. Throughout the process the NAWA Board sought a candidate who would be a heart-centered leader and strategic partner in building their shared vision of advancing the nonprofit sector in Washington State. 

​In our line of work, we talk to nonprofit leaders every day that are making career moves. Some are entering executive leadership roles for the first time after putting in their time on boards or in mid-level managerial roles. Some are seasoned nonprofit leaders that are making lateral moves from the helm of one organization to another. Some are coming over from executive leadership roles in industry to the nonprofit sector.

But regardless of where they’re coming from, they enter the role bright-faced and optimistic about their future with the organization. They are excited, ambitious, and ready to succeed!
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There’s just one problem... They can’t succeed alone!

Every new Executive Director placement brings an individual with a unique set of skills and experiences into an organization with unique needs and goals. To effectively unite the two, the organization’s board and existing leadership team needs to provide their new ED with everything that they need to find success. 

The idea of shared leadership has always been around in some form or another in the nonprofit space for years. However, nonprofit co-leadership across the entire sector gained popularity as a concept 5-10 years ago, and we continue to see some organizations choose this format today. Since its heyday conversation around whether it’s a worthwhile concept seems to have faded somewhat into the backdrop behind other more pressing nonprofit topics like decreasing philanthropy funding, diversity, pay transparency, and unionization. And yet, because “distributed leadership” is such a vague term we can’t say organizations are altogether done with it these days because it can mean different things to different organizations in different circumstances.
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Let’s look at where it’s still being used and why, as well as who is most likely to embrace it!

For over two years one of the most popular articles on our blog has been about helping staff through planned leadership transitions. It likely comes as no surprise to anyone that nonprofit leaders are often concerned with how to best prepare their organization for success after they leave, so they are eager to find resources on how to make the transition smoothly to ensure success for everyone. But a planned leadership change is vastly different than an unplanned leadership change. The timeframe is different, the considerations are different, the emotions are different, the operational needs are different, the communications are different. Everything is different!

There is very little that can be said about preparing for a leadership change that applies when a nonprofit loses their Executive Director without warning. The jarring nature of losing a leader unexpectedly provides a whole host of unique challenges.

Our hope is that this resource will give boards the framework they need to manage through an unexpected leadership transition so that if their Executive Director quits, is terminated, or is abruptly unable to lead, the organization will be fully equipped to keep moving forward.

Previously, we published an article about what nonprofit leadership can learn from frustrating nonprofit boards. In it we highlighted five common problems that boards experience and how an Executive Director, nonprofit CEO, or Board President can work to overcome them. If you haven’t checked that out yet, you definitely should! We highly recommend all nonprofit leaders familiarize themselves with the ways that boards can (and do) fail so that they can take a proactive approach to board management. 

Afterwards, we noticed the people we talked to were beginning to ask deeper questions like, “How do you know if a nonprofit board is doing a good job?” It seems that article helped nonprofit leaders, board members, and major donors to start thinking more critically about what they should look for in determining if the board they are connected to is being run effectively and accomplishing the organization’s mission. They wanted more information about what they should be on the lookout for – what kinds of red flags might signal an underlying culture problem or what kinds of signs indicate that the board is going off track.