Nonprofit Organization Challenges Paper

Nonprofit Organization Challenges

Nonprofit Organization (NPO) leaders face many challenges in growing their organizations and improving services to clients. Some of the most difficult challenges include: 1) developing leaders of change; 2) reflecting and embracing diversity; and 3) focusing on collaboration, alliance building, and partnerships. The following paper describes the three nonprofit leadership challenges and discusses how a nonprofit organizational leader could address each with recommendations.

Challenge 1: Developing leaders of change Change, whether incremental or huge, can create significant challenges and displacements in organizations due to the difficulty of many individuals, groups and institutions to adapt to change.

Without an industry-wide effort to make diversity a top concern, many organizations may find it challenging to draw from the market they want. With communities in the United States growing more diverse, the types of audiences and the means by which they communicate have also expanded, giving the nonprofit sector room to increase their base of donors and volunteers. For example, the university I work for the University of North Carolina at Pembroke is very diverse. It’s one of the top schools for diversity.

It's important that employees are representative of their client base so they can understand their needs and know how to serve them. It means that the organization as a whole is better able to relate to a larger population. It does not mean that people of one culture, gender, age, etc., only work with those respective populations. Just having people who are different from each other is not enough. A good training program helps people work better together and utilize each other's

However, while there is a growing body of knowledge about the factors that support effective negotiation and integration of strategic partnerships, much less is known about the actual outcomes nonprofits experience and how these compare to expected outcomes. Many nonprofits expend large amounts of organizational energy for questionable returns while pursuing interorganizational relationships. Nonprofits often encounter major barriers to collaboration, such as autonomy issues and conflicting organizational cultures, and trust-building among