RIVETS Fall/Winter 2001        Rivets Home         Bridges Home

Northwestern Capstone Involves Nonprofit Community

What’s the Story!
The Building Bridges project team designed its Capstone experience to highlight Northwestern’s commitment to nonprofit executive education in the metropolitan Chicagoland area. The event began with a breakfast reception followed by a panel presentation on "The differences and similarities between corporate and nonprofit governnance."

Approximately 120 members of Chicago’s nonprofit community discussed the topic with a panel that included: Sandra Guthman, President of the Board of Directors of the Polk Brothers Foundation; Jennifer Steans, President of Financial Investments Corporation and manager of the Steans Family Foundation; Newton Minnow, Attorney and former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; and James Compton, President and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. Dipak Jain, Dean of the Kellogg School of Management and Donald Jacobs, Dean Emeritus of the Kellogg School of Management introduced and moderated the discussion.

The panelists agreed that there are many more similarities than differences between corporate and nonprofit boards. Guthman spoke of "skill sets that are transferable between the sectors" such as marketing, technology, human resource management and quality management. Steans said, "The only difference between businesses and nonprofits is that for-profit boards don’t ask their board members for money." Leadership seemed to be a key for both sectors. Compton said, "Selection of the CEO and the management of the succession process is one of the most important things a board of directors does."

For more information, contact Don Haider at d-heider@northwestern.edu.

 RIVETS is a newsletter designed exclusively for the member projects and programs of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Building Bridges Initiative. It is a vehicle for talking among ourselves, for telling stories of what we’ve learned and stories of how we learned it.

A solid, strong bridge has metal rivets to hold the steel pieces together.  In RIVETS, the newsletter, we will highlight the metaphorical rivets you use to build bridges between practitioners and universities in nonprofit management education.

The articles included in this  issue serve as a style and content guide. RIVETS will be quick, descriptive and informational. Here we’ll talk about your ideas and how to set them in motion. We’ll talk of the bridges that you have built to others and the obstacles you have overcome.

Each story should be between 300 and 500 words. You must communicate the essential details that make your ideas more real, more replicable and more engaging.  Send your story ideas to: bjm@centerpointinstitute.org, preferably in Microsoft Word format or in any text (.txt) format. RIVETS will be printed on a quarterly basis or as content dictates.

Though RIVETS is designed primarily as an informational tool for Building Bridges Initiative team members, copies will be circulated to the Kellogg Foundation and other targeted individuals and organizations such as key university decision-makers, key nonprofit executives, ARNOVA, ASHE, the Council on Foundations and others.

Building Bridges team members 
Don Haider and 
Anne Cohn Donnely welcome a guest to the Center for Nonprofit Management/Chicago Campus.
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