Buenos Diaz.  Good morning.  You know, it wasn’t until yesterday when someone, as we were talking about my coming here, asked, “Are you going to give your speech in Spanish”?  And I thought “I’d love to.”  I have often spoken in English and have been interpreted in Spanish, but I’ve never done it the other way around.  But I’m delighted to be here this morning, and let me tell you that there aren’t too many groups that could get me out to give a speech two days before my conference starts.  But, as Dan mentioned earlier, Kellogg was one of our earlier funders and our constant supporter and partner in the work that we do.  So, if Kellogg asks me to do something, I try to do it.  Plus, I want to see every single one of you at our conference this weekend.  I always try to do more than one thing every time I go out to speak.

But, I also wanted to take this is opportunity for me to bring together two of the passions of my life:  nonprofit, philanthropic, citizen engagement issues with education issues.  I started out as an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn, and then went - I don’t know whether it would be all the way up or down - to higher education.  But my whole life had been about education.  Education allowed me and my family to work our way out of poverty.  It was the only avenue we had. And so the next logical step was to try to help open up opportunities for others. 

Of course, for 20 years, Independent Sector, has been Building Bridges, bridges across our own organizations.  At one time, we had Catholic Charities and Planned Parenthood as members.  We’re trying to get Planned Parenthood back, by the way.  And, we have environmentalists and petroleum companies and pharmaceuticals, and the bridge between them is that, whatever field they’re from, they are committed to citizen engagement, through private efforts for the public good.   So whatever else they’re doing in their day jobs, when we get together around the table at Independent Sector, it is to discuss how the philanthropic, nonprofit community can work together to improve our society. 

So, I am delighted to be here.  I’d love to think that Independent Sector is a household name or word - I’m working on it - but let me tell you about us very briefly.  Independent Sector is 20 years old this year.  So, our conference starting on Sunday is our 20^th anniversary celebration.  It is a coalition of about 740, and we’re growing every day.  We are foundations, nonprofits, and corporate giving programs or corporate foundations.  Name the area of work in a sector, and we represent it.  Our members are all 501(c)3’s and 4’s so we don’t encompass the trade associations or the National Football League. 

We represent primarily the grantmakers and what we call the charitable organizations, the public charities.  What we do - sometimes I joke about it - we make the world safe for nonprofit work, and believe it or not, sometimes it needs a champion. Some of our zealots in legislatures and Congress get a loony idea, and they go after us.  So, we have to stand up to protect the sector.  But what we do is a lot of the research that helps us all to understand the sector.  We do advocacy and lobbying on behalf of the interests of the sector but ultimately the interests of the people we serve.  We pay attention to issues of the ethical, accountable, open-disclosure, style of management and leadership.  We pay attention to the need to educate the public about why this sector is so important and why they need to be involved in it by supporting it through their contributions and their volunteering and, once in a while, by calling their Congress person and letting them what they think about all of this.  That’s Independent Sector. 

Now about America’s nonprofit sector.  We know in Latin America now there many places calling it “Tercer Sector”, I know that’s what they call it in Argentina, or “Sociedad Civil” or civil society - In the United States, we have  so many names for it; that’s one of our problems.  We have nonprofit, charitable, philanthropic, independent – all of that means the same thing - and it’s unique in the world..  It’s older than the Republic and growing in size, wealth, influence, and power.  There are civil societies or independent sectors in almost every country in the world, but no other sector is as large or as influential as that in the United States.  No other sector is supported by private contributions and volunteers to the extent that ours is in the United States; and no other sector is as researched and studied as ours in the United States.  In fact, the rest of the world comes to our shores daily to study our sector for lessons they can apply to their own, and when we are at our best selves, we learn as much from those exchanges as we share. 

The independent sector in the United States today comprises over 1 million organizations, including religious organizations.  Nearly 700,000 of those have revenues of $25,000 or more.  Now, of course, we also have some organizations that have revenues in the billions or the hundreds of millions.  My organization, Independent Sector, is tiny in that context.  Our budget is now about $7 million a year.  For those of you who are not very familiar with the sector in the United States, the organizations that have annual revenue of $25,000 or more have to file a tax return every year.  The total sector, has annual revenues much larger than the total budget for many countries in the world, $650 billion a year, and foundation assets are now at over $400 billion.  Ten million full-time equivalent employees labor in the sector every day, joined by 109 million volunteers.  That is the equivalent of another 9 million full-time employees.  So, this is a sector that has a tremendous impact on the economy, a tremendous impact on the labor force, a tremendous impact on the quality and diversity of services provided in communities around the country, as well as an increasing influence on policies. 

Now, I don’t think anyone has good data or any data on the number of people served by the sector.  That’s a hard one to get at, but we do know that every one of us, rich, poor, whatever our gender, race, ethnicity, religion, urban, suburban, or rural habitat, we all benefit from the sector.  You know, it’s interesting because some people in the United States forget this.  There are some who believe that the nonprofit sector benefits only the poor and maybe culture and maybe the environment, but they don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the sector.  I like to remind them by asking , “Have you ever called 911”?  That’s a nonprofit initiative.  “Have you ever been grateful for the reflecting lane dividers on a highway on a dark rainy night”?  That was a nonprofit initiative.  “Do you ever go to a museum?  The opera?  Have you ever had a mammogram or a host of other procedures and treatments - particularly in nonprofit hospitals?  Did you attend a private school or a college or university”?

The sector is one of the strengths of the United States and the uniqueness of the sector is its pluralism - of mission, of activities, of fields of work and of people working in it , and of ideas and style that we use every day.  There is no field of work or effort or any movement in this country of any meaning that has not had significant involvement in the nonprofit sector.  And today in the midst of the greatest affluence that this country or the world has ever known, the services provided by the sector are as important if not more so than ever.  Why, if we are so wealthy now, do we still need the sector?

Shelters around the country have recorded increases in demand, as have food pantries and other meal service programs.  The number of people without health insurance continues to be unacceptably high.  As people were dropped from welfare roles - you have all heard about welfare reform in the United States, haven’t you - this welfare reform pushed many people off welfare. Many got two jobs, but you know that many of those jobs pay minimum wage.  Then people had to choose between paying their rent or buying food the last week of the month.  Many of those jobs came with no health insurance and no pension plans or childcare.  Some states have been very good about providing people with services to make that transition, but not every state has been equally good.  So, we are seeing that, amidst obscene wealth, there has not been a comparable diminution in the need for services that the sector provides.

So, the sector is as essential today to the quality of life and ultimately to the stability of democracy as ever, as it continues to provide both innovation and develop new ways to serve the public good and to fill the gaps in services not provided by the government or the market.  And just as important, it continues to play a very important role in working to influence social policies and providing a voice for those without access.  And if you have been following politics in the United States, you know that access and a voice is costing more every day.

I would like to talk a bit about some of the emerging issues that will affect the third sector of the future and then move onto the role of higher education in helping the sector to find a next generation of solutions.  Many of these issues, by the way, I understand, are the same in other countries.  They may be at earlier stages or at later stages of dealing with an issue.  The magnitude may be different, but many of the issues are the same.  At Independent Sector and other forums around the country, I hear the leaders of organizations talking about the following issues:  technology, how to know what you need, how to pay for it, keeping it updated, hiring, training, and holding on to good technology staff. How do you use technology to improve your ability to accomplish your mission?  How do you make your voice on the Internet heard above all the noise?  Then, there is the information explosion, which is related to technology but not only technology.  How do you generate, gather, analyze all the information you need and turn it into knowledge and action programs for your work?

What about the new wealth?  I remember when we were talking, maybe 6 years ago, about a generational transfer of 3 trillion over the next 10 years, and now we’re hearing about 30 to 40 trillion over the next 20 years.  It’s amazing.  I hope it doesn’t turn out to be like the projected surplus in the budget that they’re spending already.  It may disappear, but we are certainly going to have a significant transfer of wealth, and everybody is saying “How do we get our hands on some of it for members of the sector, for charity, for philanthropy?”  And of course, another major issue that is being discussed right now in the halls of Congress is whether to tax that transfer or whether to allow a lot of it to go into foundations or the nonprofit sector.

Another issue is changing demographics.  We heard Dan talk about that and how to be inclusive in your organization and how the organization can be reflective of our nation’s diversity and pluralism.

Here’s another interesting issue, and I think this is happening in some places in Latin America, too - how to compete with for-profits for government funds to provide human services.  In the United States, they are privatizing some services.  Now nonprofits are in competition with for-profits and at a disadvantage.  I’m going to go through these quickly, and we can come back to whatever piques your curiosity. 

More issues:  How to secure the resources needed to accomplish our work, How to be accountable in order to earn and keep the public trust, How to measure your outcome to demonstrate your value, How to tell your story to increase your effectiveness in advocacy, How to develop the next generation of leaders for the sector, and how to work in partnership with government and business and not lose your focus on your mission.

I’m sure some of you in this audience can come up with other issues or maybe disagree with some of mine, but on these and almost any other set of issues, anyone can identify that higher education can play a role in increasing our capacity to deal successfully with them.  All of the issues I’ve identified point to the need for leaders, managers, researchers, and teachers in a sector who can engage in constant learning and renewal, who can work comfortably with diversity and pluralism, who are comfortable with the new technology, who understand and embrace partnerships and collaborations, who are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, with sharing power and decision making, and who understand the value of advocacy and good communications and marketing.

By the way, this is what they need in business, too.  Leadership and management skills do transfer from one sector to another.  The field of education, in the nonprofit sector, is relatively new as a field.  In fact, Independent Sector was influential in starting the whole discipline.  Virginia Hodgkinson, the founder of Independent Sector’s Research Program, and Sandra Gray, our Vice President for Leadership, worked in the early days to help get some of the academic centers started.  Their concern at the time was for developing a body of research that would help us all to understand the size, nature and scope of the sector.  When they started this work, they had to research whether there were any degree-granting institutions focusing on the nonprofit area yet.  If there were, it was one or two, and I’m certain we have many more today.  As for the work itself, as we all know, in every field, first the work emerges, people learn how to do the work, and then the discipline of study and research follows.

In fact, about 20 years ago, when Independent Sector was founded, there was not even much of a sense of “sector”.  We have worked for the last 20 years to develop, among those who work and volunteer in this sector, an awareness of sector or what some people humorously call “sectorhood.”  Very often, someone working at a nonprofit knows about the Girl Scouts or knows about the YMCA or knows about a shelter, but doesn’t have a sense of belonging to something that is much bigger and that has much more reach and impact.  As with every other field of work, again, first you have to do it, and then you go out and study it and research it, and then you teach it as a field or academic discipline.  What I think is different about this field is that just as the sector itself is so pluralistic in what it does, and the people who come to it have such diverse backgrounds - not only demographic, but academic backgrounds - so the preparation for management and leaders of the sector has to be inter- or multi-disciplinary in order to respond to everybody’s needs, to everybody’s background, and to bring together in some kind of coherent theoretical framework the kinds of things that we do.

In recent years, we’ve heard simultaneously some criticism about the excessive professionalism of nonprofit work as well as calls for more professionalism.  They’re both going on at the same time!  We all know that a lot of the work of the sector used to be performed - some of it still is- by nonprofessional volunteers.  That will always be true, but the sector’s organizations now do much work that requires education and training and even certification.  Similarly, managers of the organizations have been people who have worked their way up, including yours truly, with no degree or certificate in managing nonprofits, My doctorate was in education policy and administration.

I don’t think we have very many MBAs managing nonprofits yet.  We do have some attorneys, and we have some MPAs, and I believe that the number is increasing.  I think there is a need for degrees and certificates.  There’s no reason why we have to continue learning only on-the-job.  We now have a body of knowledge throughout the sector, theories of leadership and management and case studies that can be used in programs to prepare managers and leaders.  I think many nonprofits can benefit from becoming involved with higher education.  To some extent many of them always have and many of them continue to do so.  Higher education can provide interns and volunteers for the work of the nonprofits, and the nonprofits provide laboratories and clinical experience for the students where they can put the theories from the classroom to practice in the real world.

There are other approaches.  For example, the American Society of Association Executives has extensive training programs and certification, and people are very proud of their certifications - CAE, Certified Association Executive.  The National Society for Fundraising Executives has certification for fundraisers, and there is an Alliance for Nonprofit Management which is dedicated to helping managers and leaders in the nonprofit sector build and enhance their skills and  learn some new ones, to be better managers.  There are state associations of nonprofit organizations that also provide a lot of training and professional development opportunities. 

Now, while all of the nonprofits working together with higher education can be wonderful and can be win-win for both sectors, there are some barriers.  Some nonprofits don’t have the luxury of the staff or time to accommodate interns.  I know at Independent Sector, internships for less than a year may not be worth the work involved in training persons because there won’t be enough time to get some concrete work out of the relationship.  And, sometimes we don’t have people who can really spend the time mentoring and coaching.  You all know that the best internship experience requires plenty of mentoring, time for discussion and processing the experience and drawing out the learning, and two-way evaluation - the intern evaluating his experience and, in turn, being evaluated.  This may be out of the reach of many of us nonprofits who would love to have interns.

Another barrier I’ve seen is the academic focus of the professors and practical focus of the practitioners and how sometimes it’s hard to get them to focus together.  This leads me to the next issue of “Should practice inform research?”  Absolutely, yes.  Resoundingly.  There is no option.  While I have a great deal of respect for pure research and understand that it often leads to wonderful, practical solutions, as the leader of a national nonprofit organization, I need applied research today.  When I look at research, it’s for what I can learn about what we can do better.  I prefer to see research that yields possible solutions to the issues with which I’m dealing. 

At Independent Sector, we have a biennial research forum that is very deliberately planned for practitioners and researchers as presenters and participants. Practitioners have a unique perspective on their field that should inform the hypotheses, the questions, and the methodology of research design.  While there’s an important role for universities in the preparation of nonprofit managers, there are other potential sources of training.  I’ve just mentioned some, but many corporations have extensive and excellent training programs for their own staff, and they’re often willing to make space available in the programs for the leaders of nonprofits.  I have seen some of them, and they are very good.

I really believe that it’s always very helpful to have a theoretical framework to apply to the totality of what we do, and to put what we do into a concept, into perspective.

I think that developing leaders, as well as seasoned leaders, can benefit from learning about leadership, from comparing their own leadership styles to the literature.  They can benefit from having their peers evaluate their leadership style, and they can benefit from observing other leaders in the act of leading.  I think most leaders can benefit from executive coaching, something that some business schools and many consultants can provide.  Unfortunately, it’s expensive, and too many nonprofit executives cannot afford it.  Another possible approach might be another type of Kellogg Fellows Program.  Everyone I know from higher education who has participated in this has considered it a peak experience.  There should be many ways to educate and train managers to accommodate the need and preferred styles of all of the different people in the sector.  Here’s an opportunity for foundations to help support such experiences.  The Kellogg Foundation is leading the way, not just because they are one of our supporters.  They really have always been leaders in many fields and in supporting education and training of managers and leaders for the sector.

I know that as difficult as it is for Independent Sector to have a line item in the budget for professional development - and we have been sort of blessed with financial stability - it’s much harder for many other organizations.   We still have to ad hoc it every year, but it is still a fantasy of mine.   We have developed an agenda at Independent Sector of encouraging the investment in people of the sector.  We have even started a new award to do that, to reward an organization that invests in developing leaders for the sector.

Finally, the last thing I would say is that it is very important for the leaders to know how to collaborate across the three sectors.  The roles across the three sectors are blurring all the time.  The boundaries are shifting constantly, and if we don’t learn to collaborate to be able to compete – sometimes we need to do both simultaneously - we will not be able to continue to be effective.  And so I think these programs of training and education for leadership in this sector also need to be collaborations, need to include government, business, the nonprofit sector, the higher education sector.  After all, many of you are educators, and we know that one of the best education strategies is to model what we’re trying to teach.  If leaders of this sector need to be able to collaborate and make those collaborations work, then one of the ways that educators and trainers can help them is to model it in their own program.

I forgot to mention, by the way, an agenda that we have developed at Independent Sector for the nonprofit sector that we have now presented to both Presidential election campaigns.  We’re sending it to everybody running for governor, and we will be using it, after the election, to try to educate them all about the nonprofit sector.  I think you’ll find it interesting, and I hope that some of you, when you go back to your own districts, will be able to use it with your own representatives.

Thank you so much.  I’m happy now to engage  in  some conversation.