By Kate Zilke and Brett Mayfield The COVID-19 pandemic has made for a year of adjustments in almost every aspect of our lives to protect the health of our communities––including the ways we collaborate to make a social impact. From virtual staff meetings to working from our laptops, nonprofits have needed to implement a lot of technology to continue reaching their goals. After an entire year, what technologies have
By Brett Mayfield Nonprofit boards are a governing body of individuals responsible for the organizations’ affairs and conduct (Herman & Renz, 2000). While board members play a vital role in nonprofit management, little research exists about these individuals’ active roles in collaboration with other organizations. With little discussion about what board members bring to the table, leaders may not know what is valuable to look for in new members
By Brett Mayfield When non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as nonprofits seek to make an impact and achieve goals, they need the organizational capacity to do so. In recent decades, capacity-building has become more and more popular among NGOs worldwide. With such a wide variety of social issues to be tackled and few reliable capacity measures available to NGOs, Shumate et al. developed the Nonprofit Capacity Instrument in 2017. They
By Brett Mayfield Health inequalities continue to pose a significant public health problem, so nonprofit leaders often must intervene with this challenge head-on. However, these interventions are usually not widely practiced or not delivered as initially planned, even though effective evidence-based interventions are available today. Unfortunately, ongoing inequalities continue in the public health sphere because organizations often face significant barriers to implementing these interventions. To confront these health disparities,
By Brett Mayfield In 1996, a group of six foster agencies joined together to try something different. In the wake of funding threats and a scarcity of resources, these providers united to continue pursuing their missions toward foster youth advocacy. Thus was the birth of the Multi-Agency Alliance for Children (MAAC). Based in Atlanta, Georgia, MAAC arranges home options and coordinates additional services for over 1,000 foster care youth across
At NNSI, we have an ambitious goal – a scary ambitious goal for an academic research lab. But before I get to that, let me explain. We’ve been around eight years. Eight years – we’ve published groundbreaking research on networks for social impact. A sample includes research that: shows that collaboration is a lousy way to improve nonprofit capacity, demonstrates how to scale-up evidence-based social interventions across interorganizational systems, and
