Nonprofit Centers Network, Author at The Nonprofit Centers Network

Jennifer Pedroni

25/Jul/2016

An event at our shared space has me changing my mind about the Olympics. For the past year I have been working with the tenants in our nonprofit center - the Community Partners Center for Health and Human Services (the Center) - on creating a collaborative environment designed to support partnerships among our organizations. We have a vision of providing one-stop, comprehensive services to families in the community. Over the course of our work together I have learned so much about what it takes to create the type of place where everyone feels comfortable and folks know each other. I am trusting that by creating the right environment individuals will make deeper connections. You can’t work well with someone unless you have strong and trusting relationships with them. Relationship before task is my mantra.

Foundation House opened its doors in January 2016, as the creation of The Counseling Foundation of Canada, Laidlaw Foundation and The Lawson Foundation. Over the months, the conversation evolved from a simple idea of having a collective roof over their heads to becoming a hub for philanthropic collaboration, learning and sharing.

The Alliance Center serves as a Colorado's Hub of Sustainability in downtown Denver, owned and operated by the nonprofit Alliance for Sustainable Colorado. Since 2004, this multi-tenant shared space has been home to nonprofits working on advancing issues surrounding the environment, alternative transportation, healthy communities and much more.

Although the majority of NCN’s members are based in the US and Canada, there are many shared spaces across the globe. This month’s featured member is the Visy Cares Hub in Sunshine, Victoria, Australia, a suburb of Melbourne. Opened in 2007, the Visy Cares Hub is Australia’s largest co-located youth service center that is managed by The Youth Junction Incorporated. Bringing together 20 not-for-profit youth services under one roof, this center is able to support approximately 18,000 disadvantaged youth people between the ages of 12 to 25 per year.

The Jessie Ball DuPont Center in Jacksonville, Florida brought new life to the city’s former public library, a unique mid-century modern structure designed to diffuse sunlight, sustain winds up to 150 mph, and support the weight of hundreds of thousands of books. Abandoned in 2005, the building found new life as home to 12 nonprofits a few years later. The Jessie Ball DuPont Center has a mission of providing affordable office space to nonprofits, nurturing collaboration among tenants, and raising the visibility of the nonprofit sector in Jacksonville’s civic life. The center operates as a program-related investment for the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund, who owns the building. The Fund recognizes that the building will not have as great a return as some of its other investments, but they are choosing to create true community asset in downtown Jacksonville. See the Jessie Ball DuPont Center for yourself by checking out its online photo gallery.

Karen Hart

16/May/2016

Having managed two very different youth focused not-for-profit centres (NFP Centres), one in the UK and one in Australia, for the past 15 years, I was inspired to seek out a better understanding of the critical success factors inherent in models that have performed well in their development and ongoing adaptability, within their local communities. Australia is slowly gaining momentum in the NFP Centre space and an Australian-American Fulbright Scholarship provided the opportunity for me to be based at the Nonprofit Centers Network (NCN), to explore ten of those centres in North America and Canada. Whilst this exploratory research revealed a burgeoning ecosystem of complex arrangements of social purpose real estate, elaborate funding and financing tapestries and interpersonal and professional multidisciplinary stakeholder relationships, driven by an array of missions and visions, the study highlighted clear and apparent themes throughout the NFP Centre’s. The shared experiences that arose out of the discursive interviews with the ten leaders of the NFP Centres provided a conceptual framework from which to create a set of organizing principles that seemed to offer an explanatory model that has utility and application, regardless of purpose, client population, demography and geography. As a result, the P-Model emerged and comprises three primary intersecting and integrated components of people,property and place, that coalesce to strengthen the purpose underpinning NFP Centre’s.