Two recent pieces make me wonder if the pendulum is shifting on the open floor plan model. There’s no changing the fact that the trend in workspaces is toward smaller footprints, leaner offices, more mobile furniture and flexible set-ups.
Two recent pieces make me wonder if the pendulum is shifting on the open floor plan model. There’s no changing the fact that the trend in workspaces is toward smaller footprints, leaner offices, more mobile furniture and flexible set-ups.
A recent question on Ask-NCN reminded me of a workshop I attended during our 2015 Building Opportunities Conference in Vancouver, BC on Identifying and Managing Risk in Social Purpose Real Estate. The presenter that resonated most with me was Mandy Hansen of Insight Specialty Consulting, who focused on ways that you can understand risk, especially risk from partnership. She suggested that all social purpose real estate projects (including nonprofit centers) conduct a “Risk Workshop,” a constructive way to assess potential issues. Here are the 4 steps to run your own Risk Workshop...
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.
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.
Facilitating Energize: High Impact Shared Spaces in Philadelphia was the highlight of the month of April from me. It is rare that we have so many practitioners from all across the country in one room – the energy is amazing! As we planned the curriculum, we wanted to make sure that there was plenty of time for peer learning.
Just back from an action-packed week in Philadelphia! We had a sold-out Energize training on Wednesday and the mix of long-standing centers and new projects was invigorating! On Thursday, we piloted Streamlining Social Good: Overcoming Barriers to Nonprofit Resource Sharing. A terrific group of speakers, moderated by Syon Bhanot of Swarthmore College, led us through lots of concepts nonprofits don’t usually contemplate. Here are my take-aways...
When I’m traveling, I like to stop by and visit our members when I can. To date, I’ve visited 41 different nonprofit centers around the US and Canada – of course, Denver has a slew of shared spaces, so it’s easy to rack up the numbers. Most recently I was in Northern Kentucky, and I stopped by The Clearinghouse, cSpace, and The Plantory in an epic shared space road trip.
A great time in Washington DC this week for the 1,300 or so attendees at the Council on Foundations’ Future of Community Conference. NCN was honored to be a part of the program. Lots of stimulating presentations and conversations. Check out the highlights!
In March, the Nonprofit Centers Network hosted a webinar on . During the webinar, I shared three steps for developing an evaluation strategy, which I will also share with you today. Check out the basics and the details here!