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11/Jul/2016

NCN helps nonprofit organizations share many kinds of organizational infrastructure – not just space. You may see or hear us talk about “shared services” from time to time. We define shared services broadly as the collaborative use of resources across traditional organizational boundaries. Multiple organizations, or multiple programs within a larger organization, establish shared services to collaboratively and more efficiently make use of equipment, staff, program resources, and much more. Most nonprofit organizations have a traditional organizational model with their own core operations such as purchasing, public relations, human resources, IT support, equipment, and workspace. Financial pressures drive nonprofit organizations to look for new, cost-effective structures. Shared services offer a long-term solution by allocating much-needed resources to multiple organizations for a fee. Virtually any resource that does not uniquely fulfill an organization’s mission has the potential to be shared, including, but not limited to, things like busses, IT, software, reception, purchasing services, payroll, HR, volunteer management, and client intake. Why should my organization consider shared services? There are five key benefits:


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05/Jul/2016

That’s what I remembered about active shooter training when I heard a scream in the hallway while on a call with a client last week. I was at the Alliance Center, where NCN is a tenant, in a small conference room, surrounded by glass. I saw people running down the hall, shouting that someone had a gun. Then, I tried to hide in the tiny room when I saw a man walk by pointing a gun. After he passed, I darted to the bathroom across the hall since I didn’t have a safe exit route. As luck (if you can call it that) would have it, the shooter only wanted to harm his soon-to-be ex-wife and himself, not the rest of us.


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20/Jun/2016

In most for-profit coworking models, free, all-you-can-drink coffee is included in your membership fee. Coffee helps to animate the space, and gives people a reason to get away from their desks Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, argues that to encourage innovation and ideas, people need to have the opportunity to “collide” with one another, to interact. In a shared space, the common coffee pot, helps to provide an opportunity for partners to interact – because let’s face it, coffee is a necessity in the working world.


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14/Jun/2016

Recently I’ve read a lot of articles about the dark side of collaboration and how collaborations can fall apart. I don’t disagree – collaboration is hard and we often don’t have the tools to get it right. La Piana’s article speaks to the challenges of the nonprofit competitive environment and the often ineffective processes around collaboration – sometimes not resulting in any real decisions being made. These are great points.


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25/May/2016

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...


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.


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09/May/2016

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.


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03/May/2016

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...


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