Here are a few lessons I’ve learned, in no particular order:

1. You need to make sure that your mission, operations, and desired outcomes are aligned with each other.
2. Movements for equity, inclusion, and belonging have the potential to revolutionize both mission-based organizations and philanthropy.
3. Carefully tailored one-to-one desk-side coaching usually increases a worker’s effectiveness much more quickly than classroom training.
4. The nonprofit/philanthropic sector in Massachusetts is different from the analogous sector in any other state in the U.S.A.
5. Poverty is an insufficient reward for devoting one’s professional life to a nonprofit organization.
6. In a mission-based organization, many problems that initially appear to be about information and communication technology are really about organizational culture, knowledge management, or a combination of organizational culture and knowledge management.
7. Age discrimination is alive and well in mission-based organizations.
8. It makes much more sense to aim to run a nonprofit organization like a highly effective organization, rather than to aim to run it like a business. There’s nothing inherently superior (or inferior) about businesses.
9. Every human being is eligible to help others and to be helped by others; moreover, it’s a mistake to stigmatize being helped by others.
10. Bringing token members of various demographic minorities into the building isn’t enough; real power means being at the table when crucial information is disseminated and crucial decisions are made.
11. When you decide to solve a problem, you need help from the people who are deeply affected by the problem in order to determine:

• the real nature of the problem
• the possible solutions
• a clear and specific idea of what success in solving the problem would look like

I invite you to leave comments about what lessons you’ve learned from working with mission-based organizations!

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