LISTENING POST PROJECT
Project: LISTENING POST PROJECT
Sonsors: Carnegie Corporation of New York, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Surdna Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Kresge Founda-tion, and the Corporation for National and Community Service
Staff: Lester Salamon, Stephanie Geller, Kasey Spence, Hillary Belzer, and Mimi Bilzor
Purpose and Approach
The Listening Post Project is designed to improve the ability of nonprofit organizations to respond in a timely fashion to a range of critical challenges they are facing. Traditional venues for sharing innovative practices, such as annual conferences and journal articles, cannot keep up with today’s extremely dynamic environment. Yet, in contrast to the great quantity of information available on the for-profit and public sectors, developments in the nonprofit sector have not been documented in a systematic way.
To fill this gap, we are partnering with nonprofit umbrella organizations in four key fields – children and family services, elderly housing and services, community and economic development, and arts and culture – and with over 1,000 local nonprofit organizations that are serving as organizational “listening posts.” Through these groups, the project is monitoring in a systematic and timely way what is happen-ing to nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and how they are responding. The project is summarizing the resulting insights in a series of quick turn-around communiqués available on the Center for Civil So-ciety Studies website. It is also organizing roundtables for practitioners and educators in the field.
Topics addressed to date include strategies for coping with fiscal stress, nonprofit governance and ac-countability practices, nonprofit access to investment capital, recruitment and retention issues, policy advocacy and lobbying, use of information technologies, and impacts of the current economic crisis. For the upcoming year, the project will explore issues relating to nonprofit benefits, including health benefits and pension plans, among other topics.
Results and Publications
Communiqué #12: “Shovel-Ready’ but Stalled: Nonprofit Infrastructure Projects Ready for Economic Recovery Support” 2009.
Communiqué #11: “Nonprofit Policy Priorities for the New Administration” 2008.
Communiqué #10: “Report on the Nonprofit Workforce Roundtable” 2008.
Communiqué #9: “Nonprofit America: A Force for Democracy?” 2008.
Communiqué #8: “The Nonprofit Workforce Crisis: Real or Imagined?” 2007.
The full text of all project reports is available at ccss.jhu.edu.
