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| RESEARCH |
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Program: LISTENING POST PROJECT Sponsors: Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ewing Marion Kauf f man Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Surdna Foundation 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 five key fields of nonprofit activity – children and family services, elderly housing and services, community and economic development, and theaters and museums – and with 700 agencies that are serving as organizational “listening posts.” Through these agencies, the project is monitoring in a systematic and timely way what is happening 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. It is also organizing roundtables for practitioners and educators in the field. Topics addressed to date include strategies for coping with fiscal stress, nonprofit healthcare benefit coverage, nonprofit governance and accountability practices, and nonprofit access to investment capital. For the upcoming year, the project will target workforce issues and may field a second sounding on nonprofit governance.Results and Publications Communiqué #6: “Nonprofit Fiscal Trends and Challenges.” Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, 2007. Communiqué #5: “Investment Capital: The New Challenge for American Nonprofits.” 2006. Communiqué #4: “Nonprofit Governance and Accountability.” 2005. Communiqué #3: “The Health Benefits Squeeze: Implications for Nonprofit Organizations and Those They Serve.” 2004. Communiqué #2: “Stressed but Coping: Nonprofit Organizations and the Current Fiscal Crisis.” 2004. The full text of all project reports is available at www.jhu.edu/listeningpost/news/.
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