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The winds of change blow steadily through the world of social services. Our colleagues in Child and Family Services recently shared with us the dramatic changes that are occurring in foster care and adoption. Attitudes toward adoption, secrecy, parental rights, and post adoption best practices are evolving rapidly, with the mind set of both the parents seeking to adopt and birth mothers who find themselves in need of surrogate parents for their child, changing dramatically.

In today’s world with the ever-changing technical offerings and social media giving us on the spot news sharing, it’s easy to stay continually distracted in both our personal and professional lives.

As an adopted person who was separated from my twin brother at one year of age, I especially have a strong commitment to this trend. Although, I could not have landed in a better household with very loving parents the entire process was certainly less structured than today’s process.

NPQ recently reported that when the board of directors of Sweet Briar College decided it was time to throw in the towel the alumnae, students, and faculty staged an uprising. The board did not factor in the fidelity and energy of the dedicated alumnae who were now mature, accomplished, and professional women. The proud graduates of Sweet Briar, an educational nonprofit, utilized social media to mobilize stakeholders and essentially establish a new governance system…then used the courts to take over the board.

As a leader in your organization it is critical that you know that your vendors can hurt you more than your customers. It’s a fact that although you can somewhat control how your clients impact your operations it’s not possible to control your vendors if they are successful with their other customers. If you end up with a good vendor it’s imperative that you demonstrate trust in them and show appreciation when they go the extra mile.

Many mornings we drive to work with the motivation and ambition to meet deadlines, but inevitably something crops up. There may be a staff absence and extra cases to cover, or too many urgent duty visits required (thereby saturating an already over- stretched team), or something unforeseen has happened on one of your own cases.

How does a nonprofit with a couple thousand Facebook likes and an Excel spreadsheet of donors utilize the digital leverage of big organizations? In the absence of physical contact, digital communication is the new virtual glue that links stakeholders to organizations. The digital universe, however, has rapidly expanded into a vast, crowded, and mercurial communication space that favors the leverage of large organizations.

The now familiar slogan that I have chosen as the title of this blog is not meant to be a political statement or an endorsement of any kind. Rather, I was musing over why Bernie Sanders, a 74- year-old self-described socialist, appeals overwhelmingly to Millennials.  I wanted to understand how these “Feel the Bern” Millennials differ from Baby Boomers and how the differences are impacting the social consciousness of America.