The FAMCare Blog

Increasingly, nonprofits face growing competition from their for-profit counterparts. These for-profit companies can often deliver services at a lower cost or offer higher financial returns to cities, thanks to their capacity and ability to raise investment capital as business entities. This leaves the non-profit social infrastructure in communities at a competitive disadvantage and requires a more thoughtful approach to determining the value of contract bids beyond simply financial criteria.

One of our nonprofit clients recently found themselves on the horns of this dilemma:

A long-term faithful donor had been indicted for bank fraud. Should the nonprofit return his most recent donation, and should they take his name off the scholarship he had been funding to educate young girls from Malawi out of the circle of poverty?

A troubling trend is beginning to emerge from the current political discussion: “Isn’t it time to look at taxing many tax-exempt organizations?”

As a nonprofit case worker or administrator, you have a lot of decisions to make every week. And unlike some other jobs, the decisions you make can have a huge impact, not only on your organization, but on the lives of the people in your care. Having the right nonprofit software solutions can make those decisions easier and gives you the information needed to make the best decisions for everyone involved.

About a year ago, President Trump signed the Family First Prevention Service Act into law. Social workers engaged in child and family care praised the legislation as the first “prevention” measure to help keep children safely with their families and avoid the traumatic experience of entering foster care. The act emphasized the importance of children growing up in families and helps ensure children are placed in the least restrictive, most family-like setting appropriate to their special needs when foster care is needed.

Last week we reported on the Ford Foundation’s $1 billion, five-year, Build program’s ongoing investment in the long-term capacity and sustainability of up to 300 social justice nonprofits. The Ford Foundation recognized that the popular donor trend of restricting funding to specific programs without accounting for infrastructure expenses was leading to a “nonprofit starvation cycle”, where charities cease to function because they can’t pay for overhead costs, such as administrative employees, computers and electric bills.