Rising Leaf’s Nonprofit Focus
Finding the best path forward - an important journey for nonprofits and nonprofit professionals.
David and I were working in the “for profit” world for less than a year after college when we started to think of going into some kind of overseas nonprofit endeavor. Six months later, we were going through a 4-month cross-cultural prep program and community service in the inner-city communities of South Central Los Angeles. From there we headed to Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, teaching in international schools, heading up guest houses, and generally making ourselves useful for 2 years.
As soon as we got back, we briefly picked up some “for profit” jobs again, with David back to his previous occupation of sign design and me working the ubiquitous Mall Job. Then it was on to graduate school at James Madison University in Virginia, and we never looked back – nonprofits from then on!
Nonprofits come in all sizes, in all sorts of communities, and for all sorts of missions, but midsize and smaller nonprofits, especially those in rural and small towns, have needs all their own. You get a lot of people who think they understand what a “midsize” or “small” nonprofit is, but it turns out, there’s no consensus. And what a rural or small town is? You have to live it to really understand it. Combine midsize or smaller nonprofits with rural and small towns, and you’ve really got something most folks just aren’t very familiar with.
Awhile back, I suggested to a consultant that a good interview and article on small town/rural efforts would be especially helpful to people serving in those areas. When I saw the article a couple of months later, the program discussed was great, but it wasn’t in a small town at all. I asked the writer about it, and they didn’t realize that the town they picked (a city of about 50,000), wasn’t actually a small town, and definitely wasn’t anywhere nearly rural. I mean, it was smaller than Atlanta or Dallas, right? Didn’t that make it a small town? Nope. Nonprofits we’ve worked with in rural and small towns in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, or central Kansas, or small-town Alabama are a lot different from the mid-size and small nonprofits in the urban areas of Metro Atlanta or the inner city of Los Angeles! And they are extremely different from the large nonprofits that span the US!
Another time, I was helping put together a seminar on serving in small towns and rural areas. It was going to be at a conference where most folks would be coming from cities and big metro areas. The seminar coordinators thought our seminar would get maybe 30-40 people, if that many. But instead, we were packed with standing room only and people lining all the walls! There was such a need among those who serve in small towns and rural areas for help – even just simple understanding of what these organizations face day-to-day! And typically, those small town and rural folks are serving in small to mid-size organizations, with limited budgets, and a whole lot more work to do than they can ever handle.
As David and I started thinking about what kinds of nonprofits we wanted to serve, we realized that even though we’ve been working for over 10 years in Metro-Atlanta, have led programs with nonprofits in the Greensboro/Lexington area of NC, and got our start in nonprofits in the inner city area of Los Angeles, small and midsize organizations in small towns and rural areas are very close to our hearts.
In future posts, we’ll talk about plenty of topics that relate to all nonprofits. David will address issues in higher education and career growth, and we will both focus on growing programs wherever they are planted. But we hope that most of what we say, regardless of how applicable it is to a larger city or metro area, is also applicable in part in the small town and rural locales where so many of our country’s nonprofits serve.
We’re looking forward to getting to know you and working together!