The New Social Sector

Just like any industry our sector needs great leaders to be successful.  While this gets talked about quite a bit there is great work happening with the Generating Change campaign who’s goal is:

“to encourage and enable funders to increase support for talent development in grantee organizations and to build a healthy leadership pipeline for the nonprofit sector.”

It’s time for action:

Generating Change clearly states that “both funders and nonprofits to make talent and leadership development an integral part of their work.”

Personally I’m aware of at least five top notch, young social sector leaders who are, instead of moving up the ranks into executive roles with their organization, are leaving or trying to leave for a private sector position.  Reasons sited include pay, lack of clear path to a leadership role, lack of appreciation/promotion, and burn out.

If organizations in our sector want to find and keep successful young leaders so that they have great executives a few years out, they must make professional development, salary and a clear career growth path a priority. 

At a personal level, you can (and should) advocate for these things within your organization so they know how to keep you!  We’re all good advocates for others but we owe it to our sector and the future of our work to advocate for ourselves so we can continue to do the work we love.

Join the Generation Change conversation on twitter with #genchange. 

Read more on this topic from the Philanthropy potluck blog