The Foraker Group

We are grateful for a thoughtful and dedicated community of nonprofit leaders. Thank you for making the 2023 Leadership Summit a place of reflection and learning. Together, we are creating a resilient and reimagined Alaska! How will you take the concepts you learned back to your organization? For starters, you can log back into the conference app for the next 3 months (until August 12) to watch the recorded sessions and download the handouts. We have posted the slides we have available from the speakers. We encourage you to review what you have learned with your team – board, staff, and volunteers. If you took a professional portrait with Photo Emporium, you can find your photos to download here. Here are some additional ways you can continue to connect and integrate what you’ve learned: Executive Directors – join us for the next CEO… Read more »

Are you an Alaska nonprofit or tribal leader? Do you want to enhance your management skills and explore new techniques to effectively lead your organization? The Foraker Certificate in Nonprofit Management features courses developed to apply classroom teachings to your workplace, case studies directly related to issues facing Alaska nonprofits, and a network of fellow professionals to last a lifetime. We are now accepting applications for the fall 2023 cohort. The deadline to apply in June 9…. Read more »

The Alaska Community Foundation will be accepting applications through April 26 for grants from their Strengthening Organizations Fund. Awards will support nonprofit staff and boards of directors to access tools, develop practical skills, and cultivate systems needed to effectively achieve the organization’s mission in the areas of leadership development, organizational development, program development, collaboration and community engagement, and evaluation of effectiveness. Foraker is ready to stand beside you if you choose to engage with us through our capacity-building services for this grant…. Read more »

Foraker will raise rates starting July 1. The increases were carefully considered by the finance committee and approved by the Governance Board. Even with these rate increases, Foraker services are still available below Alaska’s market rates. To ensure that Foraker Partners fully understand the cost of our services, we continue to publish our complete rate structure on our website. The increase on July 1 will impact all our services including consulting, education programs, and cohort offerings. Financial Shared Services, Leadership Transition, and now From Bias to Belonging engagements will be billed as a scope of work and will also reflect the rate increases. The rates for joining as a Foraker Partner will not increase. (Partnership rates are assessed on a sliding scale based on annual budget size). As always, we will find… Read more »

A new season is upon us. April brings us many variations of religious holidays – Ramadan, Easter, Passover – reminders of new beginnings and a time to reimagine what is next for ourselves and our communities. I have been doing my own reflection as we work to prepare for the upcoming Leadership Summit happening virtually May 4 and in person May 11 & 12. Our Leadership Summits aren’t ordinary conferences where a group of experts stands at the front of the room to tell you what you should know. Instead, you are at the center of the space – holding and owning, thinking and talking, and reimagining together, from the thoughts being shared, what might come next. The genesis of this year’s Summit is actually found in a newsletter article… Read more »

We’re partnering with the National Council of Nonprofits to learn more about the workforce shortage in the nonprofit sector. Is your nonprofit struggling with unfilled vacancies, long waiting lists of people seeking services, chronic burnout, and other challenges like employee turnover? Or is the crisis of nonprofit workforce shortages a thing of the past? A major survey and report in late 2021 identified the scope of the problems related to nonprofit workforce shortages and identified both public policy and practical solutions that have helped organizations hire and retain the staff they need to advance their missions. We invite you to complete the survey and help the nonprofit sector tell its story…. Read more »

Alaska Board Match is an online match tool created to help nonprofits establish more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming board rooms. This site also assists in pairing Alaskans ready to serve local nonprofits in need of board members. Have you created an account for your organization? Find your next high performing board member today!… Read more »

Are you getting spam emails and phone calls about the Employee Retention Tax Credit?  While we don’t recommend engaging with the marketing calls, we DO recommend finding a trusted source to see if your nonprofit is eligible. If your organization experienced a shut-down due to COVID-19 in 2020 or 2021, and revenues declined as a result, you may be eligible.  The program is active through April 2024 for 2020 credits, and April 2025 for 2021 credits.  We recommend contacting your CPA firm (perhaps the one who prepares your 990) to help you determine if your organization is eligible, and assist with the filing.  These services will come with a fee, which could be calculated as a percentage of the credit received…. Read more »

Relationship reckoning – reorientation – reassessment. These words don’t just reflect trends coming out of the pandemic but also reflect behavior we see every day in our board rooms, staff rooms, volunteer pools, and maybe even in our personal relationships. We are indeed in a state of flux in our connections to one another and in the ways we choose to spend our time. I say this not as an outsider to it all but as a person who is both living it and seeing it across the sector. In my lifetime, the only point of mild comparison to what I see today is what happened after 9/11. Americans made one-time donations to a common cause more than ever before, and then shifted their giving and volunteerism dramatically to areas… Read more »

You’re invited to the 2023 Foraker Leadership Summit! Join us on May 11 & 12 at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage to stretch your thinking and discover ways to put new ideas into action. We’ll also host a virtual pre-conference on May 4. What’s the conference about? Each Summit has a theme to inspire and grow nonprofit and tribal leaders. This year the theme is Reimagining the Way We Work. The uncertainty of the last few years has tested our long-held assumptions about how and where we make mission work. And it has us thinking “Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way?” Our time together will be spent with the intention that we cannot simply “go back” to how we used to do things, but rather we must take what we have learned and move forward with strength. We… Read more »