Stable, Resilient, Adaptive: Tools to Take Us Forward This is the time for Alaskans, and especially nonprofit board and staff, to think big. The challenges facing us are significant. The needs in our communities are great. How do we begin? That’s our exploration at the 2017 Foraker Leadership Summit. This summit will be marked not just by envisioning new possibilities, but also by laying out a course for turning our dreams into reality. We will explore ways of working that are anchored by skills and tools we already know and enhanced by new ones that will take us where we need to go. It will be a time to look again at what makes us resilient. This is our charge as nonprofit leaders – to balance the need for stability… Read more »

Thanksgiving often brings us an opportunity to share our time in our own or a friend’s home. Home can conjure up both good thoughts and also remind us of life’s challenges. I am thankful for many definitions of home. One of those definitions is the nonprofit sector itself. This home has a strong foundation that we build upon every day. Our sector is built on community. We are on the ground working with our neighbors and working to improve the places we live. We are woven together by our diverse people, neighborhoods, and country, and we are stronger as a result. Our sector is built on partnerships. We are relationship-based and we know that each connection with other organizations, businesses, and government strengthens our work and creates more lasting success…. Read more »

December 1, 2016 has been marked on the calendar of many nonprofit executives, human resources professionals, and payroll departments as the date that changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) were slated to go into effect. Those changes doubled the federal, annual minimum threshold for exempt positions to $47,476 ($913 per week) with automatic updates every three years. The rule was announced by the U.S. Labor Department in May. Today, however, a federal judge hit the pause button on the new changes. The judge agreed with arguments made in an emergency motion for a preliminary injunction filed by several states. The motion maintained that the Department of Labor overstepped its bounds with the significant increase made to the minimum threshold for exempt employees and the automatic updates. So, now… Read more »

Foraker CEO Laurie Wolf has joined the steering committee for Welcoming Anchorage, which is a special project of Anchorage’s First Lady Mara Kimmel and part of a national movement. Ms. Kimmel released the following statement yesterday and as we continue to be anchored to our core values, we fully support these important hallmarks of a healthy community. We welcome the opportunity to stand beside many other nonprofits and efforts across our state that share our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion for all Alaskans. You can find more information here about Welcoming Anchorage. Dear Welcoming Anchorage friend, Home is a place that we should all feel safe and secure.  Anchorage is our home.  Whether we are from a village upstream from where our city now sits, or a war torn community half-way around… Read more »

We are pleased to let you know that we have restructured the Alaska Funding Guide, which lists funders who support Alaska nonprofits and projects. It also includes a few helpful grant writing tips. The guide is a great complement to our grant writing book and the classes we offer at Foraker. Most important, you can continue to search for funders by areas of sector and project interests. You also still have the ability to save and print your searches for your own planning. In the past we included a large amount of information in the guide that is duplicated on the websites for funders. That research took a lot of staff time and we had to charge a subscription fee to cover our expenses. That’s changed. We have reduced the… Read more »

As part of its 2016 Salary & Benefits Survey, Foraker gathered data on pay equity in Alaska’s nonprofit sector, This is the first time such data has been compiled for our state. The report highlights the results for the top-level employees in the nonprofit workplace. We understand that this issue is much deeper and wider than simply the pay of those employees. To that end, we encourage everyone reading and using this report to consider the best and emerging practices we offer in the closing section and apply them to every job classification in your workplace. Our goal is to find pay equity across all job classifications throughout the sector. Fair and equitable pay is the law in our country, and yet we have more work to do, both in and out of the nonprofit sector, to achieve pay equity. Alaska is no different…. Read more »

One of the more fun and rewarding parts of our work is watching the sheer joy of nonprofit board and staff members when things “click” for them. Literally we see light in their faces and relief in their smile. More and more we have been experiencing this around the sometimes dreaded, sometimes feared, responsibility of fundraising. I have focused for a long time on taking the fear and mystery out of this work and doing all that we can to make it fun and accessible, while still incorporating the science of the profession. Yes, fundraising is an art and a science. The art is our organizational culture and core values and the way we talk and think about the work. The science is rooted in a growing field of evidence-based… Read more »

The 2016 Foraker Group Salary & Benefits Survey© is now available for purchase. We’re pleased that this year we have more organizations represented in this report than at any time in the past. Through this research we are able to provide valuable information to nonprofit leaders to help as they make decisions on compensation. The results in this report include salary data, which is aggregated for the state as a whole and is also broken down by region, budget size, and number of employees. You’ll find tables that summarize a variety of benefits offered by participating organizations. And, for the first time this year, we also report on findings related to gender pay equity in Alaska’s nonprofit sector. You can purchase the survey on our product’s page here. If your organization participated in the survey,… Read more »

Earlier this year, Foraker and the funding partners of the Pre-Development program placed a hold on accepting new projects. We used that time to fulfill a major commitment to complete deferred maintenance that was critical for every domestic violence shelter in Alaska. During this time, too, the funding partners looked at options for moving forward with new construction projects during this time of economic challenge. The good news is that after a close analysis Foraker and the funders have determined that Pre-D still fills a gap in services to the nonprofit sector. We also determined that we were ready for a slight adjustment to the way we operate the program. As a result, we have made two changes in the program structure. First, the Denali Commission, a founding funder of… Read more »

Anchorage, AK – A consortium of five northwest state nonprofit associations has released a comprehensive study on the capacity, strengths, and challenges of the region’s nonprofit sector. The 2016 Northwest Nonprofit Capacity Report: Our Strengths – Our Challenges – Our Resilience was developed using survey data from over 1,000 nonprofits in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The report highlights the progress nonprofits are making in creating a resilient sector. The study specifically focuses on four core areas for building capacity: mission effectiveness, collaboration, public policy, and use of data and evaluation. The data points to some progress that nonprofits have made, but says that progress is limited. According to the report, all stakeholders – including nonprofit organizations, funders, and government – share the responsibility to support and enhance the… Read more »