An excerpt from Linking Mission to Money

Chapter 2 pp. 4-5 "Your First Duty is to Sustain Mission"

The primary task of a nonprofit organization is to be a reliable provider of a service that fulfills a useful need in your community. Notice that I didn't say that the organization's primary task is to grow or to do more than last year or even to be the best in the country. There are also nonprofits that are created for short-term purposes and that are intended to disappear in a year or two, but in this book I will focus on nonprofits that are intended to exist in the long term.

My emphasis on fulfillment of community need is based on the very existence of the notion of tax exemption, which allows people to deduct from their taxable income their charitable contributions to your organization. Most people refer to tax-exempt organizations as simply nonprofits. It is likely that your organization is a "501(c)(3)", which refers to the section of the Internal Revenue Code which grants your organization tax exempt status by the U.S. government. That status was granted because you are filling a community need. In fact, unless it is very small, every year your organization files a Form 990 with the IRS describing how your mission fulfills a community need and listing what you have done in the past year to fulfill that mission. If the IRS were to disagree that your activities continue to fulfill a community need, it has the ability to revoke your tax exempt status.

As a board member of a nonprofit, one of your most basic duties is to ensure that your assigned mission will be fulfilled as long as the community has that need. I refer to this duty-the ability to be there when you are most needed-as sustainability. Throughout this book I will repeatedly argue that sustainability should form the foundation of every decision the board makes. While this duty sounds obvious, it is actually difficult to execute and easy to forget amidst the myriad small decisions a board must continually confront. Many nonprofits lurch from crisis to crisis. They expand until economic recessions put them in financial crises that force them to cut back on services, often when the community need is the greatest. Whether you are a nonprofit in the arts, social services, healthcare, or another arena, the need for what you do doesn't go away when the economy falters. In fact it is likely that your role is even more central to the vitality of your community when the chips are down.

Sustaining the mission of your organization is your primary task as a board member. The primacy of sustainability forms the basis for how each board member should approach financial decisions. Steady, reliable, and predictable are the right words, but they run up against growth, expansion, and "meeting the need." When you think about your mission, you should always precede every major board decision that has financial implications with the question, "How long can we sustain this change or ensure we will be able to provide this service?"

The dilemma of sustainability versus growth pervades the nonprofit world and you have to decide early on how your organization will deal with it. Is it better to provide a service and then suspend it when finances are tight? Or is it better to not provide the service at all? There is no clear cut answer, nor is it always an either/or choice.