Non-profit directors from five counties gathered at the Bradford Memorial Library Wednesday for the first Executive Director Survival Series in El Dorado.
The event, hosted by the Community Foundation of Greater Butler County and the Sunlight Children’s Advocacy and Rights Foundation, brought in two speakers, Perry Schuckman, executive director of the Nonprofit Chamber of Service, and Dr. Barbara Andrews, an expert in leadership and organizational issues in the nonprofit sector.
“We are so thrilled that all of you came up here,” said Suzi Thien, SCARF executive director. “The response has been amazing. At the time the training was originally planned, we never would have dreamed the response would be so great. Our original capacity was 20, but due to the response, we lifted our maximum participant limit.”
Angie Bauer, director of the Community Foundation, echoed those sentiments.
“There’s a number of counties represented here,” she said.
Schuckman welcomed the group to the meeting.
“We are working to build collaboration with nonprofits in a 10-county area,” he said.
The nonprofit chamber received a grant to help them do this. He went on to give a brief history of the nonprofit chamber, which started in 2000-2001 to fill a need for a means of collaboration.
“One of the interesting things was they decided all of the board members had to be executive directors of nonprofits,” he said.
The nonprofit chamber currently has 200 members.
He then turned the session over to Andres.
She said when looking to start the collaboration process she looked up the word on Google, and it said it was the art of working together...with the enemy.”
She said in the nonprofit world sometimes they have to work with difficult people.
“Collaboration goes in all directions,” Andres continued.
“For me, survival means I need to have peers to help me out if I get in a bind or to be there for me if I get discouraged,” she said.
Collaborating also can help people to be better leaders and provide new ideas.
She looked at several areas of collaboration, including public money, marketing, private money, leadership, board and human resources.
“How can we collaborate and come together on different issues?” she asked the group.
Andres said it was important to talk about how they can collaborate, especially with the current economic situation.
Schuckman agreed they needed to work together to find common ground.
