Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity Initiative
Overview and Principles
Blueprint for Accountability
Integrity Workshops
Integrity Initiative Supporters
Questions?
CAN’s Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity Initiative is a thoughtful response to the nationwide increase of nonprofit watchdogging and accelerating calls for accountability by donors, policy makers, and the general public. The initiative works to:
- Guarantee that proposed regulations actually reduce the risk of misuse of resources.
- Help nonprofits understand the audiences to whom they are accountable.
- Provide practical tools to nonprofits for demonstrating their accountability through enhanced practices, behaviors, and values.
The Initiative includes a Nonprofit Integrity White Paper and Tool Kit (PDF), workshops, and a public policy effort working to ensure that legislation and regulations aiming to improve nonprofit accountability are both feasible and effective.
The Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity Initiative calls for nonprofits to voluntarily adopt an organizational culture and professional practices that make accountability more visible and transparent. Each nonprofit is asked to articulate and internalize the behaviors and practices that visibly reflect the moral values of their organizational culture while meeting the expectations of their audiences.
In CAN’s view, the following principles and activities are necessary for demonstrating the culture of accountability and integrity throughout California’s nonprofit sector:
- Nurture the existing, vibrant culture of nonprofit compliance into a statewide nonprofit culture of self-regulation that makes accountability an everyday activity.
- Embed responsibility for being accountable in individual nonprofits.
- Adopt a more visible and transparent culture and practice of accountability as a voluntary, not mandatory, process.
- Work with media to reframe the public discussion about nonprofit practice and the role nonprofits play in society.
- Work with leadership groups to develop and provide tools and resources that help nonprofits and philanthropy take specific, concrete steps toward more visible and transparent accountability.
- Nonprofits need additional funding to do accountability well, but the lack of adequate funding and other barriers to accountability do not release nonprofits from the responsibility to improve the transparency of their practices and behaviors.
The short version of CAN’s white paper and tool kit on nonprofit integrity, Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity: A Blueprint for Demonstrating Nonprofit Accountability, is now available! It outlines the basic principles and aspects of nonprofit integrity.
The long version will be available soon. It will provide a comprehensive tool kit for assessing how well your organization is demonstrating accountability to multiple audiences. Covering a wide range of areas – including governance, culture, internal controls, reporting, financial practices, audits, management, compensation, and public trust – it asks you to examine nearly 100 specific aspects of your organization to see how they measure up against laws, regulations, and best practices in the nonprofit sector. It then gives guidelines for understanding your self-assessment and addressing any challenges you uncovered as you went through this step-by-step examination of your organization.
It is a springboard for proving your integrity to your donors, contractors, constituents, public and other key stakeholders -- and a must for all California nonprofits! Sign up here to be notified of its release.
These one-day workshops orient nonprofits of all shapes and sizes to the essentials of embedding accountability into their organizational culture. Based on Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity: A Blueprint for Demonstrating Accountability, these workshops provide practical ways to prove to your multiple stakeholders that your organization is rock-solid in the trust and effectiveness departments. Workshops are held in partnership with community organizations. If you'd like to schedule one in your area, please e-mail Tarra McFadden or call her at (213) 347-2070, ext. 208. For more information on the workshops, click here.
CAN’s Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity Initiative is generously supported by the S. Mark Taper Foundation, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison.
Questions about the Ensuring Nonprofit Integrity Initiative? Please e-mail Flo Green or call her at (213) 347-2070, ext. 204.
