Midsummer Glory

First, a view of my lillies under lamplight. Have you noticed that twilight is falling a little earlier on these midsummer eves?

I trust your garden is achieving midsummer glory, given that ours is just about the only part of the country not sweltering or parching or apocalyptic storming these days. This is why we endure and even grow to love the rain, people!

Our glorious weather is matched only by our glorious news:

• We gave away more than $2 million this month! READ MORE
• Our Communicating for Good gathering was a sold out success. Amy Sample Ward of NTEN and Laura Mansfield of PAGATIM gave marvelous presentations with a lot of content to digest. I felt a wave of enthusiastic passion surge through the room. Elisa Klein was kind enough to cover it all in her Portland Society Page. The livestream did not go well, as it got locked on the first slide during Amy's presentation. The good news is that we learned from the failure and will be better positioned for livestreaming in the future. And we captured the event for your delayed listening and viewing pleasure and collected resources into a list with links. READ MORE
• MMT also recently hosted Nonprofit Finance Fund training sessions at our office to help area foundations better understand nonprofit financial essentials and challenges. NFF's website has a long list of useful free resources, including a financial self assesment worksheet, a guide to navigatiing changing times, state of the sector survey results, articles on nonprofit capitalization, achieving financial sustainability, scaling impact and facilities project planning, among many others. Much of NFF's presentation focused on social sector organizations, including 10 Finance Essentials for Social Sector Leaders.

We came across a few other items we bet you'd like to know about:

• Blue Avocado advises nonprofits to ditch the board composition matrix and recruit members for what they do rather than what they are.
• NAO (Nonprofit Association of Oregon) is offering a workshop on mobilizing board members to raise more money by Andy Robinson on August 24, 2012.
• The latest report on Arts & Economic Prosperity IV estimates that the nonprofit arts and culture industry in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties generates more than $253 million in annual economic activity. READ MORE

I'm keeping this short so you can return to the glorious midsummer out of doors, but not before I leave you with moments of wonder and joy and levity.

In the human-beings-continue-to-amaze-me department, just look what our species is doing with dirty cars! And how we make shadow face art! And crowdsourcing compassion!

But wait, there's more! If you use twitter, you may have already met him, but if not, may I introduce NONPROFIT HULK (the latest in hulk twitter memes). Does NONPROFITHULK say what everybody wants to say?

Have a very sporting next couple of weeks everbody!