Over the past several years, the City of Columbus, Ohio has made significant investments in school and afterschool programming. In the proposed 2025 budget, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther allocated $26.8 million for summer, after-school, and job-readiness programming to keep Columbus youth safe, active, and engaged. This substantial investment underscores the city’s commitment to creating safe, structured environments for youth. By prioritizing afterschool programming, the city ensu

For nonprofit leaders overseeing programs across multiple locations or for collaboratives made up of many independent organizations, answering the question “What impact are we making?” is rarely simple. Each site or partner organization operates within its own community context. Staff may use different tools, track outcomes in different ways, and report to multiple stakeholders with overlapping requirements. Over time, this leads to fragmented data, labor-intensive reporting

Staff turnover in nonprofits is rarely a recruiting problem. More often, it is an infrastructure problem. When systems are weak, people become the system. Institutional knowledge lives in someone’s inbox. Donor relationships depend on one development officer’s memory. Program outcomes exist in scattered spreadsheets. Grant reporting depends on one staff member who knows where everything is.

A recent LinkedIn post raised a difficult question for the nonprofit sector. It stated that roughly $110 billion in funding has disappeared since January 2025. The author broke down the numbers in a way that made the scale clear. Government funding has long made up a meaningful share of nonprofit revenue. When that support declines, the ripple effects reach every program, every team, and every community served. The post then explored whether private philanthropy could close t

The path to meaningful measurement begins at the intersection of purpose and performance. This guide explores how mission‑driven organizations can create, track, and use metrics that truly advance their core purpose rather than distract from it.