Over the past year, we have completed nearly a dozen in-depth project portfolio analyses for our organization members interested in sharpening the day-to-day and strategic management of their communities of projects.

This work has provided valuable insights into financial vulnerabilities and strengths for each organization. It has also raised bigger strategic questions: where do we go from here? What is our right size and true impact potential on the world?

Emerging from these conversations are a set of hypotheses about the very purpose of the nonprofit sector itself. Is it simply a refuge for people to engage in meaningful work that typically lies outside the conventional “free market”? Is the purpose of fiscal sponsors then to let “a thousand flowers bloom”, as the saying goes? Or, is the sector here to provide instrumental solutions to “external” problems in the human and natural worlds? Is the purpose of fiscal sponsors then to aggregate solutions to these persistent problems, targeting particular impacts? The answer is both, of course. But the tension between these two kinds of purpose is ever present and often clouds our consideration of the most fundamental questions about scale and portfolio development strategy. Join us for a conversation about how to balance this tension and engage in intentional portfolio development.

This conversation may be of particular interest to both sponsors (of all models) and funders engaged in any area of social impact work.