Growth Through Governance: What Every Jewish Nonprofit Leader Needs To Know

Whether you serve as a volunteer leader, or are on staff, this book, “Growth Through Governance”, which provides a Jewish approach to nonprofit governance, offers helpful insights and techniques to enhance your role in your organization’s operation. In this book, we’ll talk about making better decisions in your organizations. We will provide tips to running your board meetings, dealing with day-to-matters in the organization, and fundraising. For the volunteer leader or team manager, this book is worth buying just for the entirely original essays “How to Run a Good Meeting” and “Managing the Unplanned Project—and Why You’d Rather Not.” Anyone concerned about insufficient volunteer power will find challenge and food for thought in Chapter 5, “Board and Committee Leadership,” and Chapter 7, “People Management,” while strategists in all walks of nonprofit life will appreciate the selection of “Strategic Issues Most Synagogues Face.” Jewish text lovers will find the shiurim (lessons from Jewish text) to offer serious, fresh scholarship while specifically introducing the governance subject matter of each chapter. I believe my “Ethics” essay positions this book among the strictest and most careful approaches to ethics on the scene. This book is also a one-stop shop for learning about professional project management, contemporary productivity practices like Scrum and Pomodoro, and high-level metrics of organizational capability or capacity, newly and originally applied to nonprofit and specifically Jewish organizations, all explained in plain English and put in the context of spiritual nonprofit leadership. I hope the book will be entertaining, too. Filled with stories from the trenches, illustrative characters like worker bees, Dominators and Uncle Moe, and concepts like legitimacy, stagnation, working boards, the rejection-rework cycle, inspiration points and smiley-face messaging, I hope this book will be both useful and fun to read. The book is intended for a general audience, but the footnotes are intended to appeal to a scholarly audience. I have not footnoted statements which stem from common experience or which are my opinion. Footnotes offer information, support my interpretations, or highlight disagreements and areas of continuing research. At times the footnotes take excursions from the main topic, in the interest of thoroughly investigating questions of scholarship.