Through the Mastermind Program we help educational nonprofit leaders explore and embrace the knowledge, skills and mindsets needed to manage sustainable businesses, deliver meaningful programs, and prepare for valuable partnership opportunities. This easy to use workbook is designed to help you organize and prepare for funding to achieve your mission.

Here you’ll find a series of prompts and exercises to help identify and articulate personal values, organizational goals, desirable leadership qualities, brand message, program impact, and partnership opportunities.

The guiding questions are perfect for individual reflection and journaling, and can be used for board planning and team visioning workshops. Once completed, you’ll have the rationale and language to begin conversations with funders and other stakeholders.

Each section of the workbook includes:

• Big Idea: Explains what each essential is, why it’s important and how it helps build better nonprofits

• Key Concepts: Includes important words and phrases

• Prompts: Open-ended and provocative questions that inspire discovery of the big idea

• Task: An activity that reinforces the big idea and supports development of an executive summary

• Resources: Examples, templates, videos and other media that support the big idea

Self-Reflection is the ability to observe and evaluate our thinking, emotions, and behaviors. Articulating our personal values, mindsets, habits and desirable outcomes, helps us make better decisions and live more fulfilling lives. When we are operating in alignment with the vision we hold for our highest self, we are happier and can accomplish our goals with ease.

Self-reflection helps us manage our emotions and improve relationships with family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, partners and all of nature. Here we will focus on self-reflection as it relates to our work and community service.

Meaningful Service is action that is both personally relevant and important to the community. When our programs reflect the vision we have for neighborhood improvement they tend to be more exciting, more rewarding and have a greater impact.

Participating in intentional service is a powerful experience that helps to maintain motivation, improve confidence and deliver effective community service programs. When the work is meaningful we become passionate and informed advocates for our causes and we’re able to describe a world made better because of our efforts.

Service Leadership is a management style and a process that prioritizes the greater good over individual interests. Nonprofit Service Leaders serve employees, program participants and the community with humility, intention and care. When considering service leadership the goal is to understand service as a leadership model and discuss its significance, characteristics and role in nonprofit management.

What distinguishes service leadership from other leadership models is the connection to community and the commitment to developing others holistically. It’s a compassionate approach to management that results in high morale, increased engagement, strong ethical standards for the organization, and the development of future leaders.

Inquiry and Research are both about gathering information. Inquiry involves asking and answering questions, while research is an investigation and review of content and data to reach a conclusion.

Information gathering is an essential part of the nonprofit development process. As we are positioning ourselves to solve problems in our communities, we want to be able to demonstrate knowledge of our cause and readiness to take on the challenge.

We have to be able to answer the ‘Who, What, Where, When, Why and How’ questions easily and consistently when writing proposals and sharing our story with stakeholders.