Nonprofit Management Certificate (7-Sessions)

The Center for Nonprofit Management (CNM) offers an intensive 7-session Nonprofit Management Certificate Program held across a 3-month period. Designed as a cohort-based learning experience, this program builds leadership capacity nonprofit professionals need to navigate the complex challenges facing the sector, from unprecedented burnout and funding instability to increasing demands on workforce transformation post pandemic.

Our teaching model centers peer learning, real world application and a collective sense-making; participants will move beyond traditional management frameworks to develop new and transformational approaches to systems change at work. The cohort model creates opportunities for sustained relationships with fellow nonprofit leaders, allowing you to learn alongside others grappling with similar challenges while bringing up your perspectives and experiences to the group.

Participants apply their learning through a culminating organization or community improvement project that speaks to the current real systems-level challenges. Throughout the program, you'll identify a meaningful challenge within your organization or community that requires more than technical fixes, but something that calls for shifts in relationships, power dynamics, mental models, or structural conditions.

• Leadership for Systems Change: Examine your positionality, power, and adaptive leadership approaches for navigating complexity and uncertainty
• Governance as Structure and Power: Understand board dynamics, equity in decision-making, and reimagining governance models
• Building Sustainable Teams: Address the workforce crisis through whole person-informed practices and structural solutions to burnout
• Resources as Values: Connect budgeting and financial management to organizational values, equity, and strategic priorities
• From Outputs to Transformation: Design programs and evaluation approaches that measure meaningful change, not just activities
• Relationships and Resources: Navigate funding relationships, power dynamics in philanthropy, and community-centered resource development

This program is designed for nonprofit professionals with at least three years of experience as managers who:

• Recognize that traditional management approaches aren't sufficient for the complex, interconnected challenges facing the sector and your communities
• Are in a role where they have some influence over organizational practices, team dynamics, program design, or community partnerships--and are ready to lead change
• Are open to examining their own positionality, mental models, and assumptions about how change happens, not just acquiring new technical skills
• Value learning alongside others who bring different experiences and perspectives, and are ready to both contribute to and learn from a cohort

This program serves professionals across various roles such as program directors, managers, emerging leaders, and senior staff who are navigating the realities of today's nonprofit workforce.

This program may not be the right fit if you're primarily seeking technical skills training without interest in systems-level change, you're unable to commit to the full 3-month cohort experience, or you don't currently have a context where you can apply and test your learning.

• Early Bird: $920 (ends February 5th)
• General Admission: $1,020
• Read CNM's Refund Policy

If you are a CNM Member or Scholarship Recipient, please send an email to [email protected] to inquire about elegibility and discount codes.

1. March 5th: Developing our Foundation & Situating Ourselves within the Landscape
2. March 19th: Your Mission, Values, Offerings and Meeting the Moment
3. April 2nd: Diversifying Funding Streams: Tools, Skills for Fund Development Strategies
4. April 16th: Incorporating a Whole Person Approach to Our People, Organizations and Ourselves
5. April 30th: Promoting Our Work: Understanding the Power of Narrative and Storytelling in Today's Media Landscape
6. May 14th: Articulating Your Approach to Management, Change and Leadership
7. May 28th: Leadership in Action: Project Presentations and Closing Celebration

Please note that Eventbrite will only populate your calendar automatically for the first session. You will need to manually add to your calendar the other 6 sessions.

All sessions are in-person, there is no hybrid /virtual alternative.

This Certificate Program includes:

• 7 sessions in person held across a 3-month period (every other week on Thursdays)
• Cohort-based learning with ongoing peer support and collective sense-making between sessions
• An organizational or community improvement project that addresses systems level challenges
• Progress presentations throughout the program with cohort feedback and facilitation support
• Final project presentations and celebration of learning

At the end of the program, participants will receive a certificate of completion after attending all sessions and presenting their completed project.

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