By Janine Vanderburg, President/CEO In the nonprofit and government sectors, asset-based approaches have become the desired default when applied to our work with clients or constituents. We encourage staff to look for client or community assets, not deficits. We emphasize opportunities, not barriers. We’d prefer to focus on wellness, not illness. So why is it [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, Joining Vision and Action A critical part of successful grantwriting is identifying funders that are a good fit for your organization or programs. We've all had the experience of someone saying, "Oh, you should apply to this foundation—we hear that they are funding children, or the environment, etc." While it might be tempting [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, Founder, Joining Vision and Action How to Write a Grant that Will Get Funded In the 1990s, I stumbled across Eleanor Burns' Make a Quilt in a Day television series. As someone who had spent long hours creating quilts, I was instantly intrigued. The secret, it turned out, was a system of [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, President/CEO, JVA Consulting As more and more nonprofits are plunging into social enterprise and earned income strategies, one of the most challenging issues they can face is how to price their products and services. The question of how to charge or what to charge seems really perplexing, especially if they are transitioning from [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, President/CEO Yesterday I met a bright young woman in the University of Denver's business school, who interviewed me as part of a class research project on what it takes to be a successful consultant. Towards the end of the interview, she asked: What advice would you give training and organizational development graduate [...]
By Janine Vanderburg, President/CEO JVA Consulting A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Rio de Janeiro, taking in the extraordinary sights, sounds and spirit that made the New York Times list it as the # 1 destination to visit in 2013. Any visit to Rio has got to include the made-famous-by-the-song Ipanema [...]
Janine Vanderburg, CEO JVA Consulting Last week, my husband and I helped move our daughter Jackie from the house in Tacoma, Washington, that has been her home for the last few years while she attended the University of Puget Sound. We're doing what many of our boomer-age friends are doing these days—helping our kids launch [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, President/CEO JVA is not a social media company. Our work for our clients—most of whom are individuals and organizations involved in community and social change—is focused on strategic and business planning, fundraising, organizational development, program development and evaluation, communications with donors and members, and cutting edge research to inform all of it. [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, CEO, JVA Consulting It's snowing today, and I'm doing what many are doing—staying home, reading and watching movies. In my case, I can't get enough of House of Cards, the Netflix political drama series starring Kevin Spacey as Congressman Frank Underwood, a man who will stop at nothing in his attempts to [...]
By Janine Vanderburg Last year, I met Marci Alboher at the Encore Careers conference in California, after winning a Civic Ventures Launch Pad award for our concept of training people with sales and marketing background to become nonprofit fundraisers. She and I shared a passion for reinvention—and that the social change sector can benefit from [...]
