November is Nonprofit Awareness Month, a time that celebrates and promotes the support of nonprofits in the United States. This month is especially relevant to Cleveland, which has a long and thriving history of nonprofit innovation—the city is the birthplace of the first community chest (a predecessor of the United Way) in 1913, created the first community foundation in the world (the Cleveland Foundation) in 1914, and is home to a world-renowned healthcare infrastructure.
It comes at no surprise then that Cleveland’s economic prosperity and wealth during the early part of the 1900s also spawned an active philanthropic movement here, resulting in over 2,000 nonprofits in the Greater Cleveland area today. It’s also why the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences began offering the Master of Nonprofit Organizations (MNO) program—it’s one of the first nonprofit leadership programs in the U.S. and one of just nine graduate programs to be fully-accredited by the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council.
Now more than ever, managing nonprofit organizations requires a commitment to doing good plus the skills to carry out an agenda of change.
In honor of Nonprofit Awareness Month, we’ll be spotlighting some of our MNO students and alumni.
Read a Q&A with alumna Jill Paulsen, executive director of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture. Want to learn about other alumni who lead nonprofits? Check out the Mandel School website for more profiles.