Start with the newsletter

NGN is a weekly email for nonprofit leaders who want to see something that worked — and enough detail about why it worked to try it themselves.

No fluff. No doom spiral. No giant reading assignment.

What lands every Wednesday

• What's Most Good — three nonprofits that did something that worked, with enough detail to copy
• Quick Hits — deadlines, discounts, and filings worth ten minutes of your week
• AI Insights — prompts written for nonprofit work, ready to paste
• Board Corner — one exercise you can run at your next board meeting
• From Where I Sit — a short note from me

Free. Weekly. Unsubscribe any time.

Why it's free — and what that actually means

Free to the reader is not free. Someone always pays for professional knowledge, and the sector’s habit of expecting it to arrive at no cost is one more way nonprofits fail to account for the skills they need.

So the newsletter costs you nothing, and the institutions that can pay — funders, associations, insurers — pay for the work behind it. That is not charity. It is putting the cost where the budget actually is.

Tools that end in a decision, not a discussion

Most capacity building ends in a report. The consultant leaves, the binder goes on a shelf, and six months later nothing has actually changed.

What I build instead is a library of working tools for the problems nonprofits genuinely get stuck on — a board that will not decide, a risk nobody owns, a succession plan that exists only in one person’s head. Seventeen so far, on the way to about forty.

Each one is a worksheet a team can run in about an hour. Each one ends the same way: a decision written down, a name beside it, and a date to check whether it held.

Funders, associations, and insurers bring them to a whole network

A single nonprofit rarely has room in the budget for this kind of work, which is exactly why so little of it gets done.

The organizations that do have the budget are the ones with something at stake across many nonprofits at once:

• A foundation that would rather its grantees came back stronger than came back asking
• An association whose members want something they can use on Monday, not another webinar
• An insurer paying claims that better operations would have prevented

What readers say

“It’s where you go to think clearly about what AI is doing to our work before the rest of the conversation catches up.” — Merrick Hoben, Washington DC Office Director, Consensus Building Institute

“NGN has helped me put our nonprofit in a broader context. It also offers helpful tools for planning, strategy and collaboration.” — Ginny Hughes, Rooted

“Just sign up and listen to Ted, he knows what he’s talking about!” — Kim O’Brien, former Executive Director, Nonprofit Leadership Initiative

About Ted Bilich

Founder of Risk Alternatives and author of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley). Twenty years advising nonprofits — and the institutions that fund and insure them — on resilience, strategy, governance, ethics, and operational strength.

I write NGN for leaders who want more than commentary: to notice what is working, understand why it works, and think clearly about how it might apply to their own organization.

Start with Wednesday

If you want weekly nonprofit good news that is brief, relevant, and actually useful, start there. It is free, and it always will be.

And if you lead a foundation, an association, or an insurer, let’s talk about putting these tools in front of the organizations you work with.