Spotlight On: Tari Hughes, President & CEO, Center for Nonprofit Management

Spotlight On: Tari Hughes, President & CEO, Center for Nonprofit Management

2022-12-16T14:15:15-05:00December 16th, 2022|Economy, Nashville, Spotlight On|

2 min read December 2022 — The future could be difficult for the nonprofit sector because of the current economic outlook but in an interview with Invest:, Tari Hughes, president and CEO of the Center for Nonprofit Management, said there is also a good opportunity to gain efficiencies in the sector.

What did you learn from the organization’s nonprofit needs assessment survey?

We did three needs assessment surveys in 2020, immediately with the pandemic and then about three or four months later. What we learned is that nonprofits were experiencing a much higher demand for services during these last couple of years and a decrease in donations. Overall, resources are down. Nashville’s growing like crazy. That means demand is growing because not everyone in Nashville is making six figures. As a result, there’s more stress on the nonprofits to deliver services. 

We also learned that there’s a real appetite for people to be together again and we are trying to get that mix. This year we’ve been doing our full-day workshops in person and we’ve kept our shorter workshops virtual. We’ve had a lot of sold-out rooms here. 

What do you worry about going forward?

The predictions early in the pandemic were very dire for the nonprofit sector, that 30% would close their doors, but that didn’t happen. Now, with the stimulus money having dried up and the economy being as it is, I’m concerned about 2023 and 2024. I wonder if we are going to see more closures in the nonprofit sector.

What differentiates Middle Tennessee from other areas of the country in terms of the nonprofit sector?

We’re a very civic-minded city. People care about Nashville and we’ve grown a lot lately. We have a group of very committed leaders; we have organizations that have had a lot of impact. One is Leadership Nashville, which attracts leaders from different sectors to create a very diverse group. We also have a very generous philanthropic community. We’ve had some pretty bad things happen here, from a terrible tornado in 1998 and then a flood in 2010 and recently another tornado right before the pandemic, not to mention the Christmas Day bombing in 2020. It has been interesting to see the city pull together through those adverse experiences.

Middle Tennessee is just seeing such extraordinary growth with so many major companies coming here, such as Meta and Amazon. All these companies have a big philanthropic side as well.

How do you work with companies in your region?

Usually, when companies announce they are coming, we try to get in with them as quickly as we can and then just help them navigate. We have about 800 or so nonprofit agencies that are CNM members so, for instance, when Amazon announced that they were coming to Nashville, everybody was lining up at their door. We can help streamline a little bit for them. Some of the work that I think is the most complicated that we do is trying to help groups collaborate to solve some of those big population-level issues across sectors. That’s part of our community impact work, which seeks to foster trust among groups that are looking at the same issues.

Another way that we intersect with corporations is with training. We work with folks who are interested in serving on boards and we provide training on how to be a good board member and what are the fiduciary responsibilities. That’s another way that we can help. It is an asset for companies to have their employees or associates serving on boards of nonprofits because boards of nonprofits are made up of people from across the city and it expands their circle of influence. 

What is the outlook for the nonprofit sector?

If these last two years have taught us anything, it’s that there are different ways to do things. If we can be open to new ways of doing things and streamline inefficiencies, I think that there may be some opportunity to do some combining. There are opportunities to be more efficient. 

If someone wants to start a new nonprofit, they need to do the research and complete a competitive analysis to make sure that the new nonprofit makes sense. We need to work smarter, and I think we need to help nonprofits to be more efficient. Most of our investment is in organizations that are kind of already up and running and we want them to be more efficient. 

For more information, visit: 

https://www.cnm.org/ 

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