About Us

Our Mission

Through collaboration, The Nonprofit Center supports people with learning, connection, and resources to build just and sustainable communities. 

Our Vision

We envision a robust nonprofit sector that centers people and relationships, celebrates equitable and just practices, and generates community-based outcomes that transcend individual organizations.

Collaboration Creates Change: Our Model

Incorporated as a nonprofit in 2026, The Nonprofit Center builds on our 45-year legacy as one of the first university-based nonprofit support centers in the US. From our early years providing management training to nonprofits we have grown to be a full-service provider of consulting, training, board development, leadership support, and wide-ranging resources to strengthen nonprofits. Everything we do is offered free or on a sliding scale for nonprofits. Our Foundation and Corporate partners allow us to sustain this model so that any nonprofit, regardless of budget size, has access to support.

Core Values of The Nonprofit Center

  • Embrace Wholeness
    We see strengths and assets. Come as you are. We listen with openness to learn from each other and our multifaceted humanity.
  • Ask
    We unpack and unmask with curiosity and rigor to push through discomfort and ignite equity.
  • Practice Care 
    We attend to individual, organizational, and community health.
  • Gather
    We revel in our interdependence, and come together for generative, just, and restorative thinking.
  • Give Grace
    We claim the time and space to pause, reflect, and regroup to move forward artfully and purposefully.

An Investment in your Organization

At The Nonprofit Center, our mission is to strengthen nonprofit organizations through capacity building. That means building the competency, the capability, the bandwidth of organizations and their staffs.

Through all of our programs – from consulting to board training – our focus is on teaching, skills-transference, supporting, leadership development, resources, and coaching, to ensure that you have the capabilities, knowledge and resources needed to successfully fulfill your mission.
We see capacity building in three steps in which an organization learns to identify critical issues, is able to differentiate between core problems and systems, and can implement steps to resolve these issues within the organization’s core values and key operating principles. We do not do the work for you. We prepare you to be able to do the work yourself. To fundraise, to create and implement a strategic plan, to develop personnel policies, to create a succession plan, to become more effective nonprofit leaders, and more. With knowledge, tools, and a realistic plan comes greater organizational effectiveness. And ultimately, it’s about empowerment and transformation.

How its done

In all of our programs, we build capacity through sharing information that is useful, practical, and accessible — through the transference of knowledge. We offer both a theoretical understanding of a subject area as well as practical approaches that will enable you to apply the knowledge you acquire to your organization. As guides and teachers, we show you how to do what you need to become stronger and more sustainable, and to better serve your constituents.

New businesses are constantly parachuting into the nonprofit sphere professing to know it (and to know better), and offering quick fixes. We are a nonprofit who lives the experience and the culture, giving us a unique appreciation and understanding of the nonprofit experience. There may be cheaper competitors, or those who profess to be in and out in a hurry, but they can only mimic our values. Why not do it right the first time so you don’t have to redo it.
Capacity building “is not just about the capacity of a nonprofit today — it’s about the nonprofit’s ability to deliver its mission effectively now and in the future. Capacity building is an investment in the effectiveness and future sustainability of a nonprofit.”
The National Council of Nonprofits

Our History

Present Day

Guiding the Center Forward

Laura Otten, Ph.D. whose diverse career has always included a commitment to the nonprofit sector and the people it serves, succeeded Karen as director. Instrumental in creating a Women’s Studies Program , she later served as its second director. Once director of the Criminal Justice Program, she was an associate professor in the program. An author, researcher, and community advocate, Laura first began working with The Nonprofit Center in 1983 and became director in 2001. Today, she remains a standard-bearer for the use of best practices in all aspects of nonprofit management.

Read about our history in the Philadelphia Business Journal
2001

A Legacy That Shaped Our Mission

The strategic planning and board development concepts that Everett custom developed for nonprofits remain the cornerstone of The Nonprofit Center’s curriculum and consulting principles to this day. And the nonprofit consulting, training, research, and networking infrastructure he initiated have grown as the sector has.

In response to the increased demand for its services, Karen Simmons joined the Center as assistant director in 1987. In 1990, she succeeded Everett Frank as director. Under her leadership, a series of workshops was added for nonprofit executives. Today that annual slate of workshops surpasses 90 diverse programs. Consulting services in such areas as board development, fundraising and strategic planning were added and,the region’s exclusive nonprofit job search newsletter, was created. In 2001, Karen left the center to become president/CEO of the Chester County Community Foundation.
1986

Laying the Foundation

When La Salle asked Everett Frank to serve as a group leader for its early Management Training Programs (MTP), funded by the William Penn Foundation in 1981, Everett combined his business acumen with his nonprofit sensitivity to discern the strengths of each sector and what they could learn from one another. When the MTP needed a strategic planning trainer, Everett took all the international strategic planning theory and experience he had gathered over 31 years of business experience and distilled it into an abbreviated planning process that would apply in the nonprofit setting.

After five years as a popular La Salle MTP group leader, Everett agreed to become the founding director of La Salle’s Nonprofit Management Development Center, that evolved into The Nonprofit Center of today.
1981

Our Inception

Since its inception in 1981, the mission of The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University has been to build the capacity of the nonprofit sector. While our primary focus has been the Greater Philadelphia region, our reputation has led us to nonprofits throughout the country.

What is now The Nonprofit Center (itself a nonprofit organization) was established under the leadership of Everett Frank, a man who had spent most of his working life in the corporate sector, but who recognized that nonprofits “could stretch one dollar in ways for-profit corporations could never imagine.” He became La Salle’s first “Executive-In-Residence,” serving as a liaison between La Salle’s School of Business Administration and the corporate world.

 

Thank you to Our Collaborators

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