Our community is filled with nonprofit organizations, all built from a passion to serve. They’re created because someone felt a need in the community and wanted to find a path to give back to society. But what happens when that passion to serve alone isn’t enough to build and grow their organization? That’s where Nonprofit Leadership Center comes in, a nonprofit built to help other nonprofits invest in themselves to learn and grow to serve their communities in bigger ways.
Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay (NLC) originally started 30 years ago as a program under the United Way. “We had a wonderful group of community engaged people working and serving in nonprofits who had the desire to impact their communities and they needed the correlated training and development support, leadership development to help them do it,” explained Charlie Imbergamo, Chief Executive Officer of Nonprofit Leadership Center. The need was significant enough that the program developed into an independent nonprofit, which today is funded by a consortium of funders and community partners supporting its work. “We were founded originally to serve Hillsborough, and now we serve a five-county footprint: Polk, Pasco, Pinellas, Hillsborough and Hernando,” added Imbergamo.
NLC offers a range of webinars, on-demand and in-person training sessions and networking opportunities to guide nonprofits through a range of typical challenges and growth hurdles. While most of these trainings come at a cost, the fees are significantly reduced thanks to their funding partners, making it a much more approachable investment. Some larger nonprofits actually underwrite these costs for smaller nonprofits under their umbrella. For those organizations that have needs or challenges not covered by the standard offerings, NLC also offers to create custom trainings to fit the organization’s specific needs.
Any nonprofit can receive help from NLC, but they typically find that most of the organizations reaching out are mid-sized organizations that have been established for several years. “Because of resource constraints for some of the newer nonprofits, there probably are not as many newer nonprofits participating with us,” shared Imbergamo. But even those with little funding can find a wealth of information through NLC. “We have a bunch of free resources for nonprofits on our resource page. And we actually started a series of free webinars, kind of micro learnings. And people can register for those for free. People can register to receive NLC’s newsletter and create an account, all at no cost to them, which then puts them on our distribution list. Every Tuesday morning, they receive a whole host of resources that our team curates,” explained Imbergamo.
Their offerings cover some of the most important needs a nonprofit faces in order to grow. “We do a lot of training around fund development. At a time when resources are challenging for everyone, we have to teach nonprofits how to not only raise money but diversify fund development streams,” said Imbergamo. And it’s clear their offerings are creating impact. Their Grant Writing Certificate, one of their most popular trainings, offers a lot of positive feedback. “People come to that program, they’ve maybe never written a grant. They don’t know what tools they need to have in their toolbox to be effective in writing their first grant. They go through the program, we have story after story where people will write and say, I wrote my first $50,000 grant, and I got it,” shared Imbergamo.
With nearly 5,000 nonprofit organizations in the Tampa Bay area, all looking for support, organizations like NLC are fulfilling an essential need while working towards guiding organizations to grow in both traditional and alternate ways. “One thing we’re going to be spending more time on, more intentionally this year, is conversations about collaboration and partnership, simply because we have an unsustainable number of nonprofits in the Tampa Bay region,” explained Imbergamo. “That also does imply, are we duplicating services, and are there things that we could amend, or new and different business models that we could operationalize, so we’re not duplicating services, rather scaling services in fewer organizations.”
For those looking to support Nonprofit Leadership Center, they are always looking for dedicated members of the community to serve on their board. And nonprofits who need support to learn and grow only need to visit nlctb.org to learn more about trainings and resources available to help them invest in themselves to better support their community.
Because in the end, we need this kind of passion and dedication in our community more than ever. And with the right training, support, and guidance, there’s no limit to the good we can achieve together.
“People will write and say, I wrote my first $50,000 grant, and I got it,”
“One thing we’re going to be spending more time on, more intentionally this year, is conversations about collaboration and partnership, simply because we have an unsustainable number of nonprofits in the Tampa Bay region,”