Three area organizations announced a partnership to help nonprofits flourish in the future by putting a new spin on a past program.<\/p>\n
The Scranton Area Community Foundation, Leadership Lackawanna, and United Way of Lackawanna, Wayne and Pike Counites this month launched Board Match \u2014 a new regional initiative designed to connect talented, community-minded individuals with nonprofit organizations seeking board and committee members.<\/p>\n
Board Match creates a two-way connection by helping individuals find meaningful opportunities to put their skills, experience and interests to work in the community while helping nonprofit organizations identify engaged leaders who can strengthen their boards and advance their missions, Scranton Area Community Foundation officials said.<\/p>\n
Nicole Morristell, executive director of Leadership Lackawanna, noted the collaboration began after leaders from each of the groups realized they were individually working toward the same goal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe spent about a year talking it through,\u201d she said. \u201cSomething very similar to this concept was started in 1989 by the Leadership Lackawanna class.\u201d<\/p>\n
At that time, the Board Bank created through the Voluntary Action Center of Northeastern Pennsylvania sought to connect community members \u2014 who were seeking to serve \u2014 with nonprofits.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack then, you used paper and pencil, and filled out applications, and then someone would look at the actual application and manually call you on the phone,\u201d Morristell said. \u201cFast forward, it\u2019s electronic and we have partners, but there is a need now more than ever. A lot of nonprofits need volunteers, and we\u2019re hearing, over and over, that volunteers want to get involved, they just don\u2019t know how.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, the process for connecting qualified people with groups seeking leaders has been simplified.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou fill out the form based on your interests, your skills, your availability, and you go into a database,\u201d Morristell said. \u201cAt the same time, we\u2019re encouraging nonprofits to fill out a form telling us their needs, and the system makes the match. We facilitate the match, and then it\u2019s up to the individual and the nonprofit to take it from there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Training offered by the Scranton Area Community Foundation will help applicants become prepared for the new board positions, Morristell added.<\/p>\n
The applications \u2014 which may be filled out at any time \u2014 are available on each of the three partner organizations\u2019 websites, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe suspect the first matches are going to start at the end of the month,\u201d Morristell said.<\/p>\n
Angela Bassani, executive director of United Way of Lackawanna, Wayne and Pike Counties, hopes the initiative will encourage more community members to follow through on their mission to serve organizations throughout the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of times when you reach out to someone to ask them to be on a board it\u2019s because they already know someone on the board, and we\u2019re missing large pockets of the population that are really skilled in what they do,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping this kind of fills that gap. We just started and we have over 20 applications on either side already. There are so many skilled people that are coming through that no one knew prior to this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laura Ducceschi, president and CEO of the Scranton Area Community Foundation, believes the new program will provide a boost to organizations<\/p>\n
\u201cNonprofits do an incredible amount of work in our community \u2014 everything from people\u2019s ability to get placed in a new job, access to food and safe housing, and mental health support,\u201d she said. \u201cIt benefits all of us if they can have the strongest support network they can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three area organizations announced a partnership to help nonprofits flourish in the future by putting a new spin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[201,182,139,28,4399,178,180,179,181,1481],"class_list":["post-295362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pike-county","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-stt","tag-wayne-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}