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Monolog: Laura Pruteanu
This is the first of a new series of mini-interviews in which we ask one person to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with socially-focused organizations.
Name: Laura Pruteanu
Title: President/CEO
Organization: NonprofitOyster.com (http://www.nonprofitoyster.com/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: Newbie. It sounds condescending to those new to any field or practice.
Favorite Web Site: http://www.newschool.edu/milano/hub/index.html
This site contains nonprofit management resources that are put through a rigorous screening process. Rather than listing all of the resources related to a given topic, the Knowledge Hub lists a few top resources within each topic. It's one of the least overwhelming, top-quality resources compilations I've seen.
Favorite Quotation: "We must become the change we want to see." --Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Recommended Reading: The Nonprofit Quarterly. It's filled with practical articles and addresses important issues and trends surrounding the management and governance of nonprofits--a must-read for the sector in my opinion.
Prediction for the Sector: I think the blur between nonprofits and corporations will continue to grow; it's probably a permanent fixture. I also think that nonprofits are increasingly becoming aware of the need to build their management and governance capacity. I see better-managed nonprofits, with more collaboration between organizations in order to streamline operations or tap into new resources and capitalize on others' strengths.
Hedgehog or Fox?* I would classify myself as a fox. I tend to be interested in many different things, and I apply myself in many different areas, often disconnected except for the fact that they interest me.
* This alludes to Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which he uses a line from the Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") as the basis for dividing writers and thinkers into one of two categories: the hedgehogs "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance" and the foxes "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause…seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision." Berlin says Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, and Joyce are foxes.
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