Many of us in the nonprofit sector work specifically with children and young adults. It can be a big challenge, but also, I'm sure we can agree, exceedingly rewarding.

For the past four years, I have had the privilege of working with Team M'Phasis, where I get to watch young boys turn into capable, determined young men. This organization uses sports, specifically basketball, as a vehicle to help youth get motivated in school and learn life lessons while at the same time producing some seriously great athletes.

Whether you work with young volunteers or interns, or if your organization focuses specifically on children's services, I've learned a few key points that have helped me make strong connections with kids during my time with Team M'Phasis. Below are a few of those take-aways to help you and your organization get the most out of working with youth.

Develop Their Court Vision

In working with youth, it's a good idea to have a strong, clear conception of what your organization aims to accomplish. By threading easily understandable concepts throughout your program, you’ll have a better shot at getting your message front and center. In my experience, I've learned how integral life skills can be taught and nurtured by tapping into something kids love: basketball.

For Team M'Phasis, it's important to not only teach kids…

Welcome to Research Friday! As part of a continuing weekly series, each Friday we invite a nonprofit expert from our academic faculty to highlight a research report or study and discuss how it can inform and improve day-to-day nonprofit practice. We welcome your comments and feedback.

Long overdue, the IRS finally pulled the trigger. Yesterday, they published the list of organizations that have lost their exemption from paying income tax due to failure to file required reports in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The list includes 4,025 with an Arizona address, including two-thirds (2,708) with the coveted charitable exemption.

This is great news. You wouldn't know it from reading most of the hand-wringing, though. The IRS has been slow to move, making sure that they had gone well out of their way to inform these organizations of their obligations and then warn them of impending doom. The ones that did not get the message are either working under a rock, willfully noncompliant, or closed up without telling the authorities. The result is that the chaff is blown away, leaving behind a much cleaner picture of the nonprofit sector. Arizona doesn't have 15,000 federally-recognized charities — it now has closer to 12,000.

The…

Working as a nonprofit professional in the current economic environment can be challenging — and sometimes discouraging. Savvy nonprofits will fulfill their organization's mission by diversifying their income stream. One way they do this is by building mutually beneficial relationships with businesses that are also interested in positively impacting local communities. Such a relationship can be very profitable, both in terms of financial support and social gain. But in crafting successful nonprofit-business relationships, many nonprofit professionals find themselves in murky waters.

So, how can a nonprofit organization best go about building and sustaining those relationships? Moreover, what type of relationships and outcomes do businesses really want from partnering with nonprofit organizations?

Recently, I interviewed the facilitators of "Third Generation: Nonprofit | Business | Relationships | Evolved," a special three-hour workshop hosted by the National Bank of Arizona and organized by the ASU Lodestar Center. These experienced business and nonprofit professionals are committed to evolving the way nonprofit and for-profit organizations work together for good, and they were happy to give me a taste of what to expect from the workshop. Here's a bit of what they had to say:

During a 2007 TED talk, Katherine Fulton discussed the ways philanthropy is evolving — becoming faster, bigger, and more effective — and explained what you can do to keep up. In her discussion, she shares the results of Looking Out for the Future: An Orientation for Twenty-first Century Philanthropists, her report that "shows you how long-term trends are combining to create a new reality for every gift and every giver."

Most of all, Fulton's speech and the results of Looking Out for the Future seem to address two core questions that philanthropic organizations must deal with in the twenty-first century — how can we most effectively use the internet to reach possible givers, volunteers, and collaborators, and how do we deal with social issues in a society that is increasingly consumer driven? Fulton poses five examples of how innovators are working with these issues, trends that give rise to what she calls "the democratization of philanthropy."

Overall, we come away hopeful about what this new connectedness can afford us. Certainly, we must ask ourselves how we can best take advantage of the "new moral hunger that is growing" because of a world that is more self-aware than ever before.

In case you missed her talk when it debuted on the TED website,…

Welcome to Research Friday! As part of a continuing weekly series, each Friday we invite a nonprofit expert from our academic faculty to highlight a research report or study and discuss how it can inform and improve day-to-day nonprofit practice. We welcome your comments and feedback.

Near the end of the past semester, my class discussed one of the chestnuts of the nonprofit sector. Our text, Peter Frumkin's On Being Nonprofit makes some strong statements about the place of earned revenues in nonprofit organizations. "Earned" revenues are those that come from sales and contracts, not from the donated revenues that so many people associate with nonprofits. Some people really hate the idea of earned revenues, believing that commerciality makes nonprofits look and act more like businesses, which can erode their special character. On the other hand, proponents of social enterprise have a lot of good things to say about earned income strategies, especially in lean times when grants and contributions are hard to come by.

However, the particular chestnut we talked about in class isn't whether commerciality is good or bad. The topic was prominent statements about how much commerciality has crept into the sector over the past couple decades. A great recent article by Curtis Child points to statements by Frumkin and others…