UEDA and the Nonprofit Academy of Wisconsin (NAWi) are excited to announce a new partnership offering capacity building services to nonprofit organizations in the Greater Milwaukee area, building off work that began in mid-2019 to provide organizational-focused technical assistance to nonprofits.

This partnership will strengthen and extend the range of education and consulting services to nonprofits. NAWi will serve as the technical assistance partner for UEDA, focusing on, but not limited to, agencies that receive Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding. The NAWi team will include Rob Meiksins, Martha Collins, and Andrea Rodriguez, who will work with UEDA to deliver these services. Our Technical Assistance Advisory Committee will provide guidance to the implementation of this partnership.

“This is an exciting opportunity,” said UEDA Executive Director Kristi Luzar.  “We have been working with nonprofits in the community and economic development sector for a long time but have had limited capacity ourselves to reach more nonprofits. This partnership with NAWi provides that.”

Our shared goal is to help nonprofits be intentional about how they build and strengthen their organizations and is based on the Standards for Excellence, a nationally recognized organizational model that NAWi has followed since its inception. The Standards are a set of competencies that are used as a lens to review where a nonprofit organization is in terms of governance and operations. Our approach is to then work with the nonprofit to see how they want to adapt what the Standards recommend to align with the nonprofit’s mission, culture, age, and size with an eye towards organizational sustainability.

“We have been working together for a couple of years now,” said Rob Meiksins, co-founder and President of NAWi.  “It has been a good working partnership between UEDA and NAWi, and this seemed like a natural progression.”

To launch this new partnership, we will offer a free two-part introduction to the Standards model and how it can benefit nonprofits on May 31 and June 7. Sessions will be 90 minutes and led by Rob and Martha of NAWi, who are both certified consultants in the Standards for Excellence. The Standards are made up of 6 guiding principles, and each session in this webinar series will cover three of the Standards and how nonprofits can implement them.

Any organization that completes both sessions will be given access to a very brief version of a survey to compare how the organization functions in relation to the Standards. Then, we will offer a 1-hour follow-up session to review the findings and help organizations start thinking through how a full organizational review can help them deliver on their mission. Pre-registration for these introductory sessions is required.

Register for Session 1 (Mission Strategy and Evaluation, Leadership, Legal Compliance and Ethics)

Register for Session 2 (Finance and Operations, Resource Development, Public Awareness, Advocacy)

Moving forward, UEDA and NAWi will also focus on serving agencies that receive CDBG grant funding from the City of Milwaukee, who will now have access to help with a variety of services including consulting and conducting an assessment of how your organization is functioning. Contact NAWi here or by calling 414-367-8209 if you are interested (must be a 2022 CDBG funding recipient).

Lastly, this program partnership will also leverage and support Nonprofit Lift, an initiative that began through a collaborative effort in 2021 with other intermediaries that support nonprofit organizations in the metropolitan Milwaukee region. Nonprofit Lift recently launched a resource website and consultant directory and we are excited to align our work with this important effort. Learn more here>>