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Nonprofit Governance, Management, and Organizational Learning: Exploring the Implications of One "Mega-Gift"

Virginia Tech

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mstephen{at}vt.edu.

	Abstract

Little scholarly attention has focused on understanding the impact of large gifts for small nonprofit organizations or on the mechanisms by which those institutions respond to such events. The authors studied the organizational and governance stresses mega-gifts create by examining the case of the $175 million Ruth Lilly gift to the Modern Poetry Association. The association’s governing board successfully adapted to its changed circumstances by self-consciously learning and realigning its responsibilities relative to those of the organization’s executive, which required individual and organizational learning. The authors chart the changes and actions that prompted that self-education and draw on the nonprofit organization governance, organizational learning, sense making, and adaptive change literatures to contend that nonprofit organization leaders must recognize that large-scale change will demand adaptive organizational work and require concomitant shifts in the routines of governance, management, and leadership so as to encourage and capture the learning necessary for successful organizational adjustment.

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