Author name: Mark Tercek

There are Heroes Among Us In this week’s fusillade of crazy headlines, here’s one we shouldn’t forget: Layoffs of 10,000 Government Health Workers Begin. This is . . . not good. What’s worse is how these civil servants are finding out their years of service have come to an end—-with deactivated badges when they try […]

Let’s keep our focus on the right target. Our heads are spinning. Each day brings a barrage of bad news about the new administration’s haphazard and harmful decisions. As we’ve written, that’s their strategy. You know what else is part of the strategy? Getting us to turn on one another, arguing about direction, while they plow

Save our Scientists (and their work) Another week has passed and there’s no letting up in the new administration’s torrent of executive actions. Long running strategic initiatives are being stymied, agencies shuttered, funding eliminated, website content stricken, and organizations of all stripes bullied. (I mean, the Kennedy Center, really?!) As we wrote last week, it’s

A defense of DEI and other issues It’s been a tumultuous few weeks, fueled in large part by inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations. Such matters have been a feature of the American political scene for a while now. You’ll recall Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, calling climate change a hoax in a Republican debate (and no

Help NGOs Now! (Part 4) Editor’s Note: My son remarked to me that we seem to be publishing the Instigator more frequently than usual these days. I assured him this was a temporary but intentional move. We knew with the new administration and congress taking office, it would likely be a tougher but more important

Help NGOs Be Great (Part 3) Editor’s Note: We are heartbroken by the widespread devastation wreaked by the wildfires in LA and are thinking of all our readers who are impacted. We take some solace in the mass outpouring of support we’ve seen from individuals and organizations alike, and we’re grateful for this community dedicated

How Board Members Drive Success We were pleased to hear from many of you over the past week about our last issue on the topic of NGOs. Clearly, many of you care deeply. One of the important questions we heard: How can board members help their NGOs achieve more? As you know, boards have official

4 Steps to Achieve More As the year was winding down, a friend asked me to contribute to what looked like a worthy nonprofit organization. I was happy to consider a gift. I hugely admire the nonprofit sector, and I’m grateful that I’m able to help good organizations by making donations. It was clear the

Get Your Org Engaged in Financial Innovation for Good This continues to be a challenging moment for environmentalists and all progressives. Over the period ahead, we’ll likely make good progress in determining the full set of strategies needed to address challenges like climate change and biodiversity. But, as we wrote in our last issue, there is a lot

Now What? For climate hawks, it may seem like time is now divided into two distinct periods — the hopeful one before the election and the bewildering haze ever since. Clearly, things did not go quite as many environmentalists hoped. Big challenges lie ahead. We’ll need more time to figure out the full range of