Week 1: What even IS this?
Aug 24 & 26 · M0. How the course works, then naming the sector and touring the org-research stack.
This week’s big question
What even is a nonprofit, and how will we work this term? Monday is all course: how the studio runs, what’s graded, and your questions. Wednesday we name the sector, meet its defining idea (the non-distribution constraint), and open the tools you’ll use all term. Module 0 · builds LO6 (vocabulary) · thread: data/evidence.
Readings
Read both before Wednesday. Nothing is assigned for Monday.
| Reading | Focus & purpose |
|---|---|
| Core · Peter Frumkin, “The Idea of a Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector”, ch. 1 of On Being Nonprofit. Read the whole chapter. 28 pp. | The four things the sector does. Frumkin spends the first eighteen pages on what to call this sector and why its boundaries are fought over, then builds the two dimensions and the four functions (service delivery, civic and political engagement, values and faith, social entrepreneurship) on pp. 19–28. The payoff is at the end, so do not stop early. |
| Current · Stanford PACS, “Investing in Civil Society: The Foundation of Democracy”. 2 pp. | Why the sector matters to a democracy. |
Session 1 · Mon Aug 24: How this course works
No content, no reading, no activity. We spend the whole session on the course itself, and most of it on your questions.
- What the studio is. The Bloomington Nonprofit Lab: two experiential rails, with the 990 Lab’s real-filings discipline built into both, all of it around real local organizations rather than a textbook.
- A live tour of this site and of Canvas. Everything you need to learn lives here: the schedule, the week pages behind each topic link, the assignment pages, and Resources. Canvas is where you submit graded work, check your attendance record, and find the instruction team’s contact details, and that is all it does.
- The 9 graded items, walked through. Rail A the site visit and analysis (50) · Rail B the team startup plan (50), with the 990 Lab’s real-filings discipline woven into both. Everything you upload is due on a Sunday. We look at what “credit / no-credit” means on the checkpoints and what gets a rubric, so you know where the writing effort goes.
- Policies, in plain terms. The 3-3-3 rule (3 absences · 3 late submissions · each within 3 days), what presence means here (sign-in and that session’s work), and the AI policy: AI is allowed and expected, disclosed, verified against a primary source, and owned by you. See the full rules.
- How teams work. You’ll be in a team of up to 5 for Rail B. I assign teams at random in Week 2, for equity, so you don’t need to recruit anyone. Rail A stays individual.
- Q&A, as long as it takes. Bring anything: workload, deadlines, the site-visit requirement, what happens if an organization never writes back.
Session 2 · Wed Aug 26: Naming the sector, and where its data lives
Name-storm. On a printed sheet, you list every organization you can name from memory, starting with wherever you grew up, then sort them with the person beside you into nonprofit / for-profit / government, surfacing the non-distribution constraint by argument rather than lecture. We’ll come back to it properly next week; today the point is to feel where the line is hard to draw.
The org-research stack. A guided tour of the tools you’ll use all term: IRS Form 990, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Candid/GuideStar, Urban Institute/NCCS, Cause IQ (see Resources). Then Data Lab #0: look up one nonprofit you already know on ProPublica and screenshot one real number, what surprised you?
What’s due / prep
- Nothing graded this week. Bring a laptop Wednesday for Data Lab #0, read Frumkin and the Stanford PACS piece before then, and come knowing one organization from wherever you grew up (a charity, a congregation, a sports club): Wednesday’s name-storm starts from those.
- Start the A1 On-Ramp, your first graded piece of Rail A: name a candidate organization (plus a backup) with its EIN and 990 link, and send a real outreach email. Due Sun Sep 6.
- Start thinking about a local nonprofit you could visit (Rail A). Browse the City of Bloomington Volunteer Network.
Looking ahead
- A1 On-Ramp is due Sun Sep 6 (5 pts, Rail A). Name your candidate org for the site visit and send it a first outreach email, and your team posts three candidate problems. Visits take time to arrange, so start now.