Mission statement

The Atlas Center for Nonprofits’ mission is to center organizations around their mission, developing responsible fundraising strategies, and providing lasting frameworks for implementing policies that achieve equity, sustainability, and staff empowerment.

vision statement

All nonprofit organizations should have access to the skills, funding, and resources that they need.

values

SUSTAINABILITY

Atlas is focused on organizational sustainability. We begin our work at the structural level of organizations. We partner with founders and executive directors to develop plans that will both achieve programmatic goals, but also be directly tied into the organization’s mission and vision statements. This will ensure that our partners have ambitious financial and programmatic goals and benchmarks to track progress.

Creating proper systems and frameworks allows our partners to grow in a sustainable pattern. Expansion of program area and staff will have been planned in advance, rather than reacting to unexpected need without a fundraising plan behind it. This initial framing of the organization’s systems allows the Executive Director/Founder to focus on expanding the organization programmatically and make sure that services are being delivered. Atlas supports the back-end work during the critical formative years of the organization.

Good Governance

Good governance is also a key factor in the success and longevity of a nonprofit. Atlas works with nonprofits to develop positive habits and affirmative and inclusive cultures. Atlas works with leadership teams and Executive Directors to install effective and engaged board members, strategize and work through receiving tax-exempt status, develop hiring and operational policies that foster positive work environments, and establish a vision for the organization that will help bolster it against mission drift while expanding at a rapid pace.

INFORMATION & IMPACT

Growing organizations often scale their programmatic work to meet increased demands, but neglect to scale their information systems as well. This creates information silos on staff, disjointed programs, a lack of internal trust or communication, increased workloads, and opens the organization up to the devastating risk of a “brain drain” with staff turnover. Atlas is committed to helping our partners design, create, and implement information systems that can fit their need and budget to prevent the loss of institutional knowledge and create a self-learning community amongst staff.

Ingraining impact measurements into the structure and culture of organizations is key to understanding and designing programs. By using data in a way that is not restrictive to staff, simple to measure and report, organizations will be able to show the depth of their work accurately and grow in sustainable patterns rooted in concrete measures.

EQUITY

Equity and equal representation is of the utmost importance. Atlas believes that organizations are not only meant to be accountable to constituent need, but should have the role of voice amplification. Nonprofit organizations must listen and be led by the communities that they serve. This means that community voice and community power should flow within the organization at all levels. Atlas works with our partners to proactively create policies that will ensure that people from the constituency being served are represented and actively empowered at all levels of power within the organizations.