Community organizations are just individual people doing their best to work together. Which means we’re subject to the strengths and weaknesses of…people. These days, I like to measure things on a scale from SNAFU (situation normal: all f***ed up) to FUBAR (f***ed up beyond all recognition). It helps us remember that we’re not working in ideals or fantasies, but the messy, frustrating world of real people with limited time and resources.

I first encountered Nonprofit Organizational Life Cycle model from Susan Mooney, who was leading a series of staff development workshops for Transgender Law Center when I was an ambitious and headstrong program manager for the health advocacy project.

Seeing it for the first time, I had such a calming “Aha!” moment. Suddenly, all the mess and dysfunction I’d observed in different places I worked made sense within this road map. The top-level view shows six stages (Grass Roots -Invention, Start-up – INcupation, Adolescent-Growing, Mature – Sustainability, Stagnation & Renewal, and Decline & Shut-Down), organized by the key question, obstacles, and opportunities in each stage. My internal frustration of “it doesn’t need to be this way!” and “why can’t people just do better??” eased as I read deeper and understood that the problems I’d seen in internal communication, overall strategy, and operations in particular were all totally normal.

But, just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Which means: acknowledging that things are the way they are is a first step, not a shoulder-shrugging endpoint. Using this model can help to narrow in on where to focus attention and time in readjusting the breakdowns.

The Nonprofit Organizational Life Cycle model is helpful for:

• leadership to identify WTF is going on / why things feel hard in the particular ways they feel hard
• saving time diagnosing what’s going wrong where, and what needs to happen to course-correct
• getting board, staff, and volunteers on the same page about the organization as a whole, vs just the corners that each person sees regularly