This event is offered in partnership with the Initiative Foundation.

Strong nonprofit organizations are supported by engaged and effective boards. Organizational leadership & board members play critical roles in ensuring boards provide strategic leadership, ensure financial stewardship, strengthen community relationships, and support the organization’s mission.

This training is designed to help organizational leadership & board members better understand their leadership roles and provide practical tools that strengthen board engagement, governance, and organizational impact.

The session will be interactive and discussion-based, allowing organizational leadership & board members to reflect on their responsibilities, share perspectives, and identify specific actions that will strengthen the effectiveness of their board moving forward.

The training will focus on helping nonprofit leadership & board members:

• Understand the core roles and responsibilities of nonprofit board leadership


• Clarify the difference between governance and management


• Strengthen board engagement and accountability


• Understand the board’s role in fundraising and community advocacy


• Improve the board’s ability to think strategically about the future of the organization


• Identify practical steps to strengthen board effectiveness

This session is supported in part through funding from ServeMinnesota and AmeriCorps.

Sourcewell strives to bring the highest-quality resources, information, and training opportunities to our members. We’re honored to team up with the Initiative Foundation to bring this opportunity to our central Minnesota region. 

From one-time efforts to year-round momentum, too many organizations rely on bursts of energy like giving days, year-end pushes, last-minute appeals without the systems to support them.

It is important to shift the focus from urgency to sustainability. This session emphasizes practical systems, clear goal-setting, and repeatable processes that reduce burnout and increase consistency.

This training is provided in partnership with the Initiative Foundation.

Bring an issue your organization is facing, and leave with clearer options and practical next steps you can act on immediately!

This session supports leaders in moving from “fixing the same problems” to creating system-level stability. Participants translate recurring issues into system insights, map priority processes, and design a targeted 30-day experiment—building momentum even within constrained capacity.

This training is provided in partnership with the Initiative Foundation.

This intermediate-level intensive workshop is geared toward nonprofit and government staff or long-term volunteers with grant writing experience who are ready to take the next step in crafting winning proposals. Learn to write stronger proposals and win more grants.

This training is provided in partnership with the Initiative Foundation.

Turning strategy into real conversations and real results

Even with strong systems in place, many nonprofit professionals still hesitate at the most critical moment: the ask. This training is hands-on, practical, and confidence-building. This session creates space to practice, refine, and build comfort with real-world fundraising conversations. We move beyond theory into lived experience to help participants find language that feels natural, grounded, and aligned with their mission.

This training is provided in partnership with the Initiative Foundation.

How strong organizations create strong fundraising. Fundraising doesn’t begin with an ask, it begins with alignment. Participants explore how leadership, governance, and strategic clarity directly shape donor trust and long-term stewardship. This session focuses on strengthening the internal foundation that makes fundraising more natural, more effective, and more sustainable.

This training is provided in partnership with the Initiative Foundation.

In this one-day workshop participants will learn how to establish and sustain comprehensive school safety efforts that attend to both physical and psychological safety. The workshop addresses critical components needed to develop, exercise, and evaluate safety and crisis teams and plans and conduct building vulnerability assessments. The model also integrates school personnel and comunity provider roles in providing school-based crisis preparedness and response activities. Additional topics addressed also include media/social media, communication, reunification, students with special needs, culture, and memorials. After this workshop, participants will be better prepared to improve their school’s climate, student resilience, and crisis response capabilities of school personnel. With updated research and strategies, this workshop makes a clear connection between ongoing crisis prevention, mitigation, protection, response, and recovery. 

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To better support students impacted by trauma, educators must first understand the various types of traumas (beyond ACES) and how trauma affects the brain and behavior in both students and adults. This equity-infused training is embedded with trauma-informed practices that support resilience and address its insulating factors of relationship, regulation, and responsibility. The topic of trauma is approached with care and consideration for people with a wide range of lived experience.