About

Thirty-five years ago, I took my first nonprofit job. I had no idea what I was signing up for. I'm still not sure.

What I do know is that I've been inside this sector long enough to see the same crises arrive on a different schedule and get treated like they're brand new every time. That's what The Social Prophet is about. Not predictions. Pattern recognition.

Who I Am

I've led three nonprofits as an executive director. I helped build AmeriCorps from inside the federal government, one of the largest civic infrastructure programs the United States has ever created. I've sat on nonprofit boards, including the kinds I write about with some candor here. And through Common Ground Consulting, I've worked with more than 375 organizations across 35 countries on strategy, organizational design, and navigating the forces that keep reshaping civil society, whether we're ready or not.

That's the credential version. The candid version is that I've made most of the mistakes I write about, watched smart people make the rest, and spent a long time thinking about why good organizations keep getting blindsided by things they should have seen coming.

Why This Publication Exists

The social profit sector has no shortage of cheerleaders. LinkedIn is full of them. What the sector lacks is honest, independent analysis that names uncomfortable truths and backs them up with evidence.

A prophet isn't someone with a crystal ball. A prophet is someone who reads the present clearly enough to see where it leads. That's what I'm trying to do here, every month, with enough data and enough candor to be actually useful.

What's Up With The Name?

For years, I’ve used the phrase “social profit” instead of nonprofit or NGO. It’s not semantic stubbornness. It’s a more honest description of what our organizations actually do. They don’t operate without profit. They generate it in the value they create for communities, in the movements they sustain, in the democratic infrastructure they build and defend. Calling them nonprofits defines them by what they lack. Social profit organizations deserve better than that.

The Social Prophet is a natural extension of that thinking.

After 35 years inside civil society, I’ve watched enough cycles play out to know when a pattern is legible, when the sector is headed somewhere it doesn’t yet recognize, and when the comfortable stories organizations tell themselves are about to get expensive.

That’s what this publication is: honest, independent analysis of where the social profit sector is headed. Not predictions. Not cheerleading. The kind of thinking that names what others won’t, backed by evidence, from someone who has been in the rooms where these decisions get made.

A Note on Common Ground Consulting

I own Common Ground Consulting and Common Ground Labs, and I have client relationships to maintain and confidentiality obligations I take seriously. What I write here are my own thoughts, not filtered through what any client needs to hear.

The consulting is where I apply this thinking directly. The Social Prophet is where I think out loud. If you find the analysis useful and want that kind of thinking applied to your organization, Common Ground is where that conversation happens. This newsletter is not a sales pitch for that.

When I'm Not Doing This

I live in Washington, DC, which means I'm surrounded by people who think the most important thing happening in the world is happening in a building I can see from my roof. I find this both useful and exhausting.

Outside of work, I cook seriously, travel whenever I can manage it, watch lots of soccer, and share my home with two silver labs who have strong opinions about my schedule.