While I agree with Shawn, I feel his idea, as communicated, only helps in the near to short-term. I beleive there should be an effort to open the employment mindset of high school and college students of the careers open in the nonprofit and/or philanthropic sectors.

I am a for-profit financial advisor who uses his business to help fulfill my social mission. As I go from high school and college job fairs, the only nonprofits I see participating are the very large national nonprofits like the American Red Cross or Americorps. There are no nonprofits ED’s asked to speak, nor are there people from the foundation sector, public or private. Moreover, most of these students are taught to “go for the money” and nonprofits are taken off the proverbial map.

My experience for over thirty years as a nonprofit volunteer and/or board member lets me know that nonprofits need business majors, public policy majors and students that have a myriad of other collegiate majors -that could be used and insrtumental in a nonprofit’s success. The problem – no one’s recruiting them or letting the recruiters know that these skills being learned are vitally useful to a nonprofit as well as the for-profit. In other words , they don’t know the opportunity exists or haven’t learned enough about the opportunity to be curious.

Personally, I encourage young people to look at the nonprofit sector and if that’s not their choice I encourage them to be self-employed like me so they can create jobs. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many that will opt for insecurity (irregular paychecks) of self-employment.

Thank you for listening,

Walter C. Gray, CRPC
Financial Advisor
Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor

Ameriprise Financial