Nonprofit Governance and Leadership
Public Policy, Advocacy and Social Change
Innovations in Nonprofit Management
This paper describes a graduate-level course offered in the spring of 2022 that engaged students in developing prototype models of nonprofit preparedness to build organizational resilience in the event of future threats like COVID-19. The aim of the course was to provide students the opportunity to learn about nonprofit preparedness by co-creating a useful planning tool for nonprofit leaders, learning in the co-creation process a variety of ways to promote innovation. The aim of this paper, co-authored by the students, is to recount the course as a case study illustrating how the application of classroom and experiential learning methods, including new product development as a catalyzing modality, resulted in developing new contributions to the field of professional nonprofit management, with specific student deliverables being a model of nonprofit preparedness and a set of policy recommendations for nonprofit preparedness. The paper contributes to the literature on professional nonprofit pedagogy by illustrating how to speed the process of transmitting knowledge from creation to utilization using experiential education and includes considerations for nonprofit pedagogical practice and policy.