Good Stewardship

Stewardship is often thrown around flippantly. The idea behind stewardship is taking care of something as if it is your own without it belonging to you. We talk about stewarding land, stewarding our kids, and, in the nonprofit world, stewarding donations.

Good stewardship has a number of key attributes:

✔️ Responsibility. Stewardship is making sound decisions based on available information. Stewardship includes avoiding frivolous spending and ensuring there are good checks and balances to demonstrate good handling of funds.

✔️ Wisdom. Wisdom includes knowing when to invest, when to save, when to spend and on what to spend it. Wisdom in stewardship moves beyond good intentions and enters the realm of doing what is righteous. There is wisdom in the counsel of many advisors and good stewardship in nonprofit work embraces that principle.

✔️ Honesty. Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Stewardship is not about creative stories but truthful ones. It isn't exaggerating your numbers or impact or crafting a false narrative to substantiate how you spent donor dollars. Stewardship involves honest communications and sharing of information about how money is used that stands up to the standard of truth.

We see far too many nonprofits failing in this area. Pressure to perform is immense but saying you are a good steward does not make it so. Every dollar invested by a donor matters. Every grant fund received is a promise of impact. Take care of those precious funds well. Make sure your board, executive team and the policy and processes you collectively follow stand up to strong stewardship principles. Need help figuring it out? Reach out. We're here to help.

-Mindy Muller, CFRE, President/CEO of CDP

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