My client, the Badger Asn. of the Blind & Visually Impaired, of Milwaukee, WI., which merged in 2009 with the Center for Blind & Visually Impaired Children, is launching their new identity today: they are now known as Vision Forward Association. Congratulations! http://www.badgerassoc.org/whatsnew/launch-party-open-house/ .

It isn't often that a funder calls me up to introduce himself, but that's what John MacIntosh of Sea Change Capital Partners did when he heard that I was active in nonprofit collaborations in the Midwest. John wanted to learn what I was up to and make sure I knew about a unique philanthropic fund dedicated to enabling nonprofit collaborations. The Sea Change-Lodestar Fund for Nonprofit Collaboration is itself a collaboration between the Lodestar Foundation and Sea Change Capital Partners.

A discussion of Joseph Nye's theory of smart power, applied to the nonprofit sector through mergers, alliances, and partnerships.

Nonprofit strategic re-structuring is more than mergers and stakeholders in the sector need to learn to distinguish between mergers and other forms of partial and full integrations in order to keep nonprofits interested in these types of strategies.

Here are the news and other stories about nonprofit collaborations, mostly mergers, that I pulled off the Internet from all over the country. Merging Administrative Functions, posted on the site: Butts in the Seats, Musings on Practical Solutions for Arts Organizations, July 21, 2009. The posting links four separate articles written by the Nonprofit Law Blog related to back office collaborations.

The latest, most interesting study on the impact of nonprofit mergers was just published today, Feb. 26, 2009 by The Bridgespan Group, entitled, Nonprofit M&A: More Than A Tool for Tough Times.

 I am a strategic re-structuring consultant and I love to collect stories about nonprofit mergers and partnerships. Daily I find cases in my in-box from all over the country, and most are so run-of-the-mill that they are not distinctive enough to write about in my blog, but today I have one that is.

I collect lots of stories from the web about nonprofits that have successfully completed mergers, but only rarely do I find stories about two nonprofits that fail so miserably at a merger attempt that it makes the news. One such case came to my attention last month and makes for a great opportunity to talk about all the reasons people leave their merger partner.