Daniel King, Nottingham Trent University and NVSQ Author
Picture the scene. I am in my office at home surrounded by files, folders, spreadsheets, receipts, pieces of artwork and paint pots trying to write the final report for the funding body. For a small organization (which only had 5 part-time creative arts therapists and me managing the project for free), we seemed to have amassed a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy. This was not what I envisaged or set out to achieve when I entered the nonprofit sector. I never intended to be a nonprofit sector professional. But looking around my home office I am left wondering what it is that I have become?
In my recent paper in NVSQ, Becoming Business-like: Governing the Nonprofit Professional, I consider this question by examining the way I changed to see myself as a nonprofit professional. It tells the story of how I founded Creative Arts, a therapeutic arts charity, but also changed in the process of doing it. I narrate the process through which I slowly, and often without realising, over time changed from an idealistic dreamer, someone who Continue reading “How I became a nonprofit sector professional”