These are lean days for nonprofits — living with less, forced to trade in old ways of doing business for survival strategies as they watch their major sources of revenue quickly dry up.

The sector has the feel of a triage unit. Planning is done fast, with no time for the deliberative process that typically accompanies significant change. Nonprofit leaders are working furiously through every available option.

The state’s top law enforcement official offered broad support Monday for a proposed Patrick administration overhaul of state ethics and lobbying laws that offers her expanded powers and comes at a time when a handful of Massachusetts public officials are facing ethics and legal challenges of their own.

At a State House hearing of a House committee on ethics reform, Attorney General Martha Coakley said Patrick’s bill was “a step toward a much more transparent and productive state government.”

“Although we have a current framework of ethics and lobbying laws, there are more problems that need attention,” she said. “These gaps in the law provide for some to seek undue influence or others to abuse their positions of power.”

As bad as this recession feels for business, imagine the tsunami hitting the nonprofit sector — trickling corporate and foundation dollars, steep endowment losses, harsh government funding cuts and all the while growing demand for many services nonprofits provide.

As dollars have nearly frozen, the wind has been knocked out of a sector that, for years, has embodied strong pride in the breadth and depth of its presence in Massachusetts — a pride shared, even buoyed, by the state’s political and corporate leaders. The nonprofit sector employs nearly 14 percent of the Massachusetts workforce and generates more than $86 billion in revenue.

On Nov. 4, as I watched people in Chicago, all over the U.S. and the world celebrating Barack Obama’s victory as their victory, I thought back to when, 40 years ago, during my first Peace Corps assignment in West Africa, I visited at the hut of a chief in a village of nine homes, about eight miles away from even any dirt road.

There, on the wall of the hut, were two pictures: one of Siaka Stevens, President of Sierra Leone, and one of President John F. Kennedy. There were no radios or newspapers in this village. On this election night, I was sure there would soon be another picture on that wall, this one of President Obama. Not in 48 years have I been so inspired by the election of our president.

For immediate release
LOWELL – With budgets being cut and needs increasing, nonprofits more than ever are looking to increase efficiency and work together. MNN is giving nonprofits in the Lowell area a chance to do just that.
 
With funding for nonprofits growing scarcer and donations drying up, communities such as Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan are already [...]