Expanding on a key theme of this year’s Independent Sector conference, Diana Aviv, the group’s president, called on nonprofit leaders at all organizations – regardless of size or mission – to take a broad view of their work and their responsibility to help make society better.

“We do not and cannot work in a vacuum,” she told participants at the gathering of charities and grant makers, which drew some about 1,100 attendees in all.

“If our employees and their families can’t afford medical care, it limits their productivity,” she said. “If our transportation infrastructure makes it hard to get to work, it affects people’s performance. If we don’t collectively attend to the harm inflicted on our environment, polluted air and climate change will ultimately damage everyone’s work. And if we don’t demand greater civility in Congress and in the public square, we diminish our ability to...

Several speakers at Independent Sector’s annual meeting offered their insights about how to make wise financial decisions in these trying economic times.

Above all, they said, nonprofit leaders need to develop a sound plan that fits their organizations. Relying on hope or mounting debt to try to ride out this time of shrinking revenue simply won’t work, they said.

“Fundamentally, vulnerable organizations cannot serve vulnerable people,” Dione Alexander, vice president of the Midwest region for the Nonprofit Finance Fund, told conference participants.

“You can only do so much,” she added. “Figure out what it is.”

‘Crash-Test Dummy’

Rick Sperling, founder and chief executive officer of Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit, said he feels something like “a crash-test dummy” as he tries different approaches but has yet to hit on the ultimate answers.

He says his group has shifted its ...

Reflecting on his first year as head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jeff Raikes told participants Thursday at Independent Sector’s annual meeting in Detroit: “I love my second career.”

He added: “One day I’m learning about malaria and the next day I’m learning about U.S. high school education and the next I’m learning about rural sanitation in Tanzania.”

The former Microsoft executive said he has identified three broad goals for his foundation work as he looks five, 10, 15 years out.

“What I hope is that I can look back on the Gates Foundation and see that we, with our partners, contributed to significant impact on the problems that we were focused in on,” he said.

In addition, Mr. Raikes said he is constantly pushing to improve the internal workings at the foundation and to create “a great environment for people to do their best work.”

He said his experience at...

Detroit

With a mix of urgency, excitement — and at times, frustration — speakers here at the opening session of Independent Sector’s annual meeting called on nonprofit leaders to find new ways to work together in response to the nation’s problems.

This is an “all-hands-on-deck, walk-and-chew-gum kind of moment,” Melody Barnes, President Obama’s domestic policy adviser, told the audience.

She said the administration is committed to finding innovative ways for the federal government to support and promote nonprofit groups.

For example, through the Office of Social Innovation, officials hope to identify successful programs and help them expand to serve more people, she said. “We believe somewhere out there is the next Teach for America or Harlem Children’s Zone, and we want to find it,” Ms. Barnes said.

The work of nonprofit groups, she added, figures heavily in the...