Organizational Sustainability

Organizational “sustainability” is a term frequently associated with moments of crisis in the lives of development organizations—moments which threaten an organization‟s ability to operate and be “sustainable” over time. The crisis obliges the organization to quickly reflect upon its situation, and too often, as decision-makers focus on short-term solutions, they conclude: We simply need more money! The irony, as demonstrated by this partial view of SCO sustainability, is that many of these same organizations—before the crisis—believed that they were sustainable, when it is debatable whether they were or not. In other words, they confused financial stability with organizational sustainability. Stability implies having enough money in the short- to mid-term to carry out an organization‟s planned and unplanned activities, whereas sustainability implies having strong overall organizational fundamentals in place that enable the organization to contribute to meaningful social change over the long term. sustainable social change organization is also concerned with issues of legitimacy & relevance with key stakeholders, accountability, strategic alignment between real needs and organizational offerings, understanding of funding possibilities that might generate more organizational autonomy, program effectiveness and impact


Alfredo's Class YMCA