Dear Reader,

A few years ago, everyone was going on and on about so-called nonprofit “thought leaders,” an absurdly commodified and limiting social construct if ever there was one.

During this period, I received a number of email blasts that invited me (and, I imagine, thousands of others) to visit their version of the “six easy steps to becoming one of these thought leaders.” Most of the advice had to do with posting stuff online or developing your personal brand—nothing to do with how a real leader works with others to surface and advance information, sometimes finding themselves in error, or backing up to test faulty assumptions—you know, the stuff of which real, substantive leadership is made.

Writing and editing at NPQ, I have found that very few thoughts I may have are not improved by the give and take with others who are paid to do this with me or the volunteers who write with us. This is part of what makes NPQ the critical thinking community that it is.

And that is what I want to invite you to join.

Part of what makes NPQ feel grounded to those working in the trenches (as well as policy makers and funders) is our reliance on writers who have deep experience from many different perspectives in many different fields. Nowhere is this more dynamic and fast-moving than in our newswire writers, who help us track and analyze the operating environments we all work in.

I’d like to invite you to apply to this newswire writer group. We are a real, interactive collection of grounded commentators with social justice values and an eye for what is real and what is just nonsensical—like the whitewashed and vacuous notion of the six early steps to individual “thought leadership.”

If you’ve ever read one of our articles and thought that you’d like to be part of that conversation, or wished that you could weigh in on a pervasive narrative that threads through our sector’s work, you may just be an NPQ volunteer writer-in-waiting.

If that’s you, we want to hear from you. Visit our application page and start the conversation today!

Your friend,