Organizational Development

Organizational Development (OD) is a deliberately planned, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and/or efficiency, and/or to enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals. OD theorists and practitioners define OD in various ways - see the sidebar to the right.

For programs that serve survivors of torture, as with many health-related nonprofits, organizational development includes establishing appropriate organizational priorities, and managing and empowering boards to best contribute to your organization. This page includes tools (see left sidebar) and more resources (below) shared by the Center for Victims of Torture's organizational development expert, Dr. Kristi Rendahl.

Board Café

Board Café is the electronic newsletter exclusively for members of nonprofit boards of directors. Board Café offers a menu of ideas, information, opinion, news, and resources to help board members give and get the most out of board service. There are over 70 issues in the archive. Board Café is published by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services (www.compasspoint.org)

Healthy Organizations: Beyond Individual Self-Care

Burnout, secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue may be intimately familiar to clinicians, but they can also intersect in ways that seriously impact organizations. Torture affects us all. How do you stay healthy while doing this work? What organizational mechanisms and policies should be in place to promote wellness? What tools are available to measure organizational health?

Pointing in the Right Direction: Stronger Boards, Healthier Organizations, and Fewer Headaches

A framework for guiding your board towards the 'right' work and supporting them in more effective ways, this webinar offers some practical tools to strengthen boards so that they can focus on governance and oversight, become better equipped to understand and set policy, and be responsible for overall organizational health. Please note also, that for agencies that do not have a board of directors, these ideas can also be applied to oversight or steering committees or advisory boards.

The Manager: Management Strategies for Improving Health Services

This magazine, from Management Sciences for Health, outlines the connections between work climate, employee motivation, and performance. It describes how managers can assess the climate in their work group and shows how they can use the results to make changes in leadership and management practices that will motivate their group to do the best work possible and improve results.