Nonprofit Organizations and Leadership

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations include foundations, faith-based facilities, membership organizations, service clubs, and community-based centers. The latter are of special concern for adult education, which has a particular focus on the community and learning in informal settings. Community-based organizations often provide advocacy and capacity building services such as in women's resource centers, homeless shelters, preemployment training units, and literacy hubs. Their education and learning opportunities may include structured literacy classes or informal mentoring in organizing and activism. They routinely provide a continuum of nonformal certificate and diploma granting courses to informal tutoring during day-to-day operations (Coombs & Ahmed, 1974). In large measure, nonformal organizations exist as facilitators of critical social transformative learning.