Focus on the “Why”: Using Catalytic Thinking to Reimagine the Future of Nonprofit Education

This paper reimagines the future of nonprofit education as a means toward the end of true systems change, by applying the question-based Catalytic Thinking framework (Gottlieb, 2016). The questions of Catalytic Thinking lead people toward radical cre-ation (vs. reactive planning), radical inclusion (vs. selective inclusion), and radical col-lective effort, including sharing resources of all kinds (vs. operating alone in scarcity). The paper first applies these questions to nonprofit education in general, then to a case study example of a masters-level fundraising class that used those questions to rework its syllabus and the structure of the class itself. Through these examples, the paper demonstrates how nonprofit education has the potential to both reach for the ultimate “why” of nonprofit education—teaching what it takes to create the end results of a strong community—and teach the internally focused, organizational management subjects within the context of and with an explicit focus on those end results.