PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Dear Friends,

The past year 2010/2011 was the first full year that the organisation operated as the Centre for Non-Profit Leadership (CNPL). CNPL's mission "to advocate planned leadership and to nurture leadership capability for the non-profit sector" was well received by our stakeholders; including our Board level and Executive level clients, the Sector Administrators, MCYS, Corporate Partners and individual volunteers. Having moved away from a programmatic approach to a holistic one, we have been able to generate greater impact to the clients we serve.

At Board leadership level, we continued to serve the sector with the Board Match programme. Last year, we successfully placed 81 board and comittee positions in comparison with 23 positions in the previous financial year. The majority of the positions required volunteers with backgrounds in Strategic Management, Finance, HR, Marketing and Legal. In addition, our tie-up with the Social Service Training Institute (SSTI) for basic board governance training programs saw 70 seats taken up by our Board Match volunteers. Positive testimonials from both Board Volunteers as well as the receiving non-profit organisations (NPOs) give us a good indication that Board Match and the accompanying development courses are adding value to the sector at large.

At Executive leadership level, we evolved the original Executive Director Mentoring Programme to the Executive Mentoring & Coaching Programme (EMC) due to sector's feedbacks and needs. EMC allows mentoring for newer Executive Directors as well as hiring potential senior staff in the NPOs. EMC also includes individual performance coaching for executive leaders through collaboration with the International Coaching Federation. This year, the program took in 38 new mentoring and coaching relationships.

I am also happy to report that our collaboration with Bain & Company and UBS AG, for the Bain Leadership Excellence Series in Singapore(BLESS) and the Community Leadership Experience (CLE) have been successful in providing workshop-based development support to more than 60 executive leaders. This year also saw the launch of a new bottom-up initiative, The Light, an Executive Director peer network run by the EDs themselves with CNPL playing the role of secretariat and with Deutsche Bank providing resources. These Executive leadership level initiatives are consistent with CNPL's approach of providing holistic development to the NPO leaders.

Year 2011/2012 will see further enhancements of CNPL's contribution to the sector. A significant milestone would be a CNPL-developed NPO Leadership Competency Framework, a first for Singapore. Having stabilised the start-up phase on CNPL, the CNPL board has been actively engaged in developing the organisation's 3-year plan. We will continue to grow the work of CNPL because we believe that good leadership is foundational for charities aiming to fulfil their aspirations to serve our community well.

In conclusion, I want to sincerely thank the volunteers, partners and staff who have made CNPL's success possible. We will continue to live out our mission and ensure that your kind contribution will also be balanced with a sense of fulfilment. We continue to encourage more nonprofits to use our services. Each non-profit leader we help has a multiplication effect in the beneficiaries that they serve. Thank you for being part of our journey.

Sincere regards,

Laurence Lien
President, Centre for Non-Profit Leadership (CNPL)