2020 – A Year In Review

It’s been a tough year for everyone. I don’t think many among us can remember so much negativity happening in one calendar year.

Many of you have battled COVID. Maybe people you know lost their battle with it. My family didn’t gather for Thanksgiving this year, as many of yours didn’t. Small business has been hammered nationwide by the shutdowns and many millions found themselves out of work… a lot of negativity indeed.

Like you, we’re looking forward to putting 2020 behind us. But, in the midst of this year’s difficulty, there has still been positive things… things that give you hope. And we’ve gotten to share that hope with thousands of clients that we have engaged with this year, new ones and old. In fact, we have grown more in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, than in any year since 2014.

By year’s end, our Formation Team, the Foundation Group staff members who are responsible for helping new nonprofits get started, will have helped over 1,000 new organizations navigate the process of incorporating and becoming a 501(c)(3) organization. As President George H.W. Bush put it over 30 years ago, that’s 1,000 (new!) points of light shining in the darkness, working to make our world a little better.

Yes, charities have been hurt this year. Giving is down, and many nonprofits have had to let go of valuable employees. But as I reflect on the 25 years that Foundation Group has served the nonprofit community, hard times come and hard times go. We’ve seen everything from the dotcom bubble bursting in 2000, to 9/11, the Great Recession of 2008-10, and now the infamous 2020. Better days will return. They always do!

I’m looking forward to 2021, and I hope you are, too. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the scientific and medical communities, there’s reason to hope that COVID will be put behind us in 2021. We all hope that our national dialogue will cool in 2021. Old businesses (and nonprofits!) will grow and hire again. Even more people will take the entrepreneurial leap to begin new organizations. And Foundation Group will be here to help.

We’ve got a lot planned for 2021. We will be greatly expanding our bookkeeping service offering, with a goal of adding more than 100 new nonprofit clients next year. Our new client portal, more than a year in development, will launch in early 2021 (HUGE improvement!). We will increase our work with new startups next year. And finally, you can expect lots more valuable articles, videos, and other resources, more than twice as much as we produced in 2020. You should see the content calendar our Marketing Team has put together for next year! You will enjoy it and, more importantly, find it useful for your nonprofit.

Speaking for all of us at Foundation Group, thank you for your trust this year. We know it’s been hard. We’ve heard your stories. But hang in there…better days are coming!

Have a peaceful, prosperous New Year!