Nonprofit Quarterly
Nonprofit Quarterly, known to its readers as NPQ, is an American magazine and media platform for the nonprofit sector, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1994 as a regional learning magazine for New England practitioners, it grew into a national print journal in 1999 and then into a multimedia platform that now publishes daily online content alongside its quarterly magazine, newsletters, webinars, podcasts, videos and convenings. NPQ describes its work as curating conversations among civic actors, building shared understanding around racial justice, economic justice, climate justice, health justice and leadership, with the stated aim of advancing the theory and practice of multiracial democracy. It is published by the Nonprofit Information Networking Association, a 501(c)(3) organization, and is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News. In the WorldNM directory it is listed as a nonprofit-sector magazine and news platform headquartered in Boston, publishing journalism and analysis on civil society and social justice — a concise description of a publication that has spent three decades as one of the principal places where American nonprofit professionals argue about how their sector should work.
Founding as a New England learning magazine
The Quarterly was originally founded, published and edited by David Garvey in 1994 as the New England Nonprofit Quarterly. In that first form it was a regional learning magazine, written for nonprofit practitioners in New England who needed practical, field-based knowledge rather than academic theory or trade publicity. The magazine was incubated by Third Sector New England, the Boston-area capacity-building organization, which sheltered it through its first dozen years. That incubation matters to understanding NPQ's character: it was not launched by a commercial publisher looking for a market, but grew inside the nonprofit support infrastructure itself, writing for managers, board members and fundraisers about the management, governance and finance problems they actually faced. When the publication spun off from Third Sector New England in 2006 as an independent publication, it formalized a status it had effectively already earned — a sector-owned journal of practice, published by and for the civil society world it covered. Its ISSN, 1084-8371, and its Boston base date from this identity, and both remain attached to the magazine today.
Going national in 1999
The decisive step came in the winter of 1999, when the Nonprofit Quarterly launched as a national print journal. Ruth McCambridge, who became its founding editor-in-chief in that national incarnation, built the magazine into a distinctive voice: analytical, argumentative and willing to criticize the sector it served, including foundations, large charities and the management orthodoxies of the day. Under McCambridge, NPQ became known for treating nonprofit practice as a subject worthy of serious inquiry — examining how money moves through civil society, how governance succeeds or fails, and how race and power shape organizations that publicly commit themselves to equity. The national journal kept the learning-magazine DNA of the New England original while widening its lens from regional practice to the politics and economics of the whole American social sector. When Cyndi Suarez later introduced herself to readers, she credited McCambridge with launching, in 1999, what had become a multimedia platform, with the magazine itself as its foundation — an acknowledgment that the national print journal remained the anchor even as everything around it digitized.
What NPQ publishes
Today NPQ's output spans several formats. The quarterly magazine remains its flagship, organized around thematic issues that take up a major question for the field — the Spring 2021 issue, for example, was devoted to "Radical Leadership," exploring race, power and the building of a transformative civic infrastructure. Around the magazine, NPQ publishes daily written content online, multiple weekly newsletters, premium and complimentary webinars, podcasts, videos, and occasional roundtables and forum events. Its coverage is organized around core themes of racial justice, economic justice, climate justice, health justice and leadership, alongside the standing concerns of nonprofit management, governance, finance and philanthropy. The mix is deliberate: the magazine provides depth and framing, the daily site responds to events and carries voices from the field, and the webinars and learning programs turn analysis into professional development. NPQ states that it pays its contributors, and it actively solicits stories and insights from nonprofit leaders and workers, positioning its pages as a commons for the sector rather than a bulletin board for its largest institutions.
Editorial leadership and the Suarez era
On January 1, 2021, Cynthia "Cyndi" Suarez assumed the role of president and editor-in-chief, succeeding Ruth McCambridge, who became editor emerita. McCambridge's background — forty-five years in nonprofits, much of it in organizations mixing grassroots community work with policy change, including a decade at the Boston Foundation developing capacity-building programs — had defined NPQ's founding editorial era. Suarez brought a different but complementary profile: work with leaders in nonprofits, philanthropy and social movements, including the Movement for Black Lives; a network grantmaking strategy created for Boston Rising; service as executive director of Northeast Action; and academic training spanning psychology and women's studies at Boston College, feminist theory at the New School for Social Research, and community economic development at Southern New Hampshire University. Joel Toner serves as publisher. Under Suarez, NPQ has described itself as grounding in its original mission to advance civil society while rethinking what counts as knowledge in the field — deliberately elevating leading thinking and practice from the field itself, particularly from leaders of color.
Edge Leadership and the Voice Lab
A signature initiative of the Suarez era is Edge Leadership, a research-and-development platform for social change hosted by NPQ and launched by Suarez before she took on the editor-in-chief role. Edge Leadership was built around "ecosystem sensemaking" — conversations with leaders about how change actually happens in complex social systems, including the idea that transformation often arrives through radical paradigm shifts rather than gradual increments. Connected to it, NPQ has been building a Voice Lab for leaders of color interested in developing their public voice, hosting writing, podcasting, online learning and social media workshops, and supporting participants in developing a body of work through purpose, storytelling and audience workshops. The pairing of a publication with a platform that cultivates new authors is central to NPQ's current strategy: instead of only reporting on the sector's leadership, it invests in widening who gets to produce the sector's knowledge. In NPQ's own framing, that relationship creates the conditions for the knowledge creation the field needs now, within and beyond the nonprofit sector.
Home of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal archives
In 2019, Nonprofit Quarterly became the home of the online archives of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, a long-running resource for community-based fundraisers. NPQ had often partnered with the Journal over the years in marketing, writing and research, and McCambridge announced the move as a natural landing place for the collection. The archive is unusual among NPQ's offerings for its open-source character: authors allowed their articles to be licensed under Creative Commons terms, so readers can download and use articles without paying a fee or seeking permission, provided they acknowledge the original article and author, and readers are invited to add to and update the collection to keep it relevant. The episode illustrates a less visible part of NPQ's role in the sector — as a steward of field knowledge. Practical fundraising wisdom accumulated by grassroots organizations is exactly the kind of material that disappears when a small publication folds; by absorbing the archive and keeping it freely usable, NPQ preserved a working library for the smallest organizations in its audience.
A nonprofit newsroom and its business model
NPQ is itself a nonprofit, published by the Nonprofit Information Networking Association, and a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the membership organization for nonprofit journalism outlets. Its tax filings place it in Boston, at 31 Milk Street, with a fiscal year ending in December; the organization was formed in 2005 in its independent corporate form, consistent with its 2006 spin-off. Like the organizations it covers, it assembles its revenue from multiple streams: magazine subscriptions and sales, webinars and online learning, grants, donations and a growing membership model. Under Suarez and Toner, NPQ has spoken publicly about strengthening and diversifying those streams — fortifying grant support, growing membership, and building earned revenue including its successful online learning program. That transparency about its own sustainability is part of its credibility with readers: a magazine that advises nonprofits on finance, governance and strategy is expected to practice the diversification and mission discipline it recommends, and NPQ's leadership discusses its business model in the same pages where it analyzes everyone else's.
Audience and standing in the sector
NPQ describes itself as the leading media platform for the nonprofit sector in the United States, and its thirty-year history supports a substantial claim on the field's attention. Its audience is the working leadership of civil society: executive directors, board members, fundraisers, program staff, consultants and the philanthropy professionals who fund them. Its social following runs into six figures, and its webinars and newsletters reach practitioners who may never open the print magazine. What distinguishes NPQ from general business coverage of charities is standpoint: it writes from inside the sector's own debates, assuming readers who manage budgets, supervise staff and answer to boards, and it pairs that practitioner grounding with an explicit editorial commitment to justice — racial, economic, climate and health — that it states openly rather than treating as a bias to be concealed. In recent years it has framed that commitment defensively as well as aspirationally, arguing that nonprofit voices, journalism and multiracial democracy are under attack and that sharing field knowledge is a form of resistance, funded reader by reader.
Why NPQ matters
American civil society employs millions of people and moves enormous sums, yet it has few durable institutions devoted to examining its own practice. Nonprofit Quarterly is one of them. From a 1994 New England learning magazine incubated by a regional support organization, it became a national journal in 1999, an independent nonprofit publication in 2006, the steward of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal's open archive in 2019, and, from 2021, a multimedia platform under its second editorial leader, organized around justice themes and new models of knowledge creation such as Edge Leadership and the Voice Lab. Its trajectory mirrors the sector's own: professionalization, digitization, and a reckoning with race and power. For researchers, journalists and practitioners trying to understand how American nonprofits think about themselves, NPQ is both a primary source and a participant — a Boston-based magazine that does not merely cover the conversation about civil society, but hosts it.
