The Trailing of the Sheep Festival – held every fall in Hailey, Ketchum, and Sun Valley – is celebrating its 21st anniversary. Over the years, the cultural and community festival has grown and now includes a multitude of activities throughout the Wood River Valley. 

​Partnering with local businesses and venues, and sharing resources among the community has strengthened the celebration says Executive Director Laura Drake. Their mission to “gather, present and preserve the history and culture of sheep herding in Idaho and the West” is expanded every year by highlighting the many aspects of tradition and creating new ones. ​

Our job at the Idaho Nonprofit Center is to support our nonprofit sector, share knowledge, convene training opportunities, to provide professional development, and to champion the work of our sector through policy & advocacy. It’s a tall order, quite frankly, considering that we too are a nonprofit organization with a small staff, a budget to match, and the need to find creative ways to fund our operations in order to do “all the things” we should do.

A large part of our membership, as well as the bulk of technical assistance calls and emails we receive, are usually nonprofits in the “start-up” or “emerging” phase of the nonprofit life cycle. We understand, it’s tricky and not always easy to navigate the process. There’s good reason for that. 

Recently I hosted a Resource Thursday training on "Starting a Nonprofit" and the first thing I usually do is to try to talk you out of it. True story. But when I try to talk people out of starting nonprofits, it comes from a place of love – and experience. If you are curious about my message you can listen to recorded broadcast from Resource Thursday by clicking this link. There is also a recent post on Board Source about this topic. According to the article “there now are 1.8 million nonprofit organizations in the U.S. Fewer than 15 percent have operating budgets over $250,000.”

​Nonprofits are always created from a place of love, a heart full of good intentions. A passionate person wants to start something to do something to help the community. What they don’t realize is all the work that goes into starting that nonprofit and the inevitable hard decisions that need to be made