Nonprofit Management and Governance
How to run a nonprofit efficiently, ethically and with a board that knows what it’s overseeing.
Universities · Associations · Boards
Published Author · Speaker · Thought Leader · Lecturer · CEO
Douglas J.
Bystry
Nonprofit accountability, ethically managed capital.
Douglas J. Bystry has spent over thirty years lending in low-income communities, including extensive work in Indian Country. He founded Clearinghouse CDFI in 1996 and structured it as a for-profit, which meant paying taxes on work most organizations in this field do tax-exempt. That choice is where the book started.
Forbes Books · Publishing February 23, 2027
Non-Profit For-Profit
The Untaxed Empire
The book goes sector by sector and asks what tax exemption is actually buying the public. Doug wrote it because the same questions kept coming up in rooms where he was the only one who had run an organization both ways.
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Some sectors the book examines
Credit Unions
Some of them buy stadium naming rights.
Hospitals
The nonprofit and for-profit ones are hard to tell apart.
Universities
Endowments running into the billions.
Foundations and Donor Advised Funds
Where the money sits, and for how long.
Professional Sports
Some of the biggest names in sports are tax-exempt.
Religious Organizations
Churches don’t file the annual IRS returns most other nonprofits do.
Nonprofits
Most do what they say. The question is how anyone would know.
$40T
US National Debt ·
August 2026
August 2026
Why it matters now
A nonprofit hospital and a for-profit hospital can look identical from the parking lot and from the billing office. One pays taxes, the other doesn’t. The national debt crossed $40 trillion in August, and some very large organizations aren’t contributing to it because they’re categorized as something other than a business.
His position isn’t that every exemption is wrong. Plenty of them are doing exactly what they were meant to do. It’s that the public is entitled to ask what each one is buying.
Does there need to be reform? Doug doesn’t claim to have the whole answer. What he does argue is that people who donate, and people who worry about the debt, ought to be able to find out how these organizations actually run.
US Treasury, 18 August 2026
Where this started
Americans gave about $617 billion to nonprofits last year. Most of it goes roughly where people hope it goes.
After a few decades in the sector, what Doug notices is that almost nobody asks the next question. Who is this organization, how does it actually run, and what is it doing with the exemption it was given? Most donors have no practical way to find out, and he doesn’t think that’s their fault.
His argument isn’t that the sector is corrupt. He has worked in it and still believes in most of what it does. It’s narrower than that: a category built for one kind of organization now covers a lot of things that don’t look much like it.
Giving USA, 2026 report, covering 2025
The company
Clearinghouse CDFI
Doug founded Clearinghouse in 1996 and structured it as a for-profit. It lends in the same places its peers do, on the same kinds of projects, and it pays taxes on the work.
Now in its thirtieth year, it has grown into one of the largest CDFIs in the country. Most of what Doug knows about how these organizations actually operate, he learned running it.
Speaking
Doug speaks at conferences, company events and universities, and is available as a guest lecturer.
Federal Debt and Economic Trends
How the federal debt got this big, what it means in terms people can picture, and what revenue the country isn’t collecting.
Conferences · Policy · Business
Leadership and Motivation
Lessons from thirty years of building an organization the way no one else in the field would.
Corporate · Associations · Athletics
Advisory
Consulting
Doug takes on a small number of advisory engagements a year, usually with organizations working through how they’re structured or governed, or whether the way they’re set up still matches what they actually do.
Occasional notes
Doug writes when there is something worth sending, which is not often. Unsubscribe at any time.