Standards For All: What PANO Heard, and Where We Go From Here

In May 2026, PANO released two publications built on five years of listening to Pennsylvania’s nonprofit leaders: 

• Standards for All: What We Heard from Pennsylvania Nonprofit Leaders; and
• Its companion Values to Action Roadmap. 

Both are free and open-source. 

Over the next two months, we’re using this space to go deeper – post by post – into what the work says, who shaped it, and how your organization can use it. 

The nonprofit sector is under real financial, political, and structural pressure right now. In that climate, what counts as “best practice” is not an academic question. When a funder or an accreditor asks a nonprofit to adopt best practices, they are not making a neutral request. The request itself carries a judgement about what a good organization looks like and who gets to decide.  

PANO Asked: What Do You Think of Best Practice Frameworks? 

From 2021 through 2025, PANO asked nonprofit leaders, staff, and board members from every region, size, and mission in the Commonwealth to tell us: What do best practice frameworks get right? Where do they fall short? What could a version built for the whole sector look like? 

Three things came up again and again: 

• Existing frameworks were built for a narrow slice of the sector. 
• Compliance without context is not enough. 
• The how and who of nonprofit work matter as much as the what. 

The Report Names What We Heard

Standards for All pulls the conversations PANO had into five themes that run through the whole sector: 

• Values, Voice, and Belonging: Excellence is not just about compliance. It’s about whether your policies actually build trust and belonging instead of standing in the way of them. 
• Nonprofits as Civic Actors: Nonprofits go beyond just delivering services to helping sustain democracy and civic life. Best practice should equip them to play that role, not treat it as a distraction. 
• Power With, Not Power Over: The old top-down model, in which power flows from funders to boards to staff, gives way to leadership that’s shared and accountable in every direction. 
• People-Centered Policy and Practice: You can’t policy your way to change. What makes or breaks your values is the day-to-day culture of how your organization makes decisions and handles conflict. 
• Right-Sizing and Relevance: One operational bar for every organization punishes smaller and community-based groups. The work is shared goals with flexible paths that fit an organization’s size, structure, and purpose. 

The Roadmap Turns Those Themes Into Action

Instead of another checklist of what to adopt, the Values to Action Roadmap helps organizations work through two harder questions: How do we work, and who is the work for? 

It offers personal learning resources, self-reflection and group exercises, trusted skill-building partners, and tools you can adapt right now. You can start wherever it feels most urgent for your organization. 

This work builds on the Standards for Excellence Institute’s recent updates to its code, benchmarks, and resources, updates that respond to many of the same things Pennsylvania leaders raised. As a state partner to the Institute, PANO focuses on what we’re best positioned to add, which is local context and flavor shaped by our membership. 

A sector that decides for itself what excellence means, and builds practices that fit real communities, is also a sector better able to hold up its civic role when that role is under pressure. 

Where We Go Next

Over the coming weeks, we’ll share stories from the people who made this real: cohort members who shaped the findings, a funder rethinking what they ask of organizations they support, and PANO’s own team on where this work takes us. 

If you’re ready to move from reading to doing, we have room in the Nonprofit Basics Cohort, a pilot starting July 23, built for small Pennsylvania nonprofits putting these findings into practice. Don’t wait to sign up – registration for the full cohort closes on July 16. 

We spent five years listening, and we’ve built something designed specifically for the organizations that can use it best.