Great Barrington — Over nine years after founding the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires, Executive Director Liana Toscanini announced on Thursday, December 11, that she will be retiring this spring.
After moving from New York City to Berkshire County in 1996, Toscanini served for nine years as the development and marketing director at Community Access to the Arts before founding the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires in 2016.
The organization’s mission is to connect nonprofits and offer affordable services, shared resources, and creative collaborations. The organization currently has over 200 nonprofit members.
“I have been planning my retirement for a long time,” Toscanini told The Berkshire Edge. “I’m turning 65 in January, and the organization, coincidentally, happens to be turning 10 years old. It just felt like round numbers everywhere. This road has been long and hard, and I’ve been working 10 years of 70-hour work weeks, and I feel like I’m not getting any younger. In my head, I’m about 30, but my body doesn’t act like that anymore.”
Toscanini said she is looking to pass the baton off to a new generation. “I’ve had a lot of great ideas, and, thankfully, I’ve had a chance to implement them,” she said. “It just feels like it’s someone else’s turn to do this job. The organization is in good shape, and this role can be passed on. It feels kind of like sending your kid off to college.”
When asked what the key has been to the longevity of the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires, Toscanini said, “I think the secret sauce to the organization is our boots-on-the-ground advocacy for nonprofit organizations.” “We are tuned in to what nonprofit organizations need because we are one ourselves,” she said. “People appreciate that we answer our phones fast and we get people the responses they need. We have over two dozen programs, so everyone will find something for themselves.”
The Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires hosts networking events, peer groups, office hours for consulting, board training, coaching, fiscal sponsorship, and the Berkshire Nonprofit Awards. “We have something for everyone,” Toscanini said. “Our organization has also developed a really diversified revenue stream that has allowed us to be sustainable. I also believe that we have a very generous community that supports our mission. Surprisingly, a lot of our support comes from corporate donors, which I never would have imagined in the early days. I thought for sure most of the support would come from individuals, but we have really good working relationships with the banks and foundations, and that’s been hugely helpful, along with funding from the Commonwealth and a couple of large donors. When you mix all of that together, along with program revenues, we have a pretty solid base that allows us to give nonprofits a lot of free programs and low-cost programs.”
Toscanini said connecting nonprofit organizations in Berkshire County is the main underlying mission driving the organization. “We want everyone to connect, learn, and grow,” she said. “It’s important to get nonprofits in the same room where they can meet each other and collaborate because Berkshire County is really spread out. People who work at nonprofit organizations often don’t leave their desks very often because they are constantly trying to keep up with paperwork and grant reports. We’ve built a lot of social capital because we are always there for people, and that is a key to our success. The number of nonprofit organizations in Berkshire County is pretty overwhelming. By connecting people, whether it is community members or funders to nonprofits, or businesses to nonprofits in order to provide services to them, we have cemented our place in the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector.”
As for the hurdles facing nonprofit organizations, not just in Berkshire County but across the nation, Toscanini said, “I think almost everyone needs to step up to meet this moment.” “Nonprofit organizations are resilient and creative because they’ve always had to be,” she said. “People need to give more and get involved, and organizations need to find ways to do things better. That requires the convening element that our organization provides, which is to get people in the same room to talk about sharing resources and answering multiple questions: How can we do things smarter, better, more efficiently, and less expensively? How can we advocate for ourselves and tell our story so that we can get the support that we need? It’s common knowledge that philanthropy is not going to be able to replace federal funding because the dollars just aren’t there. But philanthropy can step up. Every individual philanthropist and everybody can pay out more from their donor-advised funds and their foundations to help us meet this moment. Nonprofits need more support to keep filling the holes that are going to be left from a lack of federal funding. Everybody’s kind of anxiously awaiting the storm that we see coming, and there are conversations in the county among nonprofits and agencies on how best to meet this moment.”
Toscanini said “uncertainty” is the greatest challenge currently facing nonprofit organizations. “No one knows how much money an annual appeal will raise,” she said. “A lot of folks don’t realize that nonprofit organizations are everywhere, doing whatever jobs the government isn’t doing for us. We have a long way to go to tell the stories behind that, and we must tell these stories in every way that we can. Many good nonprofits that do great work often fly under the radar, and nobody knows they exist. They are certainly not getting checks in the mail to help support their work if nobody knows what they are doing.”
Toscanini said that she is proud of the work the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires has done over the past nine years. “When I started the organization, a lot of people questioned the need for another nonprofit to support other nonprofits,” she said. “But slowly, this concept of a support and infrastructure organization has proven itself, taken off, and had a real impact. I know that 2026 will be filled with so much uncertainty, but one of our organization’s values is to meet people where they are. I think that the next executive director will get out there, meet a lot of people, listen to what their needs are, then formulate our organization’s response accordingly.”
Toscanini did not provide an exact date for when she will retire, but in the meantime, the organization’s board has hired EOS Transition Partners of Boston to conduct a search for a new executive director.
For more information about the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires, visit its website.
