We’re living and working in unprecedented times. As we think about the future of the nonprofit sector, we look to the Great Recession of 2008 for guidance. Of course, those were completely different circumstances and there isn’t a perfect crosswalk.

In its spring edition, Nonprofit Quarterly offers up “‘Four Futures’ of the Great Recession Revisited: Nonprofits’ Hopes, Fears, and What Really Happened.”

In their introduction, Ruth McCambridge and Cassandra Heliczer write, “In 2008, the Nonprofit Quarterly asked the insightful Dr. Paul Light (NYU Wagner’s Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service and founding principal investigator of the Global Center for Public Service) to make a set of predictions about what might happen to nonprofits in the course of what became known as the Great Recession. Light gamely obliged, organizing his predictions into four “futures,” or potential scenarios. We reviewed them recently, and found aspects of each scenario that did indeed play out during the recession and its immediate aftermath, and some that did not, as the following pages illustrate. But there was one scenario—“Transformation”—that intrigued us the most. We did not expect to see aspects of this scenario reflected to as great an extent as they were—though in a significantly limited way. It is this scenario that we hope will be carried forward.”