Heather McLeod Grant

John Melia is a no-nonsense kind of guy. He’s got what seems at first to be the naïve determination of a child building sand castles at water’s edge, not quite cognizant of the fact that the surf could swoop in at any moment and wreak havoc. It’s a refreshing assessment. But it’s also wrong. At 42, the wounded Gulf War vet and founder and executive director of the Jacksonville, Fla.-based Wounded Warrior Project is far from naïve about the way nonprofit organizations have historically worked. He just cuts the crap and focuses on how they should work. And in the case of WWP, how

The U.S. has 1.5 million nonprofits that account for more than $1 trillion of the country’s economy. Over the last 15 years, nonprofits actually have grown faster than the rest of the economy and currently are the third largest industry in the U.S., behind retail and wholesale trade but ahead of banking and telecommunications.   So with the playing field getting larger and larger, something begs to be asked. What makes a great nonprofit? Which are the crème de la crème, and how did they attain such a level of success? This is the question that Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant meticulously answer