How risk tolerant a nonprofit is should be determined by its board. Risk tolerance is a policy issue that is particularly important for community housing organizations because there is often a lot of money at stake, not to mention a lot of lives, and for the community, the question as to whether they are better off as a result of that organization's intervention.
A case in point is the investigative story published in today's Washington Post. A D.C. nonprofit housing developer Exec got involved with some high-risk investors and in the end, no one was better off.
Would better results have been achieved with more prudent governance?