“Balancing the stage” is a common theater term. It refers to the arranging of the actors and set in a strategic way to produce a desired effect. A director can create a feeling of order or of chaos with the choices they make. For the audience, balance is crucial — a stage that lacks balance will pull focus and distract from the story the company needs to tell.

Stand Up Placer has been serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence since 1978. Survivors and the children of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking can find refuge, emergency services and advocacy around the clock in our 55-bed safe house. Victims get to us either by calling our 24/7 crisis line, visiting one of our service centers in Roseville or Auburn, or from law enforcement referrals.

Like many local nonprofits, Cool Davis is challenged with limited funding opportunities, harnessing the talents and energy of diverse people and organizations to a common vision and purpose, and finding a positive and effective message to inspire and care for our community in the face of a rapidly worsening view of the future.

Businesses in Northern California are especially well-positioned to expand globally. The region has a culturally diverse population and an enviable proximity to ports, airports, rail systems and foreign trade zones. Even as exporting makes sense for individual businesses, encouraging companies to expand internationally makes even more sense for the local economy.

Girls on the Run of Greater Sacramento is an afterschool positive youth development program that inspires girls to be joyful, healthy and confident, using a fun, experience-based curriculum that creatively integrates running

When Latino kids grow up not seeing doctors, cops or college professors that look like them, they begin to think that those are not viable career choices: Those are jobs for other people. It is hard to encourage anyone to go into those professions when they don’t know people already in them.

It’s important for business owners to work with their financial planners to develop plans that align with their passions, and how they can achieve their company’s philanthropic goals. Some strategies include:

Since 2007, the nonprofit Capital Region Family Business Center has worked to help family-run businesses solve some of the unique challenges facing their companies. The organization recently took another step toward that goal by hiring Stella Premo as its first full-time, paid executive director. We talked to her about the ups and downs of running a family business.

I was getting more hesitant as the hours passed. Would I run into unsavory people? How crowded are we talking? And, being inherently conservative, I wondered about the cost.

I’m talking about my decision to take light rail for the first time … and doing so alone.

The effort to keep the Sacramento Kings in town showed what a community can do when everyone rallies around a cause. Now that the Golden 1 Center is opening and fans are coming downtown to enjoy the Kings, it’s bringing many people together again — perhaps too closely.