Intertwined: everything is related to everything else. (On the Boundary).

Meteorologists have been known to reflect on the beating wings of butterflies in Brazil. Could it not be that the breeze one day created by these butterflies, so gently and unobtrusively, might later become a factor that ultimately affects the path of a great storm approaching the Japanese coast?

Events of the past 12 months bring home the truth embedded in this fable. Increasingly, we are learning that in this world of ours, almost everything is related in a great web of social and physical relations.

We live in porous and penetrable communities, themselves linked into regional, national, and global economies and polities. Our lives are inextricably lodged in an interdependent global physical environment. The lighting of a match in a Colorado forest, on a trans-Atlantic airliner, or within a Jerusalem nightclub can affect, in moments or months, whether a person in Philadelphia is pushed out of work and looking for a meal, carrying a rifle in Afghanistan, or seeking psychological counseling in the face of what may easily appear a cruel and unlivable world.

Nonprofit managers, good professionals that they are, seek to create boundaries to limit how they work and what they think about. Professional media, like the trade magazine that right now occupies your attention, tend to be directed by editors and publishers who limit articles to topics of immediate reader concern. But, despite these sensible efforts, butterflies continue to beat their wings and people light their matches.

Thus, for no foreseeable or explicable reason, the value of most stocks plunged, thereby dissipating many billions of fantasized dollars nonprofit fundraisers had expected to claim for their causes. What had one day appeared to be a solid financial base had, just a few days later, become no more palpable than the breeze from the butterfly's wings.

Similar seemingly unlikely factors, supplemented by the power of the best corporate lawyers money can buy, led to a conclusion of the presidential race that some still dispute. Control of the U.S. Senate then shifted when a single senator, for no clearly apparent reason, declared himself an Independent. And, immediately following the appearance of this issue of The NPT, it is likely that control of the U.S. Congress will be determined by factors as irrelevant to public affairs as the rise or fall in stock values during days immediately preceding November 5. (Of course, the election may also be determined by the timing of an anticipated invasion of Iraq.)

And who could have anticipated the revelations that led a nation to begin to regard its corporate elite not as a group of heroic capitalist stalwarts, but rather a set of low-life pilferers, feathering their nests with millions of dollars stolen from the livelihoods and retirement plans of their own employees?

Within the nonprofit sector, these revelations have led to reflections about compensation levels of leadership. After years of statements to the point that parity in pay between non-profits and for-profits was a reasonable goal, comments began to be heard about the excessive pay of some nonprofit execs, the desirability of salary caps, and the advisability of distancing nonprofits from corporate structures and practices.

The ability of small actions to have incalculable consequences means that predicting the future is a task of no small consequence.

As this column is written on a warm fall afternoon in September; how can it be known how the reader will receive it when it enters print in early November? Will the reader have just learned that his son, part of a U.S. force sent to invade Iraq by presidential judgment, has been identified as missing in action? Will the investment stock designed to support the reader's nonprofit organization have just lost 90 percent of its value upon the disclosure of yet another CEO crime? Will a major foundation have just called to inform that an anticipated grant will not be funded, owing to a decline in foundation assets?

Futures may not be fully predictable, but they will emerge with certainty. They follow the inexorable logic of the "3 Ps:" they vary as possibilities; in the probability of their unfolding; and in the degree to which we find them preferable or unpreferable.

If we understand the past and the present, we have a better chance of knowing the future. But, we will never be certain. In Northern Ireland, for instance, to know whether a relatively surly peace will prevail in the longstanding conflict between Protestants and Catholics, we will need to know much more than how the two religious groups differ in belief and structure. The state of social peace between the groups will also be determined by how individuals in the groups view the nations they belong to, how they see each other as being "civilized" or "backward," how relations with Britain and Ireland are playing out, and which groups see themselves as having rising or declining prospects for economic and political advancement.

Even with some knowledge of these complexities, the degree to Which the conflict in Northern Ireland will be exploding or simply simmering in early November will also depend on "events:" A shooting on a Belfast street, a firebomb thrown through a particular window, a particularly unruly demonstration. All have the capacity to unbalance a delicate peace. And, as political scientist Ashutosh Varshney noted in his important new book on the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, a great deal will depend on the degree to which residents of particular communities and towns have established patterns of interaction that bridge ethnic boundaries and bring members of the differing ethnic groups into personal and group interaction.

Increasingly in our modern world, it is the nature of the kind of civic ties provided by voluntary and nonprofit organizations that have become critical in determining how people, groups, and even nations relate to each other. Few people had stronger ties to each other than the September 11 bombers, bonded by a common religio-political faith and a strong sense of belonging.

It is not the strength of social bonds that counts in building a peaceful and just world. Rather, it is the quality of these ties and their ability to link people of differing races, religions, classes, and personal orientations into a broader vision of local and global community that allows us to live together.

This, of course, is where voluntary and nonprofit organizations may play their most important roles. The most important nonprofits do not act as tax-exempt businesses, providing services at market rates only to those who can pay, nor are they solely playthings for their board members and executive staff, or clubs to amuse a set of like-minded members.

The most important nonprofits are those that connect people to each other, particularly when these connections bridge social boundaries and divisions. They also serve to link their participants to broader social purposes -- such as the struggle for peace, the quest for health and education, and the meeting of basic social needs in the face of poverty and despair.

The most important nonprofit organizations are led by people who stay in close connection to those they serve, and to the purposes they seek to advance. The best nonprofits are led by people who understand that somewhere in Brazil even now, the breeze is stirring off a butterfly's wing.

Jon VanTil is professor of Urban Studies at the Camden, N.J. campus of Rutgers University and is the author of the books "Critical Issues in American Philanthropy" and "Mapping The Third Sector," and "Growing Civil Society: From Nonprofit Sector to Third Space."