As its title implies, Alice Korngold's new book is built around the image of the lever, "a tool to convert...a small amount of force or energy into a far greater output." The book describes how business volunteers ——— for-profit businesspeople who join nonprofit boards or offer management assistance to nonprofits —— can use their skills and a reasonable time commitment to give nonprofits "leverage." Korngold states, "One volunteer...can bring about tremendous outcomes by strengthening a nonprofit....thousands of volunteers ...could be transformative for the nation's nonprofit sector."

Korngold, founder and former CEO of Business Volunteers Unlimited in Cleveland, Ohio, draws from her experiences to offer dozens of examples of how business volunteers can impact nonprofit success, whether on their own (a pricing expert helped a nonprofit realign its financial model) or in a collaboration (a group of local business executives helped an organization for at-risk youth revamp its board, leadership, and strategic plan). Korngold also shows how businesses and their employees benefit from nonprofit voluntarism: volunteering enhances leadership skills, encourages team-building, and increases business visibility. The "fulcrum" for all of this leverage is the participation of "matchmakers" ——— nonprofit resource centers whose staff interview and train potential business volunteers, assess the needs of nonprofits, and work with both parties to ensure that the volunteers' business skills can be "translated" to the nonprofit world.

The book's initial chapters detail the advantages of engagement from both the nonprofit and business points of view, without skipping the potential pitfalls, such as the business executive who wanted the nonprofit where he volunteered to cut costly human service programs that were integral to its mission. A chapter on the work of matchmakers gives a step-by-step description of the questions and training necessary for implementing a successful business/nonprofit relationship. This chapter also emphasizes that the matchmaker should identify and refer possible volunteers, but not pressure the nonprofit about the recommended individual. Another early chapter outlines the key elements of effective business/nonprofit relationships, with definitions of which "businesslike" behaviors are good for nonprofits (focusing on key governance issues, establishing a viable revenue model) and which are bad (decision-making that involves no constituent input).

In its final chapters, Leveraging offers a wealth of procedural detail on the ways volunteers can improve board governance and structure, strengthen leadership and establish a measurable planning process; these chapters contain many exhibits and worksheets that help volunteers assess and improve operations (e.g., a "governance troubleshooting checklist"). Korngold concludes by noting that service and voluntarism are expanding on a global scale. "The moment is now," she claims, to expand business voluntarism for universal benefit; her book provides an excellent guide for making such leverage possible.