Future Here Now: the Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Nonprofit chewing gum and bailing wire system
Signals
The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/the-nonprofit-industrial-complex-and-the-corruption-of-the-american-city/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Yesterday, I focused on one kind of nonprofit: the overextended, underresourced, hanging-on-by-a prayer nonprofit. These are the kind that occupy my everyday life, and the communities I am most drawn to working with. But the kind that this article describes also happen.
From my perspective, these organizations are responding to the same impossible situation of handling the false externalities - by taking a more mercenary approach.
And it’s not unusual at all for a nonprofit to demonstrate the best intentions, but a lack of accountability and follow-through skills. Of course, sometimes that’s because they can’t get enough operational funding to support the kind of accountability that other organizations should be requiring.
And sometimes it’s easier - on both sides - to simply shrug and look away.
As a result, I have mixed feelings about this article. On the one hand, I get the point that the author is making, and there are certainly cases where nonprofits square their circle, unethically, by going this route. But I would argue that this is a product of the system we’ve assumed, not an anomalty.
And the emphasis that this article puts on one case study to paint the whole sector….I have real problems with that. For every supposed TODCO, I can show you 300 that are barely holding themselves together.
Crappy Funding Practices!
https://nonprofitaf.com/2023/05/join-the-movement-to-end-crappy-funding-practices/
Vu Le’s Nonprofit AF is the source I go back to again and again for the most real of insights into how screwed up the nonprofit sector can be, especially for those organizations that often are making the most direct impact. Sprinkled with humor and a lot of pop culture resources that I’m apparently too much of a Luddite to get, Vu has the most deft knack for pulling back the curtain and showing us the idiodicy of how we handle those externalities.
This article is a couple of years old, but once you’ve read it, you will never see the way we fund nonprofits the same again. I encourage you to read everything on this page. Some of it will make you laugh, some will make you squirm, especially if you run grants or funding programs. And I think you (we) should.
No, you can’t sell your way out of it.
https://nonprofitaf.com/2023/04/no-social-enterprise-and-earned-revenues-will-not-solve-nonprofits-funding-problems/
I almost never include two Signals from the same source, let alone the same author, but like I said, Vu’s arrows hit the bullseye the way so few others writing about this space ever do. And no one does it as readably.
And this article…man, does it hit home. I talked yesterday about the fallacy of telling nonprofits to “run like a business.” Of course they can’t do that — the whole sector exists to deal with the things that almost all the business sector has discarded. And while selling a service or a product might not be a bad strategy to help diversify our funding, it can’t replace it all. Otherwise, someone would have made it a business.
Vu not only opens the hood to show us the opossums nesting in the engine of our nonprofit assumptions, but he pulls out the handfuls of chewed up wires to show us exactly how far from functional we are.
In short, read this. Nuff said.