Future Here Now: They know.

Do Now: Be worth their time.

I have spent a lot of my adult life in the nonprofit space, mostly as a board member and consultant. And I’ve been definitely known to critique the nonprofit model, primarily through sharing and riffing on the work of Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.

But today I got to see the nonprofit world through other peoples’ eyes — people who matter more than I do because they will be doing this work after I am gone. And what they saw put the failure of our reliance on nonprofit ways of making impact into stark relief.

I’m advising a group of social impact change-makers, people who have deep histories of working in their communities, which does not and has never had the money, resources and connections they should have for all the usual structural racism issues. A coalition of government and nonprofit types has been assembled to try to “address” this disparity. They’ve got the facts, pretty unambiguous, to know the depth of the problem. And they want people who are on the ground in this community,…