Listen to a video of me reading this post if listening is more your thing
As I’ve been writing my book, Healing from the Nonprofit sector, I’ve been in a reflective mood. What can I say about what I’ve seen since I’ve been in the nonprofit sector, that would be valuable for people to understand?
Well, since I started consulting in the nonprofit sector in 2009, taking my years of experience working inside of nonprofits, I’ve tried to pinpoint what makes organizations and programs fail.
This road has led me to interview university researchers, nonprofit board members, executive directors, founders, nonprofit consultants, government workers, and nonprofit workers. Suffice to say, it’s given me a political education when it really didn’t intend to.
What PATTERNS have emerged as I looked at the story of how we got here? Here are a few patterns.
- Government: Nonprofits bring the median income of a region down.
- Nonprofit Board members: “You just can’t find good help these days” – when the 3rd fundraising professional quits in as many years
- Let the government step away from providing services, nonprofits will step in, get paid poverty wages and overseen by amateurs.
This last is convenient for colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism and the ruling class.
Why? Government mostly has unions. Nonprofits mostly don’t. Government has elected oversight. Nonprofits mostly don’t. Government in other countries does a lot of what we expect nonprofits to do here.
If you wanted to take power away from unions, and have less oversight, you’d cut government social service budgets down to the bone and give their former duties to nonprofits. Which, thanks to Reagan, already happened a long time ago. Now this is accelerating in the current admin.
I used to see nonprofits as bastions of compassion. I used to love the sector with my whole heart. I felt like we were all engaged in picking up the pieces of a broken system to make a better one.
I woke up from that lie, from that dream that wasn’t true.
Here’s the truth that I offer you now.
You are letting your revolutionary energy get caught up in a net that does not threaten the ruling class, and exhausting yourself to solve problems that the government should be solving.
Instead your tax dollars are going to fund wars and genocide, and let Israel have universal healthcare, and senators have salaries and healthcare even after they retire.
How do I put this?
My loyalty was misplaced and so is yours. Your nonprofit and the ones I worked at will drag you through the street. They will chew you up and spit you out. They don’t deserve your loyalty. WAKE UP.
All of our pleading for better treatment, higher wages, better healthcare, a structure to rise in the organization falls on deaf ears.
Why would they give you that when they can just go find another desperate person tomorrow to work for starvation wages?
Why would they even care about the quality of this person’s work when they have no consequences if the work gets done badly, or if half the staff quits?
Nonprofits are run by board amateurs, so leaders don’t have accountability.
Unless their job depends on staff longevity and wellbeing, your bargaining power is limited. Speaking of which. I’ve interviewed folks who were in a nonprofit union, and they said it doesn’t necessarily protect you. You can still try though!
It took me YEARS to stop ascribing good intention to nonprofit boards and leaders when none existed. I wanted to believe that the sector I devoted so much of my life towards was worthy of my devotion. The years I spent honing my fundraising, then consulting skills in. The years living on very little, hoping that someday with enough wins I’d be able to land a job that allowed me to save.
And what do I see now?
More excuses.
More low wages in the face of massive inflation.
More handwringing about “we just can’t pay more” and board members brought in who won’t challenge the status quo. I get it.
People like routine. Board members hire their friends to work as heads of nonprofits. And a lot of folks who run nonprofits want to “maintain order” rather than think of how to support the lowliest nonprofit worker.
I’ve seen people lose their health from being overworked by nonprofits. I’ve seen people get killed in tragic accidents and replaced at their nonprofit jobs within a month.
Don’t kid yourself about what this sector really is, and how it really will treat you when it can no longer squeeze more labor out of you.
One thing that being a scapegoat teaches you is that you’ll talk about broken systems, whether or not people are listening. It doesn’t necessarily make you a restful person to work with. But certainly “passionate” as I was recently politely called.
You get to see the contradictions between what people say and what they do. And you draw attention to it. Your anger propels you forward to request that people look at how they could work even better, if they faced these contradictions.
Another trend, I’ve seen tech companies converging on nonprofits like vultures on a dying carcass
I remember speaking at a nonprofit tech conference in the last few years, about technofeudalism.
The organizer told me people hated it.
Now that future is here.
So, you know, sometimes you are right but you’re early, before people want to acknowledge or notice it.
And so you get punished for being Cassandra. Doesn’t make it any less true.
Do I feel vindicated, now that we’ve got so much obvious rampant corruption and cybersecurity breaches? Of course.
Do I wish I hadn’t been right? Yes. Definitely. But what is must be faced, and only then can we change it.