There’s No “I” in Nonprofit

The headline was what set me off:  “Young Bankers Seek ‘Good Yield’ With Their Own Nonprofits.”  Bloomberg, like so many others, even educated others, don’t understand:  no one owns a nonprofit.  Not a founder.  Not an executive director.  Not a wealthy smart-kid.

Nonprofits serve the public—not the personal needs of any one or group of individuals.  Nonprofits serve others, not a personal need to feel good by thinking you are doing good.  Needless to say, I was already beyond annoyed by the arrogance of it all, even before I read the article.  When will people understand, regardless of whether they are on Wall Street or just regular folk? Nonprofits are simply not about the individual.

But I’m getting very tired of for-profit folks who think anyone can “do nonprofits,” and do so as a part-time gig, aimed at making them feel good about themselves.

There are organizations that seem to be growing like wildfire that match mostly for-profit employees with nonprofits that need help and then let these folks with limited-to-no-knowledge of nonprofits share their presumed brilliance on a very part-time basis after their brain power and energy have been expended on their day jobs.  But, hey, they feel good; who cares what happens to the nonprofit?

The Wall Streeters highlighted in this article are no different.  These smiling, no doubt self-described “do-gooders,” who want to use their money  now, while still working, and what they perceive as special skills from the world of finance, think they know something those already toiling in the nonprofit sector don’t.

They praise their “good yield,” what they claim is a Wall Street term, failing to recognize that it is simply another way of saying “high impact,” something smart nonprofit leaders have been talking about and working to measure for decades.  We in the nonprofit sector understand the importance of ROI just as much as the person on Wall Street; once again, we just may have a different language for it.   It is, however, the language that we use day in and day out at our work; and it isn’t a side-gig for us.  It is further offensive, not to mention incredibly condescending, that they rationalize that they are bringing something “different” (and, clearly imply, better) to “their” nonprofits in order to appease their souls for making ridiculous amounts of money.

Perhaps it is even done to lessen the (perceived) scorn received from those who don’t judge a person’s value based on the size of her/his paycheck?  Really?  Like there is another way of judging value?

“Learning, earning and returning,” as one young Wall Streeter was quoted, might work in a (bad) creative writing class, but it doesn’t differentiate this group of Wall Streeters from generations of those who have learned, returned and settled for earning less in order to work in the nonprofit sector full-time, doing good work full-time.

Ironically, these Wall Streeters are dilettantes, deserving of more derision than those socialite women and wives of senior executives of major companies who for much of the prior century sat on nonprofits and were all viewed as dilettantes.  Many of these women worked incredibly hard to help nonprofits succeed, all the while being dismissed as “just women” helping perpetuate their families’ honor and/or husbands’ rise to power.  But they had pluck and brought hard work, and a commitment to the end result–the mission.  If it won them points with their families or their husbands’ bosses, so be it; they weren’t there for pats on the back or recognition or to wipe away or improve a sullied reputation.

The entire time I was reading the article, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were dancing and singing in my head.  All I heard was, “Let’s put on a show!”  Perhaps one or two of these Wall Streeters are as dedicated and talented as Judy and Mickey were in Babes in Arms, and will have their show be more than something generations of children have done every summer or holiday family gathering for entertainment and to while away boredom.  But that wasn’t what I picked up in the article.

And then, suddenly, Mickey Rooney was reading from a quote in the article: “I just have fun with it. So there’s a certain aspect of me that just is like, yeah, sure, let’s get that started, let’s go.”   Fun is great, but it doesn’t last forever.  And as everyone who has ever started or worked for a nonprofit knows, starting is easy; the sustaining is what takes the really hard work.  And when dilettantes get tired, bored or distracted and walk away leaving the furniture half-made, a sweater half-knitted or the bread-machine sitting on the shelf, no harm is done;.  But if you walk away leaving people half-way through a jobs training and mentoring program or a school built but with no supplies or teachers, real people with built up expectations, hopes and dreams get harmed, seriously harmed.  Nonprofit work is not for the dilettantes, the feint of heart, the ones who cannot finish.

I shared this article with students in my Masters in Nonprofit Leadership class and they quickly saw how little these Wall Streeters understood about nonprofits and the nonprofit sector. While a tremendous amount of doubt was expressed about both the real commitment of these individuals and their understanding of  what it takes to work in the nonprofit sector, there was also immediate recognition of a key mistake made by these do gooders:  they didn’t do their market analysis and, if they did, they read it wrong.

Maybe they did their market analysis, sized up the supply and demand and determined that there was still room for them.  (Doubtful these days that there is room for any new stand alone nonprofit.)  Or, in classic for-profit thinking, they determined they could beat the others out.  But we don’t work that way; we work to serve, not to beat others out.  Sometimes that service is best done by not starting another organization, sometimes by formal partnerships, sometimes by informal agreements.  Something not just foreign to the world of for-profits, but no doubt anathema.

Speaking the language of business doesn’t make a better nonprofit.  Taking smart business practices and marrying them with smart nonprofit practices makes a better nonprofit.  As is so often the case, these young for-profiteers assume their way is not only the better way, it is the only way.  And that just isn’t so.  Time to learn what business school didn’t teach you or stay out of the water.