as they seem to have lost their own. Komen’s decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood at the behest of an anti-choice Board member reminds us how ready the right wing is to sacrifice women’s health for political gain.
There’s a petition to sign if you want to want to make your voice heard. If you’ve been a Komen supporter and you now de-fund the organization, your voice will be heard even louder.
but she’d really have preferred not to have this as an inspiration. There is no excuse for the decision of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, until now a respected source of information and funding in the fight against breast cancer, to defund Planned Parenthood‘s program of providing breast exams to poor women.
In fact, the decision doesn’t even make sense–unless you consider that a recent addition to the Board of Komen is an anti-choice ex-politician from Georgia. As another commentator has wisely noted, Planned Parenthood will survive this latest injury–the Nonprofiteer’s determination to support the agency has just been redoubled, and probably her gift will be, too–but Komen may not.
Please join the Nonprofiteer in notifying Komen of your distress at its decision to let irrelevant politics endanger the lives and health of poor women, and of your decision to redirect to Planned Parenthood any support you may have been giving to Komen.
The Nonprofiteer’s readers might enjoy this account of a pissing match between Warren Buffett and Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky has been urging the Sage of Omaha to make voluntary contributions to the Treasury if he felt he was undertaxed. Buffett has now responded that he’ll match any such contributions made by Republican Senators.
This dialogue makes in a different form Milton Friedman’s point as recounted by the Nonprofiteer yesterday. Voluntary contributions to reduce poverty (or do any of the other things we rely on the government to do) are insufficient, because everyone would be willing to pay his/her share only if s/he could be sure that everyone else would be willing to pay his/her share. Otherwise, no dice.
Doubtless McConnell will ignore Buffett’s challenge and continue his nonsensical bluster about Buffett’s freedom to pay extra if he feels “guilty” about his low tax rate. But the point isn’t, of course, how Buffett feels, or even what he does—it’s what everyone else does. And if McConnell and his buddies don’t donate to the Treasury, then they are poster children for the free-rider problem—thereby proving Buffett right: philanthropy is not sufficient and taxation is necessary.
I am distressed by the sight of poverty; I am benefited by its alleviation; but I am benefited equally whether I or someone else pays for its alleviation; the benefits of other people’s charity therefore partly accrue to me. To put it differently, we might all of us be willing to contribute to the relief of poverty, provided everyone else did. We might not be willing to contribute the same amount without such assurance.
Therefore, this wild-eyed radical continues, the government must step in. If poverty is to be alleviated, everyone must be taxed so that no one gets a free ride to the benefits of poverty eradication.
How appalling! How socialistic! Of course, what else could one expect from an ivory-tower academic complete with Nobel prize?
Here’s a chronic story (h/t The Nonprofit Quarterly), about how the United States is the most generous nation on earth. This annual survey measures how often people donate money to charity, how often they volunteer and how often they help strangers in need—the distinction between #1 and #3 being a little vague.
While the Nonprofiteer salutes all the donors among us, she feels constrained to point out that the United States leaves to private charity a whole range of activities provided elsewhere by the government. Are the citizens of France really less giving, or are they just willing to give free public higher education through their taxes rather than depend on the kindness of strangers? Are the Swedes, who provide paid parenthood leave while Americans think they’re generous to provide unpaid leave, really stingier than we are? And do the English really turn their backs on the needy, or do they instead provide health care for everyone?
The Nonprofiteer is proud to be an American, but she prefers to be proud of the things we really do well rather than the things we do to compensate for what we do poorly, namely, supply adequate social services to all our citizens.
Now here’s something that breaks the Nonprofiteer’s heart: the MacArthur Foundation is making grants to a dozen libraries and museums nationwide to establish youth computer learning centers modeled on YOUMedia, the Chicago Public Library’s innovative youth learning project.
Why does such good news evoke such profound sorrow? Because the Nonprofiteer can remember when the notion was that the philanthropic sector would serve as a laboratory, trying out new approaches to solving social problems and then passing along the ones that worked to be funded by the government. What we have here, however, is a model already vetted in the public sector whose future sustenance apparently will have to come from private charity.
If theres anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “Youre undeserving; so you cant have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I dont need less than a deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.
T]he mere fact that there is a valid moral distinction to be made does not entail that we want our public policies to make it. It is, after all, difficult to discern between the deserving and the undeserving – maybe especially for governments, but for private charities too.
And Jewish folklore provides yet another version. The story is told of a rabbi who gave a beggar $100 and then faced the reproaches of his wife, who’d seen the beggar’s wife wearing fur. “He told me he needed it, and I had it, so I gave it to him,” replied the rabbi. “What he does with it after is none of my concern.” The point is that generosity is the process of separating yourself from your money, not the process of evaluating someone else’s virtues.
Does the Nonprofiteer tend to give her money to causes she judges worthwhile (and therefore deserving) and to agencies she believes are efficient (and therefore deserving)? Of course. But does she worry about whether the UN Population Fund is providing assistance only to women who became pregnant by an angel, or whether the ACLU vindicates the rights only of upright church-goers? Of course not. People who need help, deserve help. End of conversation.
The hard Right has long argued that government services were unnecessary because nonprofits could step into the breach. This claim was always nonsense; but at least its exponents didn’t also take on themselves the task of interfering with the charities’ overwhelmed attempts to do so. Wisconsinites will pay the same Federal taxes whether or not the state receives Federal grants to support its nonprofit sector. So clearly the point is not to shelter the state’s citizens from confiscatory taxes but to punish people who need help. Governor Walker’s ideology apparently requires not just that people in need of assistance seek private charity but that private charity be deprived of the means of assisting them.
And let’s be clear about the legal antecedents of what’s going on here. Groups of citizens of a single state are being deprived of access to something available to all other citizens of the United States—just as groups of citizens of the states of the Old Confederacy were once deprived of the vote. Then, “states’ rights” was a buzz-phrase meaning “the opportunity to mistreat black people without interference from those durned Feds.” Now, in Governor Walker’s view, the phrase is even more expansive, meaning “the opportunity to mistreat unhealthy and/or poor people of every color to make the point that those durned Feds have no right to interfere.” Anyone who’s enthusiastic about the states’ rights claims in the governors’ lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act should check out Wisconsin for a foretaste of what states’ rights really mean to the rights of states’ citizens.
Who are these people, and how did they get to be so smart?
A new study has found that inverting state tax structures—whereby the highest income earners would be taxed at the current percentage of income for the lowest income earners, and vice versa—would collectively raise $490 billion in new revenue, immediately eliminating states’ budget deficits and avoiding the serious consequences of budget cuts.
What’s being “flipped,” of course, is the current regressive tax system, which depends on getting more and more money from those who have the least of it—or, as a study co-author bluntly phrased it, “squeez[ing] water out of a stone.”
Is there any possibility that state legislatures will accept this sensible suggestion? Maybe not this minute; but the Nonprofiteer suggests we all wait until crime spikes this summer (not enough police officers) and schools open this fall with huge classes (not enough teachers). Maybe then our elected officials will get a clue that dismantling workers’ compensation and blaming public employee unions will be insufficient to preserve essential services.
So a couple of weeks ago the Nonprofiteer received a press release announcing “Redefining [of] the Nonprofit Model.” Doubtless you’re all familiar with the genre: a group of business people get together and decide that the nonprofit sector hasn’t cured cancer or ended poverty because people in the nonprofit sector are stupid and lazy, and that an infusion of good old hard-headed American for-profit business practices will compensate for that. Voila: instant Great Society!
This particular redefinition was truly revolutionary:
One hundred advisors, including many of Silicon Valley’s elite, are coming together to disrupt the nonprofit space. . . . [They] have committed to one full year of serving on the board of a nonprofit. . . . [and] attending monthly salons where they will discuss the specific pain points of their assigned nonprofits and attempt to find solutions as a team. . . . [This] is part of a larger movement . . . to make the non-profit world more efficient. . . . “This is just the start of how [we] will disrupt the nonprofit sector and create new, innovative ways for business leaders to contribute . . . . Before [this], there was no easy path for nonprofits to find experienced leaders to help them at a board management level. A board role is not just about fundraising, but includes developing growth plans, operational efficiency, cause marketing, customer relationship management, event planning, and much more.”. . . . In order to maximize results, [the group] carefully matches advisors to nonprofits based on their skills, interests and a nonprofit’s needs.
So let’s review: a bunch of business people are going to sit on nonprofit Boards of Directors! And then periodically those business people will get together and talk about how to be better Board members! As Board members, they will not only fundraise but contribute their skills! They’ll join Boards based on their interest in the nonprofit’s mission! And they’ll seek ways to improve the whole sector!
The accumulation of these radical notions caused the Nonprofiteer to swoon; but the one idea that really had her down for the count was that the entire purpose of the endeavor was to “disrupt the nonprofit space.” Because really, what nonprofits trying to serve their clients need most of all is disruption of their management to supplement the disruption of funding they face constantly, disruption of their staff produced by those funding crises, and disruption of their ability to operate smoothly or secure resources when their message is being drowned out by a constant drumbeat of demands for “reinvention.”
The Nonprofiteer understands that in the tech world, “disrupt” is a positive word, suggesting the kind of change-the-world ethic that fueled Microsoft and Facebook. But she urges everyone to notice that when those disruptive entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg moved into the nonprofit sector, what they did was to find nonprofits doing good work and give them lots of money to do more of it. If the disruptive “advisers” of the press release would just do the same thing, there would be less “news” but a healthier nonprofit sector.
As she fanned herself back to consciousness, the Nonprofiteer was struck once more. In this case, the weapon was yet another article about hybrid corporate forms designed to enable nonprofits to earn their own revenue and stop “begging.” Whether the discussion purports to be about L3Cs or public benefit corporations or Triple Bottom Lines, the argument is always the same: nonprofits should just get with the capitalist program, identify lucrative markets and earn their keep like every other good red-blooded American.
This approach ignores the fact that nonprofits’ markets usually consist of clients who are not profitable to serve—because if they were profitable to serve, the for-profit sector would be serving them. The better a nonprofit is at finding and serving its market, the poorer it will be, because though for-profit clients are a profit center, nonprofit clients are a cost center.
Fine, say the hybrid-benefit-earn-your-own-revenue people: so start a profitable business and funnel its profits into the charity. But this notion of a two-headed agency is, like most similar creatures, a monster. If nonprofits expend their limited energy on creating market-based revenue streams, they’ll be diverted from their mission-based activities. Either the marketing strategy succeeds, in which case the profit-generating people gain the power within the organization and mission falls to a sad second; or the marketing strategy fails, in which case it has consumed significant resources that should have gone to serving clients.
There are, of course, institutions for which running a business can be part and parcel of mission, for instance, job-training centers. But for mental health agencies, arts organizations, group homes, rape crisis hotlines and most of the other charities which do the important work in our society, running a business is a dangerous distraction.
What if, instead of spending time telling nonprofits how they should operate differently, business people re-examined their own operating principles? What if every business set aside 25% of its profits for investing not in the business itself but in the wider community?
In other words, instead of asking why a charity can’t be more like a business, let’s start asking why businesses don’t operate more like charities. Businesses receive all sorts of public services and protections, from the enforcement of contracts in the law courts to well-maintained roads along which to distribute their products. Why shouldn’t they be expected to contribute to the public good in return?
Most business people would say, “But our primary duty is to our shareholders, not to the public good” (and those over-influenced by Ayn Rand and the University of Chicago economics department would say “Our SOLE duty is to our shareholders, the public be damned”). Right: and the primary (or SOLE) duty of charities is to their/our clients. Anything that takes nonprofits away from that activity is perforce improper.
What’s the point of this thought experiment, in which charities chide businesses instead of the other way around? Simply to demonstrate how much business advice to charities is sheer nonsense. To presume that the voluntary sector doesn’t make a profit because it hasn’t thought about how to do so is to fundamentally misconceive its role in the wider economy.
Besides, what nonprofits need isn’t more advice: it’s more money. When business people are ready to provide that—when they’re ready to serve on Boards not as agents of disruption but as securers of resources; when they’re ready to advocate for a tax system which will underwrite the necessary work done by the voluntary sector—well, THAT will be the time for a press release.
