But let’s not let this young woman’s sense of civic duty and remarkable act of civic participation distract from the real point of the Buffett challenge, which is that without increased taxation of the wealthy, jerks like Mitch McConnell will free-ride on public-spirited souls like Katie Murphy.

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.

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.

I recently joined the board of directors of a small nonprofit (4 staff, $200k budget). Within a month of my joining, our executive director announced she would be leaving as her partner has a new job in another state. In addition, while she won’t move for a couple of months, presumably giving the board plenty of time to find a successor, she wants to study for the bar exam in the new state and requested to work half-time until she leaves.

There are a couple of complications (aren’t there always). I was approached by two board members about taking the ED position. I initially said no, but reconsidered and have let the board know of my interest. I have recused myself from any discussions of the search and said I would resign from the board if selected.

The current ED has said that one staff member is interested in the position as well. Since going part-time, the ED also said this same employee is fulfilling many of her duties, and requested a bonus for the employee equivalent to the 20 hours a week the ED is not working. She said he is, in effect, an interim executive director, and should be compensated. I and other board members doubt that the current person is actually doing the extra 20 hours a week, and/or doubt he can sustain it. (I was present for this discussion, but said nothing and abstained from the vote on his compensation).

I feel I cannot make many obvious suggestions to the board (like that we hire an outside interim ED, either full or part-time) without it appearing that I’m trying to better position myself for the job. It could appear that I don’t want a competitor to have the interim job for fear that it would give him an advantage. There is also the matter of whether I take the interim position. I can’t bring it up, of course, but what if someone else does?

I guess the big question is that having even expressed an interest in the ED job, should I resign until the search is complete and a new ED hired? That means I would stop all my board work for a period that could be months. And if I’m not selected, do I come back on the Board and pick up where things left off? Obviously I’m concerned about all the lost time on major initiatives. Having a half-time ED is bad enough. We don’t need to lose board members, too.

Signed, Conflicted

Dear Conflicted:

The short answer is “Yes.” If you’re going to be a candidate for Executive Director, you must resign from the Board of Directors–not if and when you’re selected, but right now. There is no other way the Board’s search committee can consider you without favoritism, or at least the appearance of it. And in a circumstance like the one you’ve described, in which a current member of the staff is interested in the Executive Director position himself, the appearance of fairness in the process is absolutely essential to the continued functioning of the organization.

Imagine the staff member’s spending the couple-three months minimum required for a search grumbling to his two remaining fellow employees about how unfair it is for you to compete with him for the favor of a group of your peers.  The effect on morale would be disastrous. And if you got the job under those circumstances, you would walk into a hornet’s nest: hostile employees, shame-faced Board members, and thus a host of troubles you don’t need while the agency is working on the new initiatives you mentioned.

You’re already experiencing the extent to which your Board duties and your hoped-for staff duties embroil you in conflict of interest, and it will only get worse. Either withdraw your name from consideration or submit your resignation to the Board chair–-today.

If you don’t get the job, the question of whether you can return to the Board of Directors is one to be decided by the Board of Directors, not including you. That is, you are rolling the dice that your erstwhile colleagues will want you to return after you’ve failed to impress them sufficiently to get the job. And even if they do, won’t you feel awkward under those circumstances? Won’t you be looking around the Board room wondering who voted against you, and why?

So the question becomes whether you in fact wish to become Executive Director enough to make a do-or-die fight for it, knowing that your relationship with the organization will most likely be at an end if you lose the fight. That’s up to you–you haven’t told the Nonprofiteer anything about your current professional situation but it’s presumably unsatisfying if the Executive Director post beckons so strongly–but consider the costs to the agency no matter what the outcome, and maybe think better of it.

If you do think better of it, and decide to remain on the Board, you could do two things that would strengthen the agency immeasurably: first, persuade your colleagues to hire an actual interim Executive Director, preferably someone who’s been trained in the particular tasks of that very difficult role and certainly someone who is not under any circumstances a candidate for the permanent job. A trained interim ED can make sure necessary initiatives move ahead, clear up any personnel issues that may have been festering under the ex-ED (such as, why is she so concerned about his getting a bonus? More favoritism, perhaps?), and relieve the time pressure the Board would otherwise feel while filling such an important spot. In most major cities the Executive Service Corps operates an interim ED training program and will be glad to provide you with the names of candidates. Choose one to spend between six months and a year guiding the agency while you and your Board colleagues figure out what you want in a new leader and how to go about finding it.

Second, whether or not you hire such an interim ED, persuade your Board colleagues not to confer that title on the candidate-staff member. The title makes him heir-presumptive, which if true means you won’t be conducting a thorough and genuine search and if false means you’ll have a justly disappointed employee in a position to do a lot of damage.

If you decide to pay the current ED only half her salary for working only half-time, fine; that has nothing to do with whether any- or everyone else on staff deserves extra compensation. It may be that their burdens are lightened rather than increased by having a less-engaged ED.  That may be why you distrust the ED’s claim about how hard this guy is working.

The Nonprofiteer doesn’t understand at all the concept of bonuses in the nonprofit world. If your Executive Director does a great job, reward her with a raise. If she does a lousy job, don’t. But bonuses are based on outcome metrics, and those are rarely a direct reflection of an ED’s skill. If you tell an ED you’ll give her a bonus if she puts on five concerts this year, she’ll make sure to do so–-whether or not they’re any good. Or if she expects a bonus for serving x number of clients, you can be sure that x clients will go through the agency’s doors; but whether they’ve been served is a whole ‘nother question. A Board which gives bonuses to nonprofit executives is mistaking what’s measurable for what’s valuable.

So, to recap: if you want to work for the agency, quit its Board to level the job-hunting playing field. Be prepared for the likelihood that you won’t be able to return. Consider whether you’d all be better off if instead you withdrew your name from contention and focused on helping to find someone else to provide the able leadership, both interim and permanent, the group requires and deserves.

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.

H/T the indispensable Rick Cohen at The Nonprofit Quarterly.

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?

No, not that one (or even that one): Milton Friedman.

When the man said “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” he meant it.

H/t Allen R. Sanderson.

“It’s admirable when people back their charitable impulses up with donations,” said Scott Klinger, tax policy director of the group Business for Shared Prosperity.  “But the tax code shouldn’t allow the wealthy the kind of loopholes that let them, essentially, force other taxpayers to underwrite donations to their pet causes.”

“The kind of loopholes . . . “  Is there some other kind?  That is, can we have the tax code encourage individual generosity without delegating to private individuals decisions about what constitutes the public good?  The Nonprofiteer doesn’t see how.  Either you have a tax subsidy—which means by definition that other taxpayers bear a bigger burden—or you don’t. 

Without the subsidy, current donors might give less but the government would have more to give out to public causes (health, education, welfare) now privately supported.  And perhaps without the subsidy, current donors would be replaced by those less-burdened other taxpayers in a burst of their own generosity.  And maybe this would mean fewer snow-globe museums and more attention to human services in the nonprofit sector.

Or maybe it would just mean a reduction in charity and an increase in the government’s resources, which could then be used on public education and public housing.  Or missiles and drones.

This is why the Nonprofiteer remains at war with herself over the charitable deduction.  She wants a thousand flowers to bloom.  She believes any free society requires a counter-balance to whatever the current government has decided about anything.  And she believes this counter-balance requires money.  The whole point of the nonprofit sector is that it permits people to identify and respond to their own needs in their own communities, producing a closer fit between service and community than is possible with centralized programs.

But she also believes that society-wide priorities should be funded society-wide, which means limiting the number of pots of money exempted from inclusion in the public fisc.  And she doesn’t want society-wide priorities to be determined by people who have so much money they can buy entire public school systems and experiment on them.

To quote the great Yul Brenner: Is a puzzlement.