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November 05, 2009
Independent Sector
Nonprofit Leaders Urged to Rethink Their Role in Society
Expanding on a key theme of this year’s Independent Sector conference, Diana Aviv, the group’s president, called on nonprofit leaders at all organizations – regardless of size or mission – to take a broad view of their work and their responsibility to help make society better.
“We do not and cannot work in a vacuum,” she told participants at the gathering of charities and grant makers, which drew some about 1,100 attendees in all.
“If our employees and their families can’t afford medical care, it limits their productivity,” she said. “If our transportation infrastructure makes it hard to get to work, it affects people’s performance. If we don’t collectively attend to the harm inflicted on our environment, polluted air and climate change will ultimately damage everyone’s work. And if we don’t demand greater civility in Congress and in the public square, we diminish our ability to achieve our aims.”
Ms. Aviv urged nonprofit leaders “to attend to these larger issues long before they threaten our work.”
As an example of the consequences of not doing so, she cited the experiences of health and human-services groups that now must take on loans as state and local governments increasingly delay payments for services already provided.
“Except for a sliver of public-interest organizations, at no time did we step up and try to fix a system that we have known to be problematic for years,” she said. “Why was this the case? Because we have long believed that these larger issues were not our responsibility.”
She called on participants to go back to their organizations and have at least one board meeting within the next year to define a role for their groups beyond their specific issue or cause.
“My point is that excelling at your particular mission is key – but so too is attending to the wider societal issues of the world you inhabit,” she said. “Active engagement with these issues is part of the price we pay for this special place we, as a community, have been afforded by society.”
Comments
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Copyright © 2009 The Chronicle of Philanthropy
I agree wholeheartedly, but I think this is an uphill battle. I find it difficult to get many nonprofits to see the necessity for engaging with their state elected officials on policy issues which directly affect them and their causes, let alone the global issues that Ms. Aviv raises. One reason for this is that many funders do not support advocacy work. Another reason may be that nonprofits are stretched thin and engaging in advocacy is way down the list of their priorities.
— Kate Little Nov 6, 03:17 PM #
I’m not sure it’s because nonprofits don’t see the larger issues as part of their responsibility … the challenges seem to stem from nonprofits not being properly capitalized or stakeholders who aren’t truly committed to act in ways that support the structure and systems to be sustainable such that they can raise their voice on larger issues without the fear of ‘funder retribution.’ I echo the concept of engaging the Board in how to be advocates for the organization as an excellent approach to support the staff, sustain the services and affect social change! I hope nonprofits will share their experiences — with each other, with funders and with anyone who will pay even the slightest bit of attention.
— Melanie Schmidt Nov 6, 03:49 PM #
Nonprofits have enough on their plates addressing their specific missions. Nothing prevents nonprofit staffers from participating as individual citizens in any initiatives or civic activities, however.
The idea that nonprofits should take on “larger” issues beyond their missions is frivolous and impractical.
In the first place, it dilutes the time and resources available to devote to their specific missions, breaking faith with those who have contributed to the organizations to pursue their core missions.
Secondly, though reasonable to presume that there is consensus among a nonprofit’s leadership and staff regarding the importance of its specific mission, such unanimity is highly unlikely to be the case regarding advocacy for other causes (e.g., animal rights, abortion, health care reform, gay rights and so on).
If this is the kind of deep thinking going on at Independent Sector, I would suggest that more intellectual stimulation can be had by pulling the string on a Chatty Cathy doll.
— Jeff Steele Nov 6, 10:14 PM #
I think that it’s possible to address the two perspectives outlined in the comments above, which I would summarize as:
1) Do something beyond your own mission.
2) Non-profits are too busy as an organization to take on additional tasks, much less pretending that the entire staff would agree on what this additional focus should be.
As John Gardner pointed out in his 1960 book, On Leadership, in the chapter titled “Fragmentation and the Common Good”, “But a society in which pluralism is not undergirded by some shared values and held together by some measure of mutual trust simply cannot survive. Pluralism that reflects no commitments whatever to the common good is pluralism gone berserk.”
It is my contention that one area where all non-profits can agree is in the promotion of workplace giving as a common good. If sixty percent of all employees working invested just $5 per pay period in the community non-profits of their choice, it would make a huge difference to thousands of non-profits in the United States. If 60 percent (which is an attainable goal) of all Federal employees participated in the CFC, it would double the amount donated annually to $500 million, which would go to thousands of local, national, and international charities. If the procedures were changed to make it possible for Federal retirees and survivor spouses to continue to participate in the CFC upon retirement, the potential is for that $500 million to double again to $1 billion annually.
Let me be clear, I am recommending that the entire non-profit sector promote workplace giving by designation, and through payroll deduction. By this method, as exemplified by the Combined Federal Campaign, more than 92% of the funds go to charities designated specifically by the donors.
I am not in favor of promoting the arrogant method of workplace giving, “Give me your money, I’m smarter than you, and maybe I’ll tell you where I spent it.”
A second organizational common good that I believe the entire non-profit sector should promote, and would benefit by doing is to encourage all staff members to serve on the board of directors of a non-profit that is not in competition with the employing non-profit. And this means that if the other non-profit has a board meeting Tuesday at noon, the staff member is excused to go to the board meeting. This would provide a staff development opportunity and strengthen the sector by having more people who actually understand non-profits, contributing in the board room.
At the personal level, I believe that what the non-profit sector could embrace as a sector wide initiative is the goal of 95% literacy by 2020.
A literate population helps everyone, and whatever age group or demographic you prefer to work with you can – young children, youth, older adults who haven’t learned to read, etc.
No one learned to read by themselves,(with the possible exception of Ben Franklin). Reading by definition is a one on one activity, and if one knows how to read, teaching someone else to read can be mutually beneficial.
Regards,
Bill Huddleston
www.cfcfundraising.com
— Bill Huddleston Nov 8, 09:39 PM #
Mr. Huddleston’s inference that a charity’s pursuit of a narrowly-defined mission reflects a lack of commitment to the common good is simply without foundation.
Equally invalid is the notion that some agendas, such as promoting workplace giving represent values shared by ALL nonprofits. I can enumerate many compelling reasons, both practical and moral, NOT to conduct a workplace giving campaign. Even less likely to be shared by all nonprofits is the desirability of having all staff members serving on a nonprofit board of directors.
Rather than hammering home the foregoing points with my own sarcastic commentary, suffice it to say that the reasoning in ivory tower concepts such as those advanced by Mr. Huddleston is often seductive, but closer reading and analysis usually reveals the ideas to be simplistic and the recommendations counterproductive and/or impractical.
These times call for solutions, not soliloquies.
— Jeff Steele Nov 9, 10:37 AM #
My comments are the exact opposite of an “ivory tower concept.” I talk to a lot of executive directors, and when I ask what are the 3 things they need the most, “More unrestricted funds” is always on the list, sometimes number one, but hardly ever below number 3.
I did not say at all that a charity pursuing its own mission does not contribute to the common good, indeed that’s the unifying factor of all non-profits – they exist to make the world a better place. My point was in response to Ms. Aviv’s direction that instead of engaging in everything, it would be more effective for the non-profit sector to engage in some actions that will produce positive results for more than just their non-profit.
In terms of workplace giving, the fact remains that it is the only means of non-profit fundraising that is:
Subsidized, low risk and high leverage.
Workplace giving is obviously not a perfect fit for every non-profit, but it is an area where if the non-profit sector did a better job of some basic things – like saying thank you – the potential to increase the unrestricted revenue stream to non-profits is huge.
My recommendation about encouraging non-profit professionals to serve on non-profit boards addresses two issues that the sector has identified as major concerns:
1) Professional development of nonprofit staff, and serving on a board helps in this arena.
2) In many cases, board service will also be an exercise in working across generations, as Frances Kunreuther says in the report How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector – “how will it change the structure of your organization, including boards? (p9 in the report).
Pragmatic Concrete Steps for Non-profit Revenue Generation:
When I ask EDs whose non-profits are in the CFC, and are successful enough in the CFC that they receive what is a meaningful amount of revenue for their organization, this is their most common answer:
“The CFC allows me to keep my doors open.”
They then add that knowing how much they will get for the next year, and the fact that the money comes in on a regular schedule, is huge for them.
I can’t think of anything that is less “ivory tower” than actually helping non-profits meet their payroll and deliver their services.
Regards,
Bill Huddleston
www.cfcfundraising.com
www.cfctreasures.wordpress.com
— Bill Huddleston Nov 9, 02:38 PM #