The Prostitute in the Living Room

If a pimp walks into a nonprofit tax clinic and asks for advice about his prostitutes and 13 underaged & undocumented El Salvadorean girls, what should you say?

A) Sure we can help you set up a tax-sheltering brothel! (Said with more enthusaism than a Walmart greeter.)
B) That would be illegal, unethical, and immoral! (Said with self-righteous outrage.)
C) Would you happen to be actors? (Said with suspicion.)

I wish this whole ACORN scandal was a joke, even a not-so-funny one. But instead it's a not-at-all-funny ring of hellfire for the nonprofit that even Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash couldn't make sound good. Leftists can make an okay argument for why prostitution should be legalized. But pimping underaged girls?

ACORN, you've made good progress digging your own grave and now you have lots of helpers and decidedly fewer defenders to dig you out. Nonprofits will be under more supervision and observation now, having to prostitute ourselves more to show we're not poisoning trees or murdering babies. Just give it a year, and I bet my own brothel that this shit will have led to even more nonprofit restrictions -- and at some point belt-tightening becomes asphyxiation.

The Existential Life

Apparently, it doesn’t matter who we are. For weeks now, I’ve been scouring the internet – and even making calls! – looking for demographic information about all us 9 million or so folks who call nonprofits hell home. My sense is that the majority of us are college-educated white women, but my sense also landed me dating three clinically depressed musicians in a row -- so clearly there’s some work to do. And, besides, word is that I’m supposed to really know my audience if I’m trying to make a website work.

Well, my search for stats about us has failed. But I did find demographics about who volunteers most with nonprofits. And the We Really Don’t Get Paid award goes to…. white married college-educated mothers between 35 and 44. 

I don’t know how many of these volunteers are stay-at-home moms, but maybe I should start planning a website for them instead of us. MILV: Mothers I'd Like to Volunteer. 

This whole DemographyGate shocks and insults me a little. If I’ve learned anything from nonprofits and the media, it’s that everything can be manipulated into numbers. So why not us?

Here me out, census bureau and statistically-undefined crowd: I want to be counted, if only because the picture of the nonprofit sector is often white women helping minorities. White women are lovely – I happen to be one of them – but it’s worth figuring out the barriers that stop men and minorities from nonprofit work. It’s not tokenism I’m talking about – it’s bringing our work toward equality and justice back inside the office. At least there we can count. 

Rate My Nonprofit

Would it be fantastic or a disaster if there were a rating system for nonprofits informed by the people who actually work for them?

Admittedly, I’m too old to have ever used ratemyprofessor.com or ratemyteacher.com. There’s some controversy (mostly by teachers, duh) about how well ratings like those work – whether they delve into the substance or stay on the surface, whether they’re the online equivilant of people power or popularity pagent. For starters, here’s a good discussion by a professor about those sites and their accuracy.

Popularity contests aside, ever since Al Gore invented the internet and George Bush made the internets I’ve amused myself in bored moments by thinking about what I’d write on a similar, so-far-non-existent nonprofit rating site. 

Sure Charity Navigator’s helpful figuring out where, imprecisely, the money goes, and Guidestar offers up completed tax forms. But that’s just flat, one-dimensional quantative data. I want a site that gives us the qualitative and gory goods on nonprofits: what the people who work there actually say about them. The site could have ratings for specific aspects – like management, benefits, and job satisfaction.  

I can just imagine the freak-out by nonprofits when not-so-positive or not-so-fair reviews come in, and fear that potentially enough bad reviews could hurt a nonprofit. That’s not my aim. But here’s the upside: nonprofits that do well by their employees would have nothing to fear. And – gasp – could maybe learn something. 

Equation

I’m not the kind of girl that thinks of math as elegant. It’s just not in me. Truth is, I sweat the small stuff, like the Pythagorean theorum.

So I was surprised to realize that my yoga mat and I made an equation! Just like that! (You may need to squint such a bit... the equation's not entirely cooperative.)

For non-mathletes, here how this equation translates: if 2 out of 3 employees of a nonprofit are looking for another job, that makes a 2/3 chance the nonprofit stinks the big one. Capice?