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.

Straitjacket

For a change of pace, I’m blaming everything on Harry Houdini today. He was the king of escape acts, disentangling himself from (among other things) straitjackets, a Siberian prison van, packing crates, an underground burial, and a glass tank filled with water. What a smart ass. His act, and the shows of other magicians who’ve followed, have always seemed like the equivalent of a gold-plated middle finger to me: shiny, but in the end, a big, condescending Screw You. My wonder and awe are quickly followed by a complete feeling of inferiority. If he can hang upside down in a tank filled with water while wearing a straitjacket, why can’t I?

I could use some magical escape in my life right now. I’m still reading the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” which really should be subtitled “They’re Out To Systemically Get Us.” The book reeks of conspiracy theory, but what really gets me is that professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theories kind of make sense.

The shadow state [the nonprofit sector], then, is real but without significant political clout, forbidden by law to advocate for systemic change, and bound by public rules and non-profit charters to stick to its mission or get out of business and suffer legal consequences if it strays along the way.

Let me translate. She’s saying the very nonprofit structure we are told to work within also binds us in a way that makes it impossible to do the entirety of what needs to be done. Wanna solve poverty? Too bad, advocacy will mess with your nonprofit status. Wanna experiment with holistic ways of treating homelessness? Good luck quantifying that for the grant report. The straitjacket of regulation keeps us workers nitpicking at details even when we know it’s not enough.

I wonder how Houdini would get us out of this one. You know, he used to dislocate his shoulders for his straitjacket act. I wonder what’s going to have to give to end ours. 

 

Kool Aid Talk

I’ve been slowly sipping the off-brand all-natural Kool Aid offered by the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” It’s made up of leftist scholarly essays that remind me of two things: that I hate the pretention of academia and that to some people I look like a friggin’ neo-con. Point in case? I don’t think the Ford Foundation is evil.  

But I found myself compelled by professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of the funding straight-jackets that confine nonprofits:

And generally the issues they [nonprofits] are paid to address have been narrowed to program-specific categories and remedies which make staff – who often have a great understanding of the scale and scope of both individual clients’ and the needs of society at large – become in their everyday practice technocrats through imposed specialization.

I’ve never thought of technocrat as a dirty word until now. Time for a good scrub...

Post Mortem

First off: I am not a quitter.

Second:  it's time to quit. 

No worries -- this is not angsty wrist-slashing I'm contemplating. Instead, it's time to break up with the soup kitchen volunteer work I've done faithfully and joyously each week for the last three years. But how?

Uh... it's not you, it's me? 

It was a great relationship at first. I felt appreciated; I made friends; I came home feeling fulfilled and grateful for all the stuff I usually take for granted, like meals that don't involve toddler-sized vats of peanut butter and mystery-meat soups. 

The 501c3 did so much right that it was easy to forgive its quirks. Like the fact its "leadership team" is all white, despite a diverse volunteer staff and a professed anti-racism agenda. Like the fact that team fired a volunteer who's crime was curmudgeonliness ... without giving the volunteer feedback about his behavior. 

I'm not a quitter. I could have stuck with it. But over the last few months the leadership team has instituted changes to build community that have ended up taking it away. Intimate group reflections have evolved into 30 people in a circle, straining to hear a bible study. Stimulating lunch conversations among 3-4 people have shifted to 30 people eating in a circle the size of  a sumo mat. Now the good talks are gone, and there aren't even large men running into each other wearing skimpy belt-thongs. How disappointing. 

It's time to quit, and that's something I've never been very good at. I want to run my mouth and give feedback, even though the leadership team's made it very clear over the years that they're not interested. What, pray tell, could a once-a-week volunteer know about a 501c3 that full-time staff wouldn't? 

So, consider this wishful thinking #103: I wish nonprofits could see volunteers as a resource for different perspectives in organizational decision-making. And wishful thinking #104: perhaps the occasional exit-interview to figure out why volunteers quit? 

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. 

Batting For A New Team

If things look bad for nonprofits right now, they're looking a helluva lot funkier for newspapers. 501c3s will bounce back when the economy recovers, as will construction and real estate and dinners out.

But what kind of bounce-back will the New York Times get when unemployment falls back to 6 percent?

The answer is none. Newspapers have been losing money for years as ad dollars have shifted over to the internet. It's gotten so bad that the New York Times has considered selling its share of the Red Sox. Now that's desperate.

So it's no surprise that journalists are looking at switching teams as a way to make their demise a little less imminent.

A group of former Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalists today launched InvestigateWest, a nonprofit organization they hope will deliver in-depth stories to the region and find a way to save what is becoming an endangered craft.

These west-coast writers will be teaming up with a still-forming national nonprofit called the Investigative News Network. Together, they're betting that their work breaking stories is as fundable as campaigns to save whales.

Journalists aren't nearly as cute, but they're also risking extinction. Here's hoping their betting pays off.

Duseful? (Stat of the Day)

It's time for a new word to describe that which is both dull and useful. Where's Colbert when he's needed?

Today's case in point from from Guidestar:

Quick! What are the largest sources of revenue for nonprofit organizations? The public usually thinks the right answer is charitable giving, and this is certainly where most of the attention goes. But according to the Urban Institute’s Nonprofit Almanac 2008, 50 percent comes from fees for services and goods from private sources, and another 29.4 percent comes from government grants and fees for services. That’s nearly 80 percent of all of our revenue! Private contributions account for only a little more than 12 percent.

If private contributions average only 12 percent of funding, maybe it's time to reprioritize fundraising.

Annals of the Obvious

News flash! The recession is still kicking nonprofits' asses. 

The percentage of nonprofits that have resorted to layoffs, broad-based programmatic reductions, and reserve draw-downs has increased measurably.

Really, this is what counts as news? Where ya been, buddy? For months, analysts have been saying that the crappy economy would have a slow ripple effect on nonprofits. Even though for-profits were suffering a year ago, grants to nonprofits had already been funded. (Nothing's worse for corporate image than retracting a grant...) It was the next funding cycle -- right now -- where 501c3s would take a hit. 

And it's happened. The Bridgespan study says that, as a result,  6 out of 10 nonprofits now have contingency plans. In other words, the glass is 60% full with what-ifs for the next great recession. If only we could add some vitamins to that water... 

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?