Skip to main content

Free the Nonprofits


I come to a lot of new information and ideas late. And so it is with Dan Pallotta, the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, a book that takes a hard look at how society constrains the work of nonprofits and how the people who work and volunteer for nonprofits constrain themselves.

Pallotta's got an interesting story of his own -- I'll leave you to discover it -- that has undoubtedly refined his perspective. In any case, I find it refreshing, particularly now.

He's also the author of the blog Free the Nonprofits and he's a keynote speaker at the October 2009 Arts Council of Indianapolis' Next Audiences Summit.

Here's an excerpt from his May 11th blog post entitled Re-Thinking Charity:
We have two rulebooks — one for charity, one for the rest of the economic world.

We let the for-profit sector pay competitive wages based on value, but have a visceral reaction to anyone making a great deal of money in charity. We let people make a fortune doing any number of things that will harm the poor, but want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them. This sends the top talent coming out of the nation's best business schools directly into the for-profit sector and gives our youth mutually exclusive choices between doing well and doing good. It is not sustainable, let alone scalable.

We let Coca-Cola pummel us with advertising, but donors don't want important causes "wasting" money on paid advertising. So the voices of our great causes are muted. Consumer products get lopsided access to our attention, 24 hours a day. Charitable giving has remained constant at about 2% of GDP ever since we've measured it. Charity isn't gaining market share. How can it if it isn't permitted to market?

Another choice morsel from his June 1st post Are MBAs Good Fits for Nonprofits?:

It is time we made concessions of a different sort — first, that the presence of personal economic aspiration does not mean a person has no love in their hearts; second, that we don't know what great contributions could be made to this world by allowing people who have such aspirations to pursue them while they simultaneously pursue the work of social transformation; and last, that before we go unilaterally building litmus tests for moral fitness, we ought to ask those we are trying to assist who they think fits, and what concessions they are prepared to make, as they look into the voids of extreme poverty, breast cancer, AIDS, and the other things.

His voice is an important one to add to the mix.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin.  We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week.  If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014.  It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog.  I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs.  Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management.  Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for?  This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.)  Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although