You may recall a few years ago when a huge individual gift suddenly turned a small sleepy Chicago non-profit into the Gates Foundation of poetry. The current issue of The New Yorker has a feature story on The Poetry Foundation (written by the magazine's own current star published poet), which has struck some folks in that particular literary world as more or less a frontal attack. Among them is the organization's president (see the second item of that column that was printed in Chicago's leading alternative newspaper yesterday).
Kudos to the organization's staff for posting the article and various source links on their own website; that has inspired some reader comments mostly echoing the negative comments which were quoted in the magazine article.
[Here is a counterattack on The New Yorker with regard to poetry; it's not particularly a defense of the Poetry Foundation, which despite its name is not a grantmaking foundation but an operating non-profit.]
Having read all of the above I'm left scratching my head a bit. The New Yorker article did not strike me as wildly negative or unbalanced, the executive director seems to be taking it more personally than it deserves. It's not warm or friendly but hardly reads like the kind of hack job he's labeling it. Meanwhile the actual criticisms of the organization's strategies seem plausible but also largely unpersuasive. Were I a board member over there I'd be suggesting that the chief calm down, accept that reasonable people can disagree, and keep moving forward with what sounds like a smart plan that is well-grounded in the organizational mission.
(But of course I'm no poet, as both of dot-org's loyal readers were about to point out, so perhaps there's more here than is apparent to the untutored eye.)
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Friday, February 23, 2007
Friday, December 22, 2006
Non-profit growth as part of global social change
I recently observed a briefing hosted by the Carnegie Corporation at which the opening speaker was Alan Khazei. The specific subject at hand was youth development; Khazei's remarks ended up being partly about the global growth of the nongovernmental non-profit sector.
Khazei co-founded City Year, which recruits American college-age youth for a year of urban civic service (and which is now taking its service global). Via email I obtained his permission to report his remarks publicly here and he bravely didn't ask to review my notes, so all errors of interpretation are entirely mine.
He led off by applauding TIME Magazine's naming as its annual "Person of the Year", you. By that they mean the changes now being wrought by individuals acting directly instead of through institutions, of which most of their examples turn out to be young people. (Some folks are rolling their eyes at the magazine's decision.) Khazei suggested that the magazine's choice fits well with "two of the most widespread global trends of the last half-century, the march of democracy and the explosive spread of the civic sector". Khazei cited surveys by outfits such as Freedom House and The Economist, which recently concluded that in a historic first more than half the world's population now lives under some form of democracy. (Though the latter, at least, thinks that the spread of democracy has stalled.)
Those two broad global trends, Khazei said, have been in driven by the United States' cultural influence but have now spread beyond any single society's control. And, he argued, "both of these changes depend on empowered effective citizenship and can be undone by the lack of it. There is nothing inexorable about any of this; less than 100 years ago autocracy was the world's growth sector."
Khazei's related thesis is that "everywhere around the world, people are concluding that the limit has been reached in the ability of big government to directly solve problems." Not a theory that centralized government needs to vanish, but rather that "the list of things which government can be the effective solution to has been exhausted." The social entrepeneurship idea flows from this notion, he noted. From his travels around the world he reported that "this is not at all just a Western idea, it is the consensus in the grass roots everywhere." In place of big government, he said, is the emerging idea of 'big citizenship': individual action and the civic sector as the primary drivers of positive change. "Young people are very excited by this and take naturally to it."
Foundations, Khazei argued, can play a key role at this juncture, "can help empower this. You can help build capacities and build citizenship and nurture ideas; you are uniquely placed to convene people at key moments and places." Also, Khazei said, "we've got to start making some big bets. We need in the non-profit sector the kind of dynamism that the business world now has, where half of our 20 largest corporations are less than a quarter-century old. Most of the non-profit models taken to serious scale, like the Girl Scouts and Amnesty International and United Way, are several decades or a century old."
Khazei co-founded City Year, which recruits American college-age youth for a year of urban civic service (and which is now taking its service global). Via email I obtained his permission to report his remarks publicly here and he bravely didn't ask to review my notes, so all errors of interpretation are entirely mine.
He led off by applauding TIME Magazine's naming as its annual "Person of the Year", you. By that they mean the changes now being wrought by individuals acting directly instead of through institutions, of which most of their examples turn out to be young people. (Some folks are rolling their eyes at the magazine's decision.) Khazei suggested that the magazine's choice fits well with "two of the most widespread global trends of the last half-century, the march of democracy and the explosive spread of the civic sector". Khazei cited surveys by outfits such as Freedom House and The Economist, which recently concluded that in a historic first more than half the world's population now lives under some form of democracy. (Though the latter, at least, thinks that the spread of democracy has stalled.)
Those two broad global trends, Khazei said, have been in driven by the United States' cultural influence but have now spread beyond any single society's control. And, he argued, "both of these changes depend on empowered effective citizenship and can be undone by the lack of it. There is nothing inexorable about any of this; less than 100 years ago autocracy was the world's growth sector."
Khazei's related thesis is that "everywhere around the world, people are concluding that the limit has been reached in the ability of big government to directly solve problems." Not a theory that centralized government needs to vanish, but rather that "the list of things which government can be the effective solution to has been exhausted." The social entrepeneurship idea flows from this notion, he noted. From his travels around the world he reported that "this is not at all just a Western idea, it is the consensus in the grass roots everywhere." In place of big government, he said, is the emerging idea of 'big citizenship': individual action and the civic sector as the primary drivers of positive change. "Young people are very excited by this and take naturally to it."
Foundations, Khazei argued, can play a key role at this juncture, "can help empower this. You can help build capacities and build citizenship and nurture ideas; you are uniquely placed to convene people at key moments and places." Also, Khazei said, "we've got to start making some big bets. We need in the non-profit sector the kind of dynamism that the business world now has, where half of our 20 largest corporations are less than a quarter-century old. Most of the non-profit models taken to serious scale, like the Girl Scouts and Amnesty International and United Way, are several decades or a century old."
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Land conservation takes the lead
A startling report from the Land Trust Alliance is getting some national-media attention this week but I wish they hadn't buried their lede, which is that in the U.S. the permanent protection of land for conservation is now going faster than sprawl -- and pulling away.
Last month the national conservation groups were celebrating the current boom in state/local public funding for land conservation; now the LTA has pulled together national data on non-governmental activity for the same purpose. They report that just in the past five years private non-profits protected 13 million acres, equal to a new Yellowstone National Park every year.
The national conservation-advocacy groups say that new development consumes 2 million acres per year, so the nongovernmental land trusts alone are now protecting more land than is being sprawled on each year. Obviously adding the new open space protected via all those new state and local bond referenda, and the occasional addition to federal national monuments and so forth, makes the picture even better.
The LTA report does have a couple of oddities, such as that most of their charts and graphs include only state and local land trusts when national groups like The Nature Conservancy and Trust For Public Land are a huge part of all this activity. And while criticizing the drops in direct federal appropriations for conservation they ignore the fact that all that private non-profit land protection is being subsidized by the federal tax code to the tune of billions per year now. (And the increase in federal tax benefits from donating land or easements which President Bush signed into law in August will boost all this even more.)
The non-profit land trust business is, not surprisingly, booming like dot-coms in the 90s. The LTA reports that even while the number of state and local land trusts was increasing by a third, the average operating budget increased by two thirds and salaried staff increased by almost half. In just five years, during an economic downturn! And that again doesn't count the big national/international groups.
Last month the national conservation groups were celebrating the current boom in state/local public funding for land conservation; now the LTA has pulled together national data on non-governmental activity for the same purpose. They report that just in the past five years private non-profits protected 13 million acres, equal to a new Yellowstone National Park every year.
The national conservation-advocacy groups say that new development consumes 2 million acres per year, so the nongovernmental land trusts alone are now protecting more land than is being sprawled on each year. Obviously adding the new open space protected via all those new state and local bond referenda, and the occasional addition to federal national monuments and so forth, makes the picture even better.
The LTA report does have a couple of oddities, such as that most of their charts and graphs include only state and local land trusts when national groups like The Nature Conservancy and Trust For Public Land are a huge part of all this activity. And while criticizing the drops in direct federal appropriations for conservation they ignore the fact that all that private non-profit land protection is being subsidized by the federal tax code to the tune of billions per year now. (And the increase in federal tax benefits from donating land or easements which President Bush signed into law in August will boost all this even more.)
The non-profit land trust business is, not surprisingly, booming like dot-coms in the 90s. The LTA reports that even while the number of state and local land trusts was increasing by a third, the average operating budget increased by two thirds and salaried staff increased by almost half. In just five years, during an economic downturn! And that again doesn't count the big national/international groups.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Non-profit mergers -- too many or too few?
Mergers are not common in our sector but a few large ones have been in the news this year, such as in Boston, Cleveland, and Memphis. A good number of veterans in the field, particularly at foundations, react to that news by saying, "Good! There are way too many non-profits today!" It's one of the most-common threads of conversation nowadays.
It also seems odd. When a new Target or Wal-Mart opens up in town do we say, "Good! There are way too many small businesses around here"?
It is a fact that there are far more incorporated not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. today than there used to be (and radically more than in any other nation in the world). Even assuming that a fair number of the organizations on the books with the IRS are actually defunct, the active total basically doubled from 1990 to now. There's no sign of any slowdown either.
To me, that's on balance a good thing. Healthy industries, and for that matter societies, are attractive to people -- the clearest sign of the decline and fall of the U.S. will be when the day comes that millions of people are no longer so eager to come raise their children here. The non-profit sector is booming because more and more people are willing to fund it, which is because it's gotten more and more smart and effective, which in turn attracts more smart young people into the field, rinse and repeat.
Healthy growing economic sectors are dynamic with lots of churn, that's part of the deal. We could ask the U.S. auto industry what the opposite feels like....Now if it one day turns out that the not-for-profit sector has been growing faster than the demand for it (expressed in earned and contributed revenues) then there will be some shakeout. I'm not cavalier about this because I once had to shut down a failed non-profit, and if you haven't been there you've no idea how much that sucked. But again: it's part of the big picture, and the big picture is overall terrific.
For example it's easier today to discuss and test new paths to greater effectiveness, and evaluation, and efficiency, and interdisciplinary bridgebuilding and several other hot topics, because at the crowded industry conferences the rooms are full of smart focused 30-somethings who aren't wedded to the rules of thumb and so forth which some of us learned on back in the paleolithic era. A big thumbs up to that (cue George Burns: "I wish I was 28 again...").
It's not that older non-profit staff are simply threatened by the flood of new folks, I detect little of that. It could be that funders are simply uncomfortable with the idea of having to act like customers and choose from among more and more possible grantees. It may be that we don't want the implied pressure of our sector being healthy and thriving with strong growth in resources: it doesn't fit our collective self-image as the underdog fighting upstream to improve the world despite endless funding cuts and the slings and arrows of a regressing society and so forth (cue violins).
Well I vote for dynamic and growing. Like the cliches go about democracy: it's messy, noisy, frequently unpleasant, and beats the heck out of all the alternatives.
It also seems odd. When a new Target or Wal-Mart opens up in town do we say, "Good! There are way too many small businesses around here"?
It is a fact that there are far more incorporated not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. today than there used to be (and radically more than in any other nation in the world). Even assuming that a fair number of the organizations on the books with the IRS are actually defunct, the active total basically doubled from 1990 to now. There's no sign of any slowdown either.
To me, that's on balance a good thing. Healthy industries, and for that matter societies, are attractive to people -- the clearest sign of the decline and fall of the U.S. will be when the day comes that millions of people are no longer so eager to come raise their children here. The non-profit sector is booming because more and more people are willing to fund it, which is because it's gotten more and more smart and effective, which in turn attracts more smart young people into the field, rinse and repeat.
Healthy growing economic sectors are dynamic with lots of churn, that's part of the deal. We could ask the U.S. auto industry what the opposite feels like....Now if it one day turns out that the not-for-profit sector has been growing faster than the demand for it (expressed in earned and contributed revenues) then there will be some shakeout. I'm not cavalier about this because I once had to shut down a failed non-profit, and if you haven't been there you've no idea how much that sucked. But again: it's part of the big picture, and the big picture is overall terrific.
For example it's easier today to discuss and test new paths to greater effectiveness, and evaluation, and efficiency, and interdisciplinary bridgebuilding and several other hot topics, because at the crowded industry conferences the rooms are full of smart focused 30-somethings who aren't wedded to the rules of thumb and so forth which some of us learned on back in the paleolithic era. A big thumbs up to that (cue George Burns: "I wish I was 28 again...").
It's not that older non-profit staff are simply threatened by the flood of new folks, I detect little of that. It could be that funders are simply uncomfortable with the idea of having to act like customers and choose from among more and more possible grantees. It may be that we don't want the implied pressure of our sector being healthy and thriving with strong growth in resources: it doesn't fit our collective self-image as the underdog fighting upstream to improve the world despite endless funding cuts and the slings and arrows of a regressing society and so forth (cue violins).
Well I vote for dynamic and growing. Like the cliches go about democracy: it's messy, noisy, frequently unpleasant, and beats the heck out of all the alternatives.
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