Nonprofits Are Not Self-Driving Cars
A student in my Nonprofit Management Certificate Course last semester asked, “Why are nonprofit workers paid so poorly?”
A clinical psychologist, she founded a nonprofit to provide subsidized therapy to low-income clients. In our discussion on nonprofit leadership (the final session of the course), she said she’d been greatly impressed with the experience, skills and professionalism of the other students. She couldn’t understand why they were paid such low wages.
I had to pause before responding. I think I said something like: “It’s always been like this. Probably goes back to those old European values on charity that came over with the Pilgrams, and the concepts of “noblesse oblige” and “white savior complex.”
The student’s question is a tough one, I think, because the scarcity mindset –- the attitudes and norms that lead to below-market salaries – are the water we swim in; we can’t see it. The subject came up at a workshop I led recently on avoiding burnout. A participant shared that financial strain from his low income contributed greatly to his and his coworkers’ chronic stress.
Many of you will recall the 2013 TED Talk by controversial AIDS Ride organizer Dan Pallotta. In “The Way We Think about Charity Is Dead Wrong,” Pallotta lamented the norm in our sector for underfunding nonprofits and underpaying nonprofit leaders, arguing that it hamstrings efforts to create social and environmental change.
(Pallotta has a new book, Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, and a compelling new full-length documentary with the same name -- available on Prime Video.)
Hope on the Horizon
The organization Fund the People (FTP) seeks to build a movement to challenge the beliefs and practices that feed chronic disinvestment in the nonprofit workforce—and change the very way the social sector functions.
At a recent talk by FTP founder Rusty Stahl, I was encouraged by the group’s pragmatic efforts to take on the dysfunctional “overhead myth.” FTP intends to make it safer for nonprofits to ask for the funding they truly need and easier for philanthropists to provide full-cost support for both programs and staffs.
As Stahl spoke, I was reminded of Pallotta’s plea to unleash nonprofit workers’ passion and creativity to solve society’s most pressing issues. I loved his quip that nonprofits are unlike driverless cars; they can't operate without people.
According to its website, “Fund the People is the national initiative to maximize investment in America's nonprofit workforce. Our goal is to bring about widespread adoption of talent-investing by influential funders and nonprofits.”
FTP wants to eliminate the practice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — how nonprofit leaders and funders unintentionally co-conspire to perpetuate chronic underinvestment in the sector. The overhead myth promotes the nonsensical notion that nonprofit programs can -- like self-driving cars – operate without humans.
Stahl said that if nonprofit leaders told funders the truth about the actual costs of their activities -- and if funders knew they were not alone in making full-cost grants – investment in nonprofits would grow.
“Talent Justice!”—the New Rallying Cry
In 2019, FTP partnered with the Center for Urban and Racial Equity to study the systemic barriers to an intersectionally diverse nonprofit workforce. The partners produced the Talent Justice Report, which identified three key roadblocks:
Access to Nonprofit Work
Advancement and Retention
Ascension to Positions of Leadership
The report recommends several ways funders can modify their grantmaking practices and nonprofits can shift their fundraising so that diverse nonprofit staffers are able to earn living wages for their work within supportive cultures.
I’m doing what I can to spread the word about the Fund the People movement. I’ll be out of town, but I hope you’ll consider attending FTP’s California Talent Justice Initiative conference December 9-12 in Berkeley. Learn more here.