Just from my perspective, this chat says it gives a critical look at nonprofits from both the “left” and the “right,” but those poles are both internal to the same modern, centralized paradigm, on one side, state-socialist expectations that nonprofits should more perfectly be part of de-democratized and centralized bureaucratic public provision; on the other, technocratic complaints from a private sector based central planning regime that they fail to discipline themselves via (so called) price signals or managerial (so called) efficiency. What is entirely missing is a critique from the standpoint of lower case “d” democracy in-general, in such systems civic power is diffused through mass-membership associations, locally governed institutions, federated parties, mutual-aid societies, varying associations, decentralized and diffused private sector, redundantly diffused and locally anchored educational institutions, similar with science, locally based voluntary organizations, etc, etc that in systems of that sort are constitutive of democratic life instead of just adjunct service contractors or elite advocacy platforms. The essay acknowledges, commendably, “associations without members” as a problem but never asks what was lost when nonprofits ceased to be embedded, participatory civic organs and instead became professionalized intermediaries between centralized capital and/or centralized government, and an abstract “public”
Also, the claim that the internet has “democratized” nonprofit life is at best half-true. While digital access has lowered the cost of discovering information once individuals are already motivated to search for it, the dominant reality is that the internet functions for most people as a centrally directed attention and narrative system, platform-mediated, algorithmically filtered, big biz or foundation-funded, and professionally curated.
Finally, I think its super notable how closely the modern nonprofit sector looks like elements of earlier centrally planned or semi-centralized systems in Europe, such as the pre-Reformation Church structures, formally non-state, morally legitimating, heavily endowed, elite-staffed, and operating as service-delivery and norm-setting arms that mediated between authority and populace while crowding out local self-governance. Like episcopal or monastic institutions, today’s large NGOs often claim universality, speak in moralized abstraction, and rely on patronage rather than participatory consent.
Excellent interview, I liked the parallels between the "new" style of nonprofit thinking and conventional VC thinking. However, there's a vagueness to large parts of the conversation that made it hard for me to follow. For example:
"a feeling that in many nonprofits it has become difficult to voice opinions outside of a very narrow progressive orthodoxy. Frankly, there’s some truth to that critique as well."
What are those opinions that can no longer be voiced?
"So it’s not so easy to just hand-wave away the priorities and predilections of this younger generation. You have to deal with them. They’re not going away."
What priorities and predilections are you referring to?
"Some [problems in the nonprofit sector] are downstream of how kids have been educated in universities, high school, and other institutions."
How are kids being educated that is causing these problems?
"The broader critique from the right is that using the phrase “BIPOC,” or capitalizing “black,” is a symptom. The underlying beliefs were the problem."
What are the problem beliefs that lead one to use the phrase "BIPOC" or capitalize "black"?
> left-wing critics have looked at nonprofits and asked hard questions about racial disparities ... sexually harassing behavior ... substandard wages paid at the lower levels... Those are all fair critiques... On the right, I see the critique mostly being focused on viewpoint diversity and “wokeness,” for lack of a better word ... there’s some truth to that critique as well.
I don't like this form of dialogue. I mean, sure, you can use it as an "explanation", but we could just as well replace the word "nonprofit" with "for-profit":
"left-wing critics have looked at for-profits and asked hard questions about racial disparities ... sexually harassing behavior ... substandard wages paid at the lower levels... Those are all fair critiques... On the right, I see the critique mostly being focused on viewpoint diversity and “wokeness,” for lack of a better word ... there’s some truth to that critique as well."
Some people have opinions and/or behavior that other people don't like. It doesn't seem like a problem with nonprofits but rather a problem with humanity in general.
"There's some truth to that" is a diplomatic way of saying "there's some falsehood to that" ― any given critique does not apply to all organizations, yet political operatives routinely lie by painting everyone with the same brush, or at least everyone on "the other side". It's fine to acknowledge when there is "some truth to that"―it's a prosocial move, even. But I don't have to like it, do I? It doesn't convey any actual information, it just tries to create an atmosphere in which maybe more people will listen to whatever information comes later.
As someone who has spent my entire career working with NGOs or as an elected Chicago City Council member, I’ve seen many people grow frustrated with nonprofits because they’re not confident that the work being done is producing meaningful results. One way to build greater trust in NGOs, I believe, is to emphasize clear outcome measures completed within a defined timeframe. Concrete results are much harder to dismiss.
I always think of this article as a forewarning for why volunteerism, donations to charity, and overall civic health is decreasing. This was nearly 20 years ago - and rings more true every day as america has turned into a multicultural low trust society.
Further, I would say that Soros himself has been devastating to the perceptions of NGOs. The Wren Collective, the efforts of helping economic migrants in the EU, etc. Just a disastrous person for
Really good episode — only thing that felt missing was a discussion of the literature on practices that make non-profits effective in delivering their mission and maintaining public credibility. E.g. things like:
Reporting and org status
- Annual (or more frequent) donor impact reports
- Accreditation and formal certifications
Operating model
- Formal org structures, R&Rs, reporting chains, SOPs, etc.
- Good governance including right-sized board structures (>5, <15), CEO succession planning, market-indexed comp
Revenue management
- Strong investment in fundraising and donor management operations
- Having at least one primary, reliable revenue stream
- Strong book-keeping and internal audit practices
Execution focus
- Depth over breadth (opting to serve fewer people better) and tracking service volumes on a per-individual basis to ensure effective minimums are met
- Outcome v. input based goals (# of people who achieved the desired policy outcome v. who came in for services or were treated)
- Regular supervision in the field, along with shadowing to ensure service providers are actually doing their jobs well
Could go on and on. The fact is, most non-profits are not well run. Same with most businesses. Except non-profits have fewer feedback loops for success, and rely less on reciprocal value exchange for their operation — which means they'll inherently have a trust deficit compared to for-profits. But there's nothing essentially suspect about non-profits. It's not a perfect science, but there definitely are facts of the matter about better and worse that we should all strive to learn.
Hi. Respectfully, this frames the issue far too passively and lets power off the hook. It wasn’t that Americans “happened” to organize differently because of a fleeting historical moment; we were already on the cusp of having something very close to the centralized, hollowed-out system we have now, and people recognized that and responded with massive, conscious structural and systems design to build the world they wanted instead, federated parties, mass-membership civic institutions, locally grounded finance, participatory newspapers, redundantly diffused educational instititions, redundantly diffused scientific instititions, publicly contestable decision spaces, etc. The Bank War era wasn’t an accident of sociology; it was an explicit counter-construction against elite consolidation.
And then post WW2 there was a transformation away from it that wasn’t an organic “shift” either, over decades, an assortment of powerful special-interest groups engaged in equally deliberate structural and systems design, centralizing finance, standardizing education, professionalizing politics, replacing membership bodies with advocacy shops due to the fact they lacked grassroots power. All worlds are contrived; the difference is who gets to do the designing, where decisions are made, and whether ordinary people have institutionalized access to power or are reduced to spectators
Just from my perspective, this chat says it gives a critical look at nonprofits from both the “left” and the “right,” but those poles are both internal to the same modern, centralized paradigm, on one side, state-socialist expectations that nonprofits should more perfectly be part of de-democratized and centralized bureaucratic public provision; on the other, technocratic complaints from a private sector based central planning regime that they fail to discipline themselves via (so called) price signals or managerial (so called) efficiency. What is entirely missing is a critique from the standpoint of lower case “d” democracy in-general, in such systems civic power is diffused through mass-membership associations, locally governed institutions, federated parties, mutual-aid societies, varying associations, decentralized and diffused private sector, redundantly diffused and locally anchored educational institutions, similar with science, locally based voluntary organizations, etc, etc that in systems of that sort are constitutive of democratic life instead of just adjunct service contractors or elite advocacy platforms. The essay acknowledges, commendably, “associations without members” as a problem but never asks what was lost when nonprofits ceased to be embedded, participatory civic organs and instead became professionalized intermediaries between centralized capital and/or centralized government, and an abstract “public”
Also, the claim that the internet has “democratized” nonprofit life is at best half-true. While digital access has lowered the cost of discovering information once individuals are already motivated to search for it, the dominant reality is that the internet functions for most people as a centrally directed attention and narrative system, platform-mediated, algorithmically filtered, big biz or foundation-funded, and professionally curated.
Finally, I think its super notable how closely the modern nonprofit sector looks like elements of earlier centrally planned or semi-centralized systems in Europe, such as the pre-Reformation Church structures, formally non-state, morally legitimating, heavily endowed, elite-staffed, and operating as service-delivery and norm-setting arms that mediated between authority and populace while crowding out local self-governance. Like episcopal or monastic institutions, today’s large NGOs often claim universality, speak in moralized abstraction, and rely on patronage rather than participatory consent.
Excellent interview, I liked the parallels between the "new" style of nonprofit thinking and conventional VC thinking. However, there's a vagueness to large parts of the conversation that made it hard for me to follow. For example:
"a feeling that in many nonprofits it has become difficult to voice opinions outside of a very narrow progressive orthodoxy. Frankly, there’s some truth to that critique as well."
What are those opinions that can no longer be voiced?
"So it’s not so easy to just hand-wave away the priorities and predilections of this younger generation. You have to deal with them. They’re not going away."
What priorities and predilections are you referring to?
"Some [problems in the nonprofit sector] are downstream of how kids have been educated in universities, high school, and other institutions."
How are kids being educated that is causing these problems?
"The broader critique from the right is that using the phrase “BIPOC,” or capitalizing “black,” is a symptom. The underlying beliefs were the problem."
What are the problem beliefs that lead one to use the phrase "BIPOC" or capitalize "black"?
> left-wing critics have looked at nonprofits and asked hard questions about racial disparities ... sexually harassing behavior ... substandard wages paid at the lower levels... Those are all fair critiques... On the right, I see the critique mostly being focused on viewpoint diversity and “wokeness,” for lack of a better word ... there’s some truth to that critique as well.
I don't like this form of dialogue. I mean, sure, you can use it as an "explanation", but we could just as well replace the word "nonprofit" with "for-profit":
"left-wing critics have looked at for-profits and asked hard questions about racial disparities ... sexually harassing behavior ... substandard wages paid at the lower levels... Those are all fair critiques... On the right, I see the critique mostly being focused on viewpoint diversity and “wokeness,” for lack of a better word ... there’s some truth to that critique as well."
Some people have opinions and/or behavior that other people don't like. It doesn't seem like a problem with nonprofits but rather a problem with humanity in general.
"There's some truth to that" is a diplomatic way of saying "there's some falsehood to that" ― any given critique does not apply to all organizations, yet political operatives routinely lie by painting everyone with the same brush, or at least everyone on "the other side". It's fine to acknowledge when there is "some truth to that"―it's a prosocial move, even. But I don't have to like it, do I? It doesn't convey any actual information, it just tries to create an atmosphere in which maybe more people will listen to whatever information comes later.
As someone who has spent my entire career working with NGOs or as an elected Chicago City Council member, I’ve seen many people grow frustrated with nonprofits because they’re not confident that the work being done is producing meaningful results. One way to build greater trust in NGOs, I believe, is to emphasize clear outcome measures completed within a defined timeframe. Concrete results are much harder to dismiss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-diversity.1.6986248.html
I always think of this article as a forewarning for why volunteerism, donations to charity, and overall civic health is decreasing. This was nearly 20 years ago - and rings more true every day as america has turned into a multicultural low trust society.
Further, I would say that Soros himself has been devastating to the perceptions of NGOs. The Wren Collective, the efforts of helping economic migrants in the EU, etc. Just a disastrous person for
Guy does a great job avoiding the fact that most Non profit executives are getting $400k+ salaries
Really good episode — only thing that felt missing was a discussion of the literature on practices that make non-profits effective in delivering their mission and maintaining public credibility. E.g. things like:
Reporting and org status
- Annual (or more frequent) donor impact reports
- Accreditation and formal certifications
Operating model
- Formal org structures, R&Rs, reporting chains, SOPs, etc.
- Good governance including right-sized board structures (>5, <15), CEO succession planning, market-indexed comp
Revenue management
- Strong investment in fundraising and donor management operations
- Having at least one primary, reliable revenue stream
- Strong book-keeping and internal audit practices
Execution focus
- Depth over breadth (opting to serve fewer people better) and tracking service volumes on a per-individual basis to ensure effective minimums are met
- Outcome v. input based goals (# of people who achieved the desired policy outcome v. who came in for services or were treated)
- Regular supervision in the field, along with shadowing to ensure service providers are actually doing their jobs well
Could go on and on. The fact is, most non-profits are not well run. Same with most businesses. Except non-profits have fewer feedback loops for success, and rely less on reciprocal value exchange for their operation — which means they'll inherently have a trust deficit compared to for-profits. But there's nothing essentially suspect about non-profits. It's not a perfect science, but there definitely are facts of the matter about better and worse that we should all strive to learn.
Hi. Respectfully, this frames the issue far too passively and lets power off the hook. It wasn’t that Americans “happened” to organize differently because of a fleeting historical moment; we were already on the cusp of having something very close to the centralized, hollowed-out system we have now, and people recognized that and responded with massive, conscious structural and systems design to build the world they wanted instead, federated parties, mass-membership civic institutions, locally grounded finance, participatory newspapers, redundantly diffused educational instititions, redundantly diffused scientific instititions, publicly contestable decision spaces, etc. The Bank War era wasn’t an accident of sociology; it was an explicit counter-construction against elite consolidation.
And then post WW2 there was a transformation away from it that wasn’t an organic “shift” either, over decades, an assortment of powerful special-interest groups engaged in equally deliberate structural and systems design, centralizing finance, standardizing education, professionalizing politics, replacing membership bodies with advocacy shops due to the fact they lacked grassroots power. All worlds are contrived; the difference is who gets to do the designing, where decisions are made, and whether ordinary people have institutionalized access to power or are reduced to spectators