8 Ways Philanthropy & Nonprofits Must Transform If They Want to Do Good
Let's imagine that better way together....
This post is meant to be a companion post to the last one, which was heavy on criticism of philanthropy and nonprofits. In this one, we’re going to dream about a better world, a better way of working toward it together — one that could be closer to now than we think.
Read on….
For You: Today’s Main Course
Friends, the last post I wrote here — 8 Reasons Philanthropy & Nonprofits Aren’t Doing As Much Good As They Think They Are — went kinda viral.
I think I touched a nerve?
As I said in that post, my criticism comes from love.
I love working in this field dedicated to positive transformation — of people and their communities, and of the natural world we all live within.
I can’t imagine better work.
My criticism also comes from the fact that I know we can be better.
I believe that this field of work itself should be open to positive transformation too — and that, as soon as we open ourselves to changing, we absolutely can.
I know it, and I want to see it happen.
So.
To that end, here are eight things I suggest happen soon, so that the work of philanthropy and nonprofits can be so much better:
1️⃣ Ego takes a back seat. People no longer refer to an organization as “my” nonprofit, or “my” foundation, etc. Executive Directors no longer say things like “the people who work for me.” Donors no longer want their names on things, or to completely control what their donations do. Board members no longer disrupt board governance because they’re unhappy with their life elsewhere and are trying to assert the power they can’t assert anywhere else. Staffers no longer play politics with each other, eschewing open collaboration for sharp elbows and possessiveness.
Nonprofits and philanthropy are accountable to no one else but the public, the community — which is the whole reason for their existence.
Everyone involved knows that they don’t “own” anything, that they are holding and stewarding something in a sacred trust for the larger community who cares about it.
No one involved is doing the work to scratch an ego itch. There aren’t power plays. There aren’t games. There is just everyone rolling up their sleeves to work together, in cooperation and collaboration.
Perhaps most importantly, there is open talk of ego. People are constantly self-assessing, staying aware of whether or not their ego is taking over. Those around them actively give them feedback, when they see this happening. And everyone is open to that feedback, receiving it with gratitude and humility — because everyone knows how destructive ego trips can be for this work… and no one wants that kind of destruction to derail something so important.
2️⃣ Community drives the whole process. Everything is better when it’s come out of the wisdom of community. The best decisions are made from consulting a diversity of lived experience — and since there are so many different kinds of lived experience, we consult, and honor, as many of them as possible while we lead, especially when what we’re leading is expressly dedicated to serving our communities.
This means that executive leadership is not driving the process. Rather, they are in conversation with, and listening to, community.
This means that donors are not driving the process. But rather, they are exquisitely attuned to, and responsive to, needs arising from their communities.
Organizations are vehicles, tools, simply organized ways for communities to do the work they know needs to happen. And, from beginning to end, communities are the ones driving that work.
3️⃣ Everything is based in real relationships. We genuinely prioritize relationships because, as Hali Lee so wisely says, “relationships are infrastructure.” Both philanthropy and nonprofits prioritize real relationships, the kinds laid out in last week’s post:
Real relationships require honesty. Real relationships are mutually giving and receiving. Real relationships have accountability baked into them. Real relationships require shared responsibility. Real relationships prioritize trust. Real relationships don’t continue without deep, open communication. Real relationships welcome conflict, because they know they aren’t actually possible without it. Real relationships are constantly airing out and re-negotiating power dynamics.
The kinds of skills we used to talk about as “soft skills” (read: less-important/critical) — things like giving and accepting feedback well, actively inspiring and growing trust with others, and collaborating well with others — are the primary skills we seek when recruiting staff, volunteers, and board members.
We are steeped in a sense of shared responsibility, for others’ lives, for our planet’s well-being — which makes us naturally committed to accountability among us. Thus, we give and receive feedback freely. We openly, genuinely apologize when we have harmed others. We focus on repair… until we have actually repaired a relationship, and/or righted a wrong as much as we can.
We embrace conflict, knowing that not only is conflict inevitable in genuine relationships, but it is also usually the path to deeper relationships — and more effective community efforts that help as many people as possible.
4️⃣ We stop separating problems from each other as though they’re distinct. Instead of there being education over here… and housing over there… and conservation of our shared natural environment in a whole different zone… and arts and culture in their own silo… and so on… we start acknowledging how interconnected all of these things are… and we start addressing them in holistic ways, rather than creating a reality where they’re “competing” for support against each other.
There is no reality in which one community issue is independent of others.
We acknowledge that.
And we start designing our systems of resource allocation and distribution to work within that assumption.
We start finding new ways to collaborate on solutions that serve the whole.
We start operating as if a rising tide lifts all boats, because we know it’s true. We start working cooperatively with each other to raise the tides of our shared home, because we know in our bones that we all do better when we all do better.
5️⃣ Funding is exquisitely attuned, and responsive, to community needs. Those with funds to give are not driving the process of giving to community work, deciding on their “strategies” and “priorities” and then asking communities to respond to them.
Instead, the process is completely flipped.
Communities surface needs… and those with funds have nothing to do but respond and move their funds to the needs.
As I’ve written before:
During the traumatic Operation Metro Surge, our community’s cash simply flowed toward asks arising from community needs — with no strategy first, no funder priorities, no carefully choreographed process. Just a simple reality: 1) community need arises; 2) it’s communicated; 3) it’s funded.
We simply open our minds to whole new ways to organize this work — especially because we realize that the ways we had been organizing it for decades had not only not solved so many of the problems we said we wanted to solve, but often, the problems were getting worse.
We realize that, clearly, having donors and funders deciding where the funding flows was revealing a critical disconnect, creating funding streams fatally out-of-touch with on-the-ground realities and needs.
So we flipped this model upside-down.
Folks set down their egos long enough (see above) to not dismiss this idea out-of-hand because it threatened their jobs and/or everything they’d spent years doing… and they were willing to make this change, whatever it took.
6️⃣ Nonprofits completely reorganize our fundraising systems to focus on growing community — with practices like donor organizing and collective giving. We do this because this approach is not only more realistic for our resources and organizational structures than what had become the norms… but we realize it’s also much more aligned with our missions and purposes.
All of what we had considered “best practices” until this point were essentially commercial direct marketing and sales practices that folks had adapted somewhat for the nonprofit context. But really? They were not that different from what corporations used every day to get us to buy, buy, buy.
Like corporations, we nonprofits had been relating to donors as individuals — individuals who we were trying to influence to do what we wanted them to do (i.e. to give us money).
Whether we were relating 1:1 (what our “best practices” called “major gifts”), one-to-a-few (what our “best practices” called “mid-level giving”), or one-to-many (what our “best practices” call “annual fund”), the start of the relationships was always the ONE (meaning the organization)… to the however-many.
We had hired staff to manage those relationships. Then we ran them ragged, because managing that many relationships is a lot of work.
Generally, the much bigger organizations — the ones who could afford to have more staffers to do this work — were the ones who had actually raised the most money, while the smaller, more grassroots orgs (which are actually the vast majority of nonprofits) had to listen to all the “gurus” tell them how they should be working in the ways the large shops were… when there was no conceivable way for them to actually manage it all, with their current staffs and resources.
Seeing the error of their ways, nonprofits realize that we should never have adopted these practices, because these models of relationship are actually antithetical to so much about nonprofits — not the least of which is our missions and purposes.
We remember that almost every nonprofit bubbled up from a community need revealing itself, which then caused people to organize themselves around it and eventually form an official organization. We realize that we had not been honoring that community DNA in how we developed fundraising norms — and that we need to.
So we ask ourselves…
What would it be like if the process of fundraising was — instead of a process of marketing, communications, and sales, essentially — a process of growing deep, genuine relationships (see above: full of honesty and conflict and mutuality) with and between donors?
What if fundraising became a process of drawing community close, nurturing its development, and helping it grow?
What if fundraising stopped focusing on money so much… and instead helped all of the humans who care about a mission engage with it in many ways (including giving time and talent and testimony and ties, in addition to treasure)?
What if “fundraisers” (who probably would stop calling themselves fundraisers in this reality) knew their job was just to support the community that they had gathered around the mission, nurturing it like a gardener nurtures flowers? To be a direct conduit between that community and the day-to-day work of the org?
What if we adopted donor organizing — a cousin of community organizing — as our primary model of relating to current donors and finding new ones?
What if giving was no longer a solo act… but one grounded in community and collective action?
How might everything change, if we changed the work in these ways?
And out of those questions — and the answers we find to them — a whole new model of raising resources to support a mission is born.
7️⃣ Boards develop totally different incentives and guidelines for their recruitment, membership, and governance. They do this because they realize that the norms that boards had developed, over the decades, are actively harmful to the organizations they care about.
So they resolve to do better.
They realize that focusing on people in powerful positions with lots of money, or access to money, as they recruit is actually creating a toxic culture, where money and power start to matter more than anything else.
They also realize that when the board is composed of people who have entirely different life experiences than whoever is being served by the nonprofit, they’ve created a situation where they’re governing blind.
They realize they don’t want to do this!
So they start making their top recruitment priority that potential board members have lived experience of their mission and purpose.
Related to that, they realize that it’s an outdated expectation that board members volunteer for all of the work involved in board leadership, so they resolve to offer stipends to all board members — and to address other potential barriers to participation for people, like transportation and childcare.
They also realize that their typical approach to recruiting board members — promising them that it’s not too much work or time — is actually shooting themselves and the organization in the foot.
Because in reality, the org needs people to go all-in, making the mission an essential part of their life, commitments, and responsibilities.
So they start talking much more realistically about how much of a priority they’re hoping board members will make the org within their life.
On top of all of that, they realize that they’ve gotten so consumed by their deer-in-the-headlights response to the specter of fundraising… that they’ve completely neglected governance.
They know next-to-nothing about governance. They wouldn’t even know where to learn more. And they haven’t taken the time to find out yet.
So they decide to change that. They talk to their board chair and tell them that they want to prioritize learning about good governance — and practicing it! The board chair welcomes the idea and gets right to work making it happen.
8️⃣ White folks remove themselves from the center of the work, then fund and support the work as it’s done by marginalized communities (and focus on working deeply within their own communities). After many decades of being told how harmful it is for them to be centered in, and leading, work that primarily serves communities of color, White folks decide to step back and let others lead.
Then, realizing they have far more financial capital at their disposal than communities of color — after generations of benefitting from all the systems rigged in their favor — they decide to dedicate their funds to supporting communities of color and their visionary, necessary leadership.
They don’t do this out of charity, as they realize that that’d be patronizing. Instead, they do this out of genuine solidarity, because they’ve finally learned the truth: none of us are free until all of us are free.
They also realize that, just because they have relative financial comfort, that doesn’t mean they are “more fortunate” than others — nor that they don’t have any problems within their communities.
Looking at the history of Whiteness, and seeing how much harm it’s done in the world over the centuries, they realize that it’s actually harmed them and their families, too.
So they decide to start some deep inner work, both inside themselves and within their communities. Their goal: finding whole new ways to live, in joy, shared humanity, community, and collective liberation.
………………….
SO, y’all.
Whadaya say?
Subscribe… or Become a Supporting Subscriber!
Become a Free Subscriber, and you’ll get a loveletter missive like this — or a podcast episode — in your inbox on Fridays…
… or become a Supporting Subscriber and you’ll get the above… PLUS you’ll have these additional opportunities to participate in this community:
➡️ podcast-based (5-15 min) Morning Meditations on weekdays;
➡️ monthly Fire Circle (story-telling) gatherings via Zoom;
➡️ and online chats here on Substack;
… and perhaps most importantly, as a Supporting Subscriber, you’ll help provide the financial support needed to pay me for all of the time I invest in this project… and thus you’ll make For the Love of Humanity possible.
Conversation: Your Real Real
I really want to know your more detailed and nuanced thoughts, too. Let’s start a conversation on this topic. Visit the comments section!
Community-Weaving for Fundraisers
Life’s been LIFING lately, yes?! Now is the time to reach out and connect with others. When you’re embedded in supportive community, even the most difficult things don’t seem so hard.
Your community is waiting for you!
Advice when you need it. Been-there, done-thats. Commiseration. Support. A place to vent. Guidance and mentoring.
All of this — and more — is what happens throughout each month…
… at Community-Weaving for Fundraisers.
Just community-based fundraisers. Gathering for (virtual, on Zoom) lunch together. Twice a month. Year-round. Chatting and supporting each other via WhatsApp in between lunches. Being there for each other.
All you need to do is show up and be present… while I guide, facilitate, organize, and create the container.
Practice: Make It Yours
Find a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted… and reflect on these questions:
Is change something you welcome?
If yes, why?
If no, why?
How might you welcome more change into your work and life?
A Gift to Take With You: Something to Sit With
For the Love of Humanity is an online community made up of, and generously supported by, its readers and listeners (like you).
Why become a Supporting Subscriber?
➡️ Receive a loveletter like this — or a podcast episode! — every Friday evening. ➡️ Participate in Asynchronous Content Club… in the Substack Chat! ➡️ Listen to (5-15 min) Morning Meditations every weekday in the Supporting Subscriber podcast feed, where you get your podcasts. ➡️ Join monthly Fire Circles, via Zoom, to share stories and community. ➡️ Affirm and invest in the value of true philanthropy in your life. ➡️ Provide the financial support needed to make this hopeful project possible… and to help it continue… and grow!
Find For the Love of Humanity elsewhere and join us there too!
➡️ LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | BlueSky ⬅️
Thank you. 😊❤️