I was talking to my dad about non-profits last night. How they should be run, what they should do, if they should even be around. I've been thinking about this a lot. Kate took a class this fall, "Advocacy and Political Participation by Non-Profit Organizations", dropped a few facts into my lap, and since then I've thought hard about the role they play and, subsequently, what I want to do.
One of those facts, for instance, is that when high taxes on large companies fell, so did the money for social services provided by the government. And as those social services decreased, non-profits sprang up; they became popular, nowadays they are even chic. I read somewhere that Portland, always following the trends, is said to have the most non-profits of any major city. They literally spring up everywhere and for everything - I wrote a (fake) grant for a non-profit whose sole purpose was to bring magicians to senior homes and hospitals.
And then there's the bureaucracy and the natural shoestring budget of all but the largest non-profits (well they all have the bureaucracy). My favorite example is my own Hillsboro Family Resource Center: the Washington County Commission on Children and Families saw there was a need for basic family resources in 2002, and that's how the HFRC started. BUT the Commission didn't want to oversee us, so they gave that task to another non-profit called Youth Contact. And finally, we are part of the Hillsboro School District - I'm not even sure how. What this all means is that whenever we make a big decision, it goes through all three groups. Different progress reports go out to each group, and those who give us grants. In order to install a PRINTER, we have to call the school district tech support to get an appointment to install it themselves (they hate us, by the way, because they definitely don't see us as part of the district and therefore see everything they do for us as a favor).
As always, this is something I want to read about more. Because another interesting topic is the rules around non-profits and political advocacy. Of course, there are non-profits whose purpose IS advocacy. But in my opinion, the huge number of social service organizations spend far, FAR too little time on advocacy. The realization I am coming to, and have been for quite some time, is this: offering short-term services without looking at long-term solutions (laws! National! State! County!) is shortsighted, inefficient, and does not help your clients. Should non-profits strive to eliminate themselves? Is there ever realistically possible?
In my next post, I will do some research (i.e. talk to my lovely Kate) on political advocacy and non-profits.
The trend to eliminate government services and foist them into decentralized organizations is definitely worrisome in a lot of ways--fighting for funding gets really messy. It's also amazing how much community organizing has become a dirty term shooing away anyone who wants to do strong advocacy--even just getting grants for anything but direct service is increasingly difficult.
ReplyDeleteUgh, and I hear you on the mess of organizations overseeing each other. Some bad communication in that vain is what led me not being able to fill the AmeriCorps position I was going to take in Dallas.
We should chat sometime since it looks like I'm actually in the area for now (I keep thinking that I'm leaving any minute and therefore don't do anything). I'm thinking about starting an MPA program so I've been trying to mull over the place of a lot of agencies and non-profits running around each other.