Publication of our Panel and the Futrure of Escaping Corporate Capture

STATE OF THE SECTOR: Part One

We are delighted to report that a transcript of our July 26 panel — ‘Escaping Corporate Culture: Nonprofit Survival in a For-Profit World’ —has been published in both NonProfit Quarterly and Economic Hardship Reporting Project. We hope you will read it and let us know what you think.

As noted in the articles and at the panel, the five participants (Caroline Crumpacker, Steve Dubb, Jule Hall, Alissa Quart and Amarah Sedreddine) will be working with a group of activists and nonprofit leaders to develop a series of recommendations, suggested reforms and engaged ideas for the nonprofit sector and the philanthropic model. This group is organized by Ultra Advising & the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

It’s all super exciting. More information coming soon!

Meanwhile, Zuhirah brought this article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy to our attention —a sobering look at recent data from the US Census Bureau. The Bureau’s research finds that 20% of our 13.9 million nonprofit employees, from across the country and throughout the sector, are struggling to make ends meet. That is a huge and depressing number.

Particularly on our mind: How to move our government and private funders to support nonprofit labor instead of ‘sexy’ projects? Nonprofits increasingly provide essential services cut from federal budgets over the years and decades — from social services to education to sustainable land care and conservation— and those of us who are part of the public sector should be paid fairly.

To add to the bleakness of the article’s findings, more than twice as many BIPOC nonprofit workers live in financial instability as white counterparts. We should all find that beyond unacceptable.

This is one of the reasons we feel, strongly, that the nonprofit sector should be reformed. Presidents of elite universities and, even more so, CEOs at healthcare nonprofits garner huge salaries and are technically peers with executive directors at arts or social service organizations earning a fraction as much. Even more concerning, hospitals and universities have wildly inequitable internal pay-scales. At a large nonprofit hospital, CEOs can make 15 times as much as most hospital staff. A university president's salary hovers between 3 and 15 times that of senior faculty and probably something along the lines of 100 times that of the adjuncts that currently comprise 70% of higher education faculty.

Where, exactly, is the NON in these nonprofits? We’re thinking about all of this. This is what we’re on about. So…stay tuned.