White Courtesy Telephone

Avoid Frankenthinking, Expert Suggests

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In Mary Shelley’s beloved novel, Dr. Frankenstein was a visionary member of the scientific community of his day, who, sensing the terrible nature of his work, isolated himself from the world to conduct his experiments.  He was a god-like figure, a “modern Prometheus” breathing new life into inanimate flesh.

Imagine how a well-meaning member of the nonprofit or foundation world might have rewritten Shelley’s tale.  Perhaps, from this perspective, Dr. Frankenstein’s approach to creating human life was too top-down.  This is what ultimately led his townsmen to take up their torches and pichforks to hunt down and kill his monster.

Suppose instead that Dr. Frankenstein had invited each villager to dig up his or her favorite body part in the churchyard and bring that to a community visioning process.  The creature, when finally stitched together, might have sported five arms and two heads and been unable to breathe for lack of a trachea, but it would have been their monster.

Unfortunately, research indicates that group brainstorming processes that involve simply eliciting and accepting the contributions of multiple participants, without examining these contributions critically, rarely outperform processes that incorporate a robust measure of respectful disagreement and debate. 

“Never, ever brainstorm,” cautioned Jonah Lehrer, the keynote speaker at a recent Grantmakers for Effective Organizations conference in Seattle.

And yet brainstorming, “consensus-building” processes are endemic to our field.  Every potentially bone-headed thing we’ve ever said is reverently recorded on a piece of flipchart paper now hanging in some facilitator’s office.  Being overly cautious not to offend our colleagues, we self-edit our “yes, buts” into “yes, ands,” as if by doing so we can bleach out the stain of our disagreement.

That is how we in the foundation world take what might be an extraordinary tale, a great advance in human knowledge, and turn it through groupthink into lifeless quiltwork.  These processes account for the myriad incoherent mission statements we encounter in our work, which are not so much mission statements as overwrought landscape paintings attempting to capture every inconsequential detail of some alien terrain.  What might have been simple statements of purpose are often yes-anded into meaningless word salad.

Inclusiveness is an important value in nonprofit work, I get that. Yet I often find that a regard for including all points of view in these processes does more to make us feel good than to improve our work.  We celebrate our consensus not fully understanding what the cost is to the communities we serve.

Philanthropy lacks the respectful, yet bracing, debate that is so much a part of the culture of the business world and of academia.  It would take a deliberate and sustained effort to shift our culture, but doing so might at least help us avoid compounding the sin of ineffectiveness with the sin of incoherence.

Lessons for Nonprofits From the Komen Foundation Controversy

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Does the recent Komen Foundation debacle signal an increasing scrutiny by the giving public of nonprofit activities? Just as we can’t attribute every record-breaking heat wave to global warming, neither can we assume that recent high profile cases (ACORN, NPR) represent anything like a trend.

Recall that many years ago foundation support for the Boy Scouts took a nose dive after it was revealed that the organization was discriminating against gay men. As long as I can remember, our senators and representatives—both at the national and state levels—have attempted to score political points by targeting charities. I would guess that during any session of Congress there will be at least a handful of bills with provisions to curtail the advocacy rights of nonprofit organizations. (The Alliance for Justice can provide all the sordid details.) Consider also the restrictions on legal service providers that receive funding from the Legal Services Corporation—in force since 1996—and the occasional high-profile ACLU case that’s kicked around like a political football.

What’s clearer to me is that as the American culture wars drag on, more and more charities will be caught in the crossfire.

Charities need to attend to three factors in addition to an increasingly nasty civic culture. We’re living in an age of more activist donors (though I wonder if the research would support this view). The advent of the Internet has raised citizen expectations about the accessibility of information. And finally, calls for transparency in private and public institutions have increased.

Charities beware: You can bet that as we get closer to the November elections, every contribution made by a candidate will be scrutinized. Political operatives will attempt to score big points from a public that generally doesn’t understand the nonprofit sector and can be easily whipped into a froth about the work of shadowy foundations.

I have two primary suggestions for charities. The first is for boards to sit down with their staffs and determine what mission-appropriate transparency means for their organizations. However insistent the calls for transparency might be, I would never, for example, unless I were compelled by law, agree to audiotape board meetings and post these recordings on the Internet. I believe this would stymie the free and open exchange of ideas and ultimately compromise our mission. Other organizations might have a different take on this, but it’s critical for each organization to think through the issue of transparency.

Second, and more importantly in my view, your organization needs to determine whether it has a moral center, and if so, get in touch with it. That means understanding your identity and mission. Years back, the Girl Scouts were willing to take a hit for their nondiscrimination policies. The great value of a not-for-profit organization is that it has no shareholders whose pecuniary desires it needs to satisfy. It can afford to be governed by the love of mankind. Sure, the Girl Scouts lost some donors, but we can assume it gained others in the process.

The time for charities to do their soul-searching is now. Once a campaign against your organization goes viral, it’s time for you to step up to the microphones and tell the world who you are and where you stand. Faced with the question, “What are you about?”, in the wake of an unpopular decision, do you have a clear idea what you would say?

Do you exist to maximize donor support, to perpetuate the life of an institution? or do you exist to advance the cause of justice, however unpopular that might be?

 

Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

Our Nonprofits Are Too Good to Fail

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Editor’s note: A version of this op ed appeared in today’s Times-Picayune.  That’s why the piece is written in the first-person serious.  Feel free to use it as your own, without attribution.

While the feds were bailing out large investment banks on Wall Street, our local nonprofit organizations were having a financial crisis of their own.  The great majority of them operate on shoestring budgets.  They feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick with the limited resources they’re able to scrape together from individual and institutional donors.  Raising enough money to keep the lights on is a never-ending task.  A recent survey of our community’s not-for-profit organizations (available at the Greater New Orleans Foundations website, www.gnof.org) revealed that almost 59 percent received less than a quarter of their revenues from public sources, and an even larger number received 25 percent or less of their funding from foundations.  Close to half of all survey respondents had three months or less of operating reserves, making their financial situation precarious, to say the least.

In sharp contrast with this gloomy picture of their financial health are the myriad contributions these organizations make to the well-being of our city and our region.  Across the US, nonprofit organizations are responsible for 12.9 million jobs, or approximately 9.7 percent of the country’s workforce.  Every dollar granted to a charity or charitable program produces $8 in direct economic benefits—this according to a 2011 study by The Philanthropic Collaborative titled Creating Jobs and Building Communities.

Beyond their contributions to our region’s economy is the important work they do in keeping us bound together as a community.  They provide avenues for the wealthy to work shoulder to shoulder with the poor to improve our city; they help us bridge the racial, ethnic, and class differences that so often divide us.  The many organizations in our region devoted to the arts and culture help preserve the very special character of New Orleans and its people.

We ignore the health of these organizations at our peril.

This is not a time of great prosperity for many of us.  When times are hard, we need to ask what’s most important to us, our families, and our communities.  We should consider what our community would look like—what it would feel like—without the thousands of nonprofit workers who dedicate long hours on short pay to make this a better place for all.  Consider what New Orleans would be like without its homeless shelters, without its food pantries, its hospitals and schools, its afterschool programs, its museums, and its parades.

As we better understand our priorities as a society, the many contributions that our nonprofits make to our region should move us to contribute more to them, not less, during this giving season.  Our community’s charities are just too good and too important to fail.

 

Two Social Media Technologies That Will Transform the Nonprofit World

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1. Content.Cloud.0

Problem:  In large metropolitan area X, each of three nonprofit organizations wants to create the online portal for neighborhood-level indicators.

Analysis:  The idea behind a portal is that you try to entice the online user to come to you.  Once at your site, she can benefit from your content and online tools.

The downside:  The user experience is unpleasant because she has to go to your site to find the most accurate data about poverty, another site to find the newest statistics on crime, and a third to track city investments in her neighborhood.

Solution: Content.Cloud.0 is a new social media technology that enables nonprofits to share their content with one another easily.  This new de-portalization tool can be implemented using existing MOU technologies and other B2B instruments.

Here’s how it works:  A group of content creators/providers working in a given area (e.g, neighborhood indicators) agrees to share online content and tools with one another.

This new technology enables online users to find whatever content they’re looking for at their favorite port of entry into the online space, avoiding the hassles of site specialization.  Content.Cloud.0 builds on late 20^th century “SharIng” technologies.

2. CLOUTsourcing

Problem:  During the great healthcare debates of 2009 and early 2010, political will from above met limited agitation from below, leading to legislation that fell short of many activists’ hopes for universal health coverage.

Analysis:  Many of us advocates for low-income communities were sitting on our hands, either because healthcare wasn’t our issue or because we were in the middle of some other campaign.  It was clear, however, that the ability to access quality healthcare would affect the destinies of low-income people for years to come.  The healthcare debate was happening nationally and legislation was being debated in Congress.  Reason dictated we drop whatever else we were doing and get behind this issue.

The downside:  This didn’t happen to any significant degree.

Solution: CLOUTsourcing is a new social media tool that enables advocates to coordinate their actions for greater effect and the greater good.  CloutScourcing can be implemented using existing P2P technologies such as Meetings, Electronic Mail, or Picking Up the Phone and Calling Someone.

Here’s how it works:  When an issue that deeply affects low-income communities is up for a vote in Congress or in the state legislature, and/or is being debated extensively in the media, all advocates get behind the issue instead of doing their own thing.  They offer to help the lead agencies involved by mobilizing their networks; educating their constituencies about the connections between the issue in question and the fate of low-income communities; writing op eds; etc.

Sector Agnosticism

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I’ve been hearing it mostly from younger people entering the nonprofit field: You can do good for society in any sector—nonprofit, business, or government.

The lines between the sectors have blurred, I’m reminded, and it’s the IRS that forces incorporated entities into nonprofit and for-profit boxes. The social entrepreneur who starts a profit-making venture to support her charitable work shows us how to free our not-for-profit minds. Blended entities such as B-corporations promise double and even triple bottom lines. If you’re hip to the jive, you avoid using words like nonprofit altogether.

Am I imagining this or do I sometimes detect a bit of a sneer in all this sector agnosticism?

Belittlements aside, the view that nonprofit designation is largely a matter of IRS convention—or worse, a failure of entrepreneurial imagination—appears to be gaining currency.

I understand the frustration some people feel with the normal course of business at many not-for-profits. But our sector agnosticism overlooks an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods nobody wants to pay for. If it really were possible for a business-minded individual to turn a hefty profit by providing health care to the penniless, for example, it would have happened long ago.

R U a philanthrocapitalist? If you are, I’ll eat my shoe if you can convince a hundred investors to buy stock in a company that promises to make a killing by helping returning prisoners reintegrate into their communities.

The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of imagination or of will, but rather a sober assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. If you’re selling a product like the iPhone, you’re in luck. If not, you might need to resort to begging like the rest of us not-for-profit shlumps.

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Image source: Sketchpot

New Nonprofit Study Promises to Change Everything

A groundbreaking new study by the Institute for Better Philanthropy concludes that sound management, good governance, and smart fundraising are strongly correlated with nonprofit success.

“We weren’t completely surprised by the findings,” commented Zach Skywalker, CEO of the 2Cool4U Foundation which sponsored the study.  “We’ve been saying for years that a completely new paradigm is needed for nonprofit work.”

New Wine in Old Skins: Attracting the Next Generation of Nonprofit Leaders

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Attend any earnest discussion of nonprofit issues and there’s frequently an elephant in the room.  On the issue of how to attract and retain the best nonprofit talent, the room that houses all those elephants in the room is, in my view, the chronic and significant undercapitalization of nonprofit organizations. 

“Undercapitalization” is a fancy way of saying that nonprofits are always madly scrambling for money.  This undercapitalization leads to fundraising burnout (figuring prominently in both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead  reports*), underinvestment of time and money in staff capacity, lack of attention to new staff, and an impoverished organizational infrastructure.

But chronic undercapitalization also exacerbates something I’ll call the nonprofit “frump factor.”  That’s frump as in “frumpy.”  Think Roz Chast doing a cartoon about a bake sale for the local 4-H Club.

A friend and I were watching a film about the making of Cloverfield, one of those big budget summer blockbusters featuring extraordinary special effects: thirty-storey monsters tearing off the head of the Statue of Liberty and hurling it down Broadway—that kind of thing.  At one point my friend, a veteran of nonprofit work, turned to me and asked, “Why can’t our sector do anything as cool as that?”

His question gave me pause.  You’ll have investors lining up to get a piece of the Cloverfield franchise, but few who’d expect to make a buck by housing the homeless.  To my friend’s point: there is something yawn-inspiring about the way we describe our work and communicate its impact to would-be employees and other audiences.  We invite the idea that nonprofits are pokey, unglamorous, 19th century places to work, mired in process and wed to outdated business models.

A widespread misunderstanding and undervaluation of the sector contributes to the nonprofit frump factor.  We tell our parents we want to be environmental advocates, and they roar back, “What the hell kind of job is that?”

In this country, we’re not for-profit organizations; abroad, we’re not governmental.  We’re the in-between sector, the neither-this-nor-that sector, the invention of IRS lawyers and policy wonks.

We’re the sector that does things nobody really wants to pay for.

In the Ready to Lead study, we saw significant “sector agnosticism,” the notion that a person could contribute to the public good in any sector.  And I increasingly run into people who wish we’d save ourselves the embarrassment by simply dumping the term “nonprofit” altogether.

Yet I also remember what attracted me to the sector years ago, and what keeps me committed to it.  I know that each day tens of thousands of nonprofit workers in my city are getting out of bed to do somebody an unambiguous good.  I’m convinced—foolishly perhaps—that after great art and literature, nonprofits are the last remaining civilizing force, this function having been long ago been abandoned by government, business, and the media.  I believe strongly that nonprofit work is the glue that keeps us bound together as a society.  And I believe that nonprofits and the foundations that fund them are the last institutions capable of shaking a fist at government and business when a fist-shaking is called for.

We can do much more to make this work appear less frumpy.  But we’d be challenged to make it any more meaningful.

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* Full disclosure: I was one of the authors of the Ready to Lead report; my foundation funded and helped create both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports.

March Metrics Madness

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I was recently invited by Bill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy & Civic Renewal, to speak on a panel titled Metrics Mania.  Panelists were asked to comment on an essay commissioned from Gary Walker, the founding director of Public/Private Ventures, on the subject of evaluating social programs.  Here is the text of my remarks ...

Bill Schambra saw my role on this panel as the guy who when asked about metrics replies “metrics schmetrics,” but I’m going to have to disappoint him—to some extent.  Measurement and evaluation, when done properly, are not just a bit of value-added for philanthropic or nonprofit work, they’re absolutely essential.  Only a fool would disagree with that proposition. 

But here I mean not just the kinds of formal evaluations described by Gary Walker in his essay, but informal evaluation as well: the kinds of course corrections we naturally make when we embark on a project, take a false step, and adjust what we do accordingly.  Evaluation is not and should not be the sole province of the highly compensated consultant.  We evaluate all the time; our own eyes and ears notice things the most astute consultant will never notice; and we’ll often be our own worst critics.

Now here’s where the metrics schmetrics comes in, perhaps: We’ve written more nonsense about evaluation than just about any other subject in philanthropy.  Worries about evaluation, engendered in part by logic models the length of whale intestines, have become the math anxiety of the philanthropic world.

My general thesis—if I could call it that—is that from the perspective of somebody like Mr. Walker whose organization has been commissioned to conduct lucrative, large-scale evaluations of social programs (lucrative by nonprofit standards), the Impact Revolution might seem like a good thing.  But from the ground, from the perspective of many people working in community-based organizations, this so-called revolution has brought with it new sources of irritation, new ways of adding meaningless make-work to already overburdened nonprofit staff members.

It has not been a people’s revolution, in other words, but rather one championed by elites—like myself, I’m afraid— sometimes unable to see far enough beyond our own measuring sticks to understand the limitations of formal evaluation techniques, and the trade-offs in staff time and other resources that these formal techniques require.

R U Ready 2 Lead?

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Assuming the impending nonprofit workforce crisis is real and not imagined, we have some work to do.  The latest report on the subject, Ready to Lead: Next Generation Leaders Speak Out,* reviews the various factors that will make nonprofit leadership recruitment more difficult in the years to come.  The report is based on a survey of close to 6,000 mostly younger next generation leaders—the largest survey of its kind to date.

Retiring Baby Boomers and the money worries of Gen Xers and Gen Yers will constrain the supply of would-be leaders even as nonprofits are drawn into an all-out “war for talent” with the government and business sectors.  Meanwhile, a lack of support and mentorship from incumbent executives will make it difficult for younger staffers to develop the skills they need to lead a nonprofit organization.

We’ll soon see if market forces will, as some predict, smooth out the bumps in the road ahead.  It’s possible that with more openings in the leadership ranks, more young people will look for careers in the nonprofit sector.  Sector leaders may rally and create new training programs and new incentives for charitable work.

I’d worry less about the impact of this impending crisis if the sector were, in general, better bankrolled.  Instead, charitable organizations operate in an environment of chronic scarcity as they struggle to meet the demand for services.  In this kind of environment, current leaders neglect to nurture the younger talent in their ranks; board members lose touch with the overhwelming fundraising burdens on executive directors.

But if there’s a theme that runs through these various workforce reports, it might be this: Because it’s so hard to raise charitable dollars, those of us who direct the work of the sector—current executive directors and board members, in particular—are frequently tempted to recruit and retain good talent on the cheap; but our investments in staff are the absolute last places we should be looking to cut costs.

It used to be that if one applicant turned his nose up at a nonprofit job, there’d be three waiting in the wings to apply.  We’re moving into an era when the demographics will turn sharply against us.

_____

* I was one of the authors of this report together with Marla Cornelius of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and Patrick Corvington of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  I serve as vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation, one of the report’s primary sponsors.

The Axiology of Nonprofit Impact

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In a celebrated 2001 essay, wordsmith Tony Proscio asked, “Are grantmakers a species of investor, building benevolent enterprises that produce a measurable return for society, or are they more passive enablers of good, seeking mainly to support those who pursue charitable ends by whatever path?”

He was commenting on the tendency of the foundation sector to import the language of business while remaining largely oblivious to its insights.  But his question still manages to provoke.  The debate over the “measurable return” of charitable enterprises rages on between the wielders of business metrics and the Luddites who oppose them.

The Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington attempts to stake a middle ground with a new report titled, Beyond Charity: Recognizing Return on Investment.  The report includes the kinds of cost-saving arguments familiar to many of us: each dollar spent on Johnny’s education saves us tens of thousands of dollars in prison costs and helps turn Johnny into a productive citizen who pays taxes to support local schools and fire fighters.  But the report also attempts to highlight nonprofit contributions that are a little harder to quantify—strengthening community, improving the quality of life, stimulating reform.

I understand the need for return-on-investment arguments, but I also worry about their impact on audiences that might have a limited understanding of the civilizing effects of the nonprofit sector.

What’s the ROI, for example, on a provocative question that interrupts, if only for a moment, our relentless consumerism and reminds us of what we once aspired to become?  And where do we learn to distinguish between those cases in which metrics apply and those in which social goods are less susceptible to measurement? 

It used to be that notions like “character” and “good citizenship” figured prominently in arguments for maintaining the quality of a good public education.  Now it’s mostly about the dreary but important business of building a better workforce.

What do we lose when we attempt to convert every currency to a single coin?

Selling Soap, Saving Lives

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Susan Herr’s recent post on Filmanthropy raises some interesting questions in aesthetics: Why is it so difficult to marry art with advocacy?  Why is so much political art shrill or heavy-handed?

Population Communications International, a New York-based nonprofit organization, has, for the past twenty years, pioneered the use of telenovelas in the fight against poverty, AIDS, and other social ills.  The organization has politely rejected every socially conscious script I’ve sent them, including this latest, titled, La Flor Apolonia:

(Apolonia is a beautiful woman with big beauty-parlor hair and long nails.  Her dress makes a small “X” across her chest, barely concealing her breasts.  Marta, her closest friend, wears a white mini-skirt, a bright blue Spandex top, and long, bangly earrings.  She has applied her makeup with unmatched zeal.  The two women speak in quick, unaccented Spanish.)

Apolonia:  Enrique told me that his parents had disowned him.  I pitied him, Marta—you’ve seen those big brown eyes of his!  (Apolonia juts out her chin defiantly.)  The barbarian repaid my kindness by forcing himself on me.  (The orchestra swells, heavy on the strings, as Apolonia clenches her teeth.)  Now I’m pregnant with Enrique’s baby and I’m afraid I might have AIDS!  (Music sting.)

Marta:  You were clearly born to suffer, Apolonia!  Listen, I know a woman who works at the local health collective.  Just the other day she was telling me how they had convened diverse community stakeholders around issues relating to the sourcing of positive health outcomes for economically-challenged persons of female.  Let’s go see her …

What’s the secret of seamlessly integrating the preachy earnestness of poverty-fighting messages, say, into melodramas starring sexy Latinas and hunky vaqueros?  Apart from being one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, what made Bertolt Brecht so good at using theatre as a forum for political ideas?

America's Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member

On the eve of the consumerist orgy we call “the holidays,” we republish this classic Phil Anthropoid satire.  It’s a cheeky take-off on America’s Next Top Model, a reality television show in which 13 beautiful young women compete for a grand prize that includes multi-page photo spreads in Seventeen magazine and lucrative modeling contracts.  Each week the competitors are given a new fashion challenge, and one of them is eliminated from the competition.  Our colleague Phil explores what would happen if nonprofit staff members were forced out of their comfort zone and into the world of modeling …

ANNOUNCER	Tonight on America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member, it’s down to the final three: Arthur, the 57-year-old executive director from Services, Inc. in Hendersonville, North Carolina; Bebe, the 43-year-old artistic director from the Granite Falls Community Theater in Oregon; and Cheryl, the fiery 26-year-old communications coordinator from People for a Better Universe Overall. As the final elimination looms, each contestant faces his or her own special challenge. Arthur must overcome the limitations of his geography and upbringing ...
ARTHUR	Nobody in Hendersonville calls minorities “people of color.” What does that make me? A person of clear?
ANNOUNCER	Bebe needs to prove she’s open-minded enough to work in any nonprofit environment ...
BEBE	Well, yes, I did make some unguarded remarks about Cheryl during the Nonprofit Advocacy photo shoot, but these New York princesses really chap my ass!
ANNOUNCER	Cheryl needs to find a style that her more experienced colleagues can connect with …
CHERYL	I mean, if we’re about progressive social change, why don’t we just say so?
ANNOUNCER	Tensions run high as our three contestants approach their final challenge.
	(Scene: The inside of the contestants’ apartment. The contestants are in various stages of undress as the camera pans to a large envelope perched on an easel. Bebe’s the first to see it. She snatches up the envelope, tears it open, and reads the message out loud.)
BEBE	“A limousine will pick you up at noon for today’s challenge. Once you get to the studio, you’ll have 15 minutes to throw together an outfit for a photo shoot on the theme, ‘Haute Couture Site Visit.’ Here’s the catch: You don’t know what your program officer is going to ask you because you didn’t write the proposal!”
	(Music sting. The three contestants shriek. Close-up on Bebe.)
BEBE	Oh my God!
CHERYL	You look like a scabby old egret, Arthur. You’re going down!
ARTHUR	Shut up, bitch.
	(Shot of limousine picking up the contestants at their apartment and dropping them off at the studio. They’re led into a room filled with clothes racks, shoes, and accessory bins.)
MESSENGER	You have 15 minutes. Go to it, contestants!
	(We see tantalizing images of the contestants pulling clothes from the racks and trying on shoes. As Arthur undresses, the camera does a tight close-up on his boxer shorts which are decorated with little fox hounds. Bebe uses her considerable girth to push Cheryl out of the way as she reaches for a leather belt. Cross fade to the judges’ room where we see the three contestants fidgeting in front of a panel consisting of head judge Tyra Banks, fellow judges Jay Manuel and Twiggy, and guest judge Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector.)
JUDGE TYRA	Welcome, contestants. Today we’ll determine who moves on to the final round of America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member. Let’s start with you, Cheryl. Here’s your best photograph from today’s shoot. (Some of the judges roll their eyes, others sigh.) What were you trying to do here, Cheryl? (Cheryl is too shocked to respond.)
JUDGE TWIGGY	You look like the headmistress of a school for proctologists.
JUDGE DIANA	It’s very Senator Grassley—not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
CHERYL	(Defiantly.) Last week you said I needed to tone down my enervating youth and arrogance.
JUDGE JAY	The look isn’t working for you, Cheryl. It’s hyper-zombie, totally glacial.
	(Music sting as camera cuts to Cheryl who wistfully cracks her gum.)
JUDGE TYRA	You’re next, Arthur. Here’s your best photograph from today’s shoot. (The judges shake their heads.) Tell me about your outfit, Arthur.
ARTHUR	Well, I saw this tan bedspread and I thought I could use it as a scarf …
JUDGE JAY	You look like a giant buttocks.
JUDGE DIANA	Or perhaps something flatter, like the Principles for Good Governance report recently released by the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector ...
JUDGE TYRA	Hold that thought, Diana. (Coldly.) Arthur, I think we all agree you look like a giant buttocks. (Music sting as Arthur is left twisting in the wind.) Bebe, let’s look at your best photograph.
JUDGE JAY	The look is fierce!
JUDGE TWIGGY	I like how you use the nun shoes to balance the effect of the whip. Sister Bertrille meets Candidia Cruikshanks. (Camera cuts to Bebe, who smiles, exposing a row of yellow teeth.)
JUDGE TYRA	Bebe … (Suspense music as the camera cuts first to Arthur, then Cheryl, then Bebe.) … you’ll be moving on to the final round! Congratulations, girlfriend!
BEBE	(In tears, turning to Arthur and Cheryl.) Hah! Eat my dust! Eat my not-for-profit dust!
ANNOUNCER	When we return: Who will be America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member? ...

Innovations in Fundraising: Spinning Straw Men into Gold

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The October 20th New York Times brought us this item*:

After Rush Limbaugh referred to Iraq war veterans critical of the war as “phony soldiers,” the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, the parent company of Mr. Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, received a letter of complaint signed by 41 Democratic senators. Mr. Limbaugh decided to auction the letter, which he described as “this glittering jewel of colossal ignorance,” for charity, and he pledged to match the price, dollar for dollar.

On Thursday night, Mr. Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host, said he thought the letter would bring in as much as $1 million. He was wrong.

When the eBay auction closed yesterday afternoon, the winning bid was $2.1 million. It is the largest amount ever paid for an item sold on eBay to benefit a charity.

The money will go to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization in New Jersey that provides scholarships and other assistance to families of marines and federal law enforcement officials who die or are wounded in the line of duty. Mr. Limbaugh is a director of the organization, which had total revenues of $5.2 million last year.

Having made his own fortune by underestimating the intelligence of the American public, it was only a matter of time before Mr. Limbaugh would explore new markets.  People will pay top dollar, apparently, for the artifacts of boneheaded self-righteousness.

Mr. Limbaugh’s action suggests a new frontier for fundraisers.  Can the indicted members of nonprofit and foundation boards  make it up to their disgraced organizations by auctioning off their arrest warrants, for example, or their prison dungarees?  Suppose the housekeeper who dusts Alberto Gonzalez’s empty office (Mary, are you reading this?) were to donate to the ACLU the series of memos establishing the United States as a nation that tortures.  How much would these fetch on eBay?

Some of you will recall that several years ago, Mr. Limbaugh’s housekeeper, Wilma Cline, approached Florida authorities to reveal that she had acted as his drug buyer for years, illegally purchasing more than 30,000 painkillers.  Perhaps Mr. Limbaugh would consider auctioning off the court briefs that helped him avoid prosecution, or the master recording of the radio show in which he called defenders of medical marijuana “potheads.”

My advice to fundraisers: Hop on this gravy train as quickly as possible.  The bottom will fall out of the market once consumers realize the tokens of human folly and vice are in liberal supply.

_____

* “Critical Letter to Limbaugh Fetches $2 Million,” by Stephanie Strom.

Black Courtesy, White Courtesy: The Great ARNOVA Race Debate

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Editor’s note: Two weeks ago an ARNOVA member set off a campfire of controversy by warmly recommending the White Courtesy Telephone blog to his colleagues.  For those of you unfamiliar with the group, ARNOVA is an association of extremely intelligent people who study the nonprofit sector.  WCT investigative reporter Rachel Tension was able to obtain a transcript of the highly charged ARNOVA discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.  (We changed the participants’ names because we were too lazy to ask their permission to use their real names.)  In Washington, DC, it’s dog eat dog.  In academia, it’s the opposite, so we were frankly hesitant to approach the subject without some professional assistance.  We invited WCT semiotician-on-retainer, Monique Nescafé, to help interpret the transcript for us.  Dr. Nescafé’s work for the past several years has focused on neomaterialist narratives in the novels of Jennie Adams.  This is her first guest post with WCT …

I am so very happy to be invited to write for the White Telephone of Courtesy, and especially to comment on the post-capitalist discourse of ARNOVA members.  They say the American mind is closed.  No, my friends, he is wide open, like the pore of some gigantic sweat gland.

Consider this small exchange:

Alas, … I find the name [White Courtesy Telephone] unfortunate. It may indeed be useful but the title is off-putting.
—Betty

I am in the process of considering the title for my upcoming book, so I have titles on my mind.  Can you clarify what it is about the title of the White Courtesy Telephone blog that makes it off-putting? …
—Dorothy

I think the title of “white courtesy” gives the impression that there is something else possible like “black courtesy”—i.e. that there are disparate courtesies for different groups. Or even worse—that there is no other courtesy other than white courtesy.  I have been involved in discussions with other groups who would therefore find the title offensive. Unless of course you mean it ironically (like we don’t have white courtesy).  At the very least, I do not actually understand what “white courtesy” means.
—Betty

In her brilliant rejoinder,  Betty lays bare the racial insensitivity of the White Courtesy Telephone editors.  This is not in dispute: these editors often make light of subjects that would be better treated with reverential silence.  I applaud Betty.  Her act of problematization, of affirming a posttextual paradigm of reality—the impression of a racialized there-for-me—is, in my view, an intellectual tour de force.

How does she do it?  She describes herself as being in a superposition of affective eigenstates: while it’s true that she feels “put off,” she simultaneously postpones her feelings of offense as she considers an ironic reading of “white courtesy.”  She is put off, but she is not quite yet put off.  (A monk asks Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan answers, “Three pounds of flax.”)  And although Betty does not actually understand what “white courtesy” means, she complains about the phrase anyway.  If confusion is the first step to knowledge, then Betty is clearly very knowledgeable.

Betty also brilliantly presences the elided contextuality of the ARNOVA discourse by referring to “other groups” that would find the blog’s name offensive.  This kind of offense-by-proxy is the mark of a generous individual, willing to be offended not only for herself but on behalf of others as well.

And so, what is it ultimately that puts the “white” in White Courtesy Telephone?  Another ARNOVA commentator chimes in:

… we know words make a difference, so what I’m interested in is: why did the creators of white courtesy telephone pick that name, rather than, say, ‘black courtesy telephone,’ or just plain old ‘courtesy telephone’?

Was it in order to prompt this very discussion?

Or do white courtesy telephones have a special connotation not shared with courtesy telephones of other colours?

I may be exposing my ignorance here—but that’s because I’m ignorant.
—Nigel

Did Monsieur Ruesga, when he chose the name White Courtesy Telephone, choose it in order to “prompt this very discussion”?  It is possible, n’est-ce pas?  He might very well have anticipated the ARNOVA exchange as a sommelier anticipates a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.  How delicious, to inquire after coloured telephones through the fog of a fine wine.  While these coloured telephones may have a special significance, we will henceforth, in deference to our subject, refer to them as telephones of colour.