In the last week a number of my colleagues have been reading, sharing, and commenting on an essay by Nan Ransohoff. I have been tagged in it more than once by people who suspect that I share their skepticism. I do. And, curiously, Ransohoff’s essay has reminded me of something I watch happen in my classroom every semester.
Hear, hear! I experienced this firsthand as a board member of a nonprofit arthouse cinema in San Francisco (shoutout to The Roxie!). It thrives because patrons and members make it so; even "outside money" in the form of larger donations has the membership vibe. Belonging is the secret sauce that members of the Philanthropic Industrial Complex overlook because they themselves aren't members of the communities they fund.
Thanks for sharing this. I'd argue that any promise that elite wealth holders will fix the world self-deconstructs around the word "elite" (or any of its proxies). That is a strange sentence, but one I hope that you will understand!
When talking about the mental health field, I used to break problems down into two buckets: "scarcity" problems and "engineering" problems. Engineering problems are anything to do with the throughput of people, money, and services. Scarcity problems are about the amount and distribution of resources. There's a third bucket, of course, which roughly corresponds with the "expressive" idea in the piece: what I would sometimes call "metaphysical" problems having to do with the social/cultural conditions in which we are all formed. The challenge of the third bucket is that those conditions are impossible for any central actor, philanthropy, government, or otherwise, to control or engineer.
All three buckets are important, but solving for engineering problems without considering the other two is doomed to hit a hard ceiling of impact. Ransohoff's vision of applying "tech talent" to social problems in her third wave runs headfirst into this problem. Tech can solve important engineering challenges in impactful ways, but that is about all it can do.
Service delivery matters deeply, but the nonprofit sector is not only a delivery system. It is also one of the places where belonging, solidarity, local knowledge, leadership, and shared responsibility can be formed.
I keep thinking about the difference between funding programs and rebuilding civic muscle. Both matter, but they are not the same thing.
Some of what communities need most cannot simply be funded into existence. It has to be built through relationship, membership, trust, and sustained presence.
That may be the harder work but it may also be the work we most need to rediscover.
Hear, hear! I experienced this firsthand as a board member of a nonprofit arthouse cinema in San Francisco (shoutout to The Roxie!). It thrives because patrons and members make it so; even "outside money" in the form of larger donations has the membership vibe. Belonging is the secret sauce that members of the Philanthropic Industrial Complex overlook because they themselves aren't members of the communities they fund.
Thanks for sharing this. I'd argue that any promise that elite wealth holders will fix the world self-deconstructs around the word "elite" (or any of its proxies). That is a strange sentence, but one I hope that you will understand!
When talking about the mental health field, I used to break problems down into two buckets: "scarcity" problems and "engineering" problems. Engineering problems are anything to do with the throughput of people, money, and services. Scarcity problems are about the amount and distribution of resources. There's a third bucket, of course, which roughly corresponds with the "expressive" idea in the piece: what I would sometimes call "metaphysical" problems having to do with the social/cultural conditions in which we are all formed. The challenge of the third bucket is that those conditions are impossible for any central actor, philanthropy, government, or otherwise, to control or engineer.
All three buckets are important, but solving for engineering problems without considering the other two is doomed to hit a hard ceiling of impact. Ransohoff's vision of applying "tech talent" to social problems in her third wave runs headfirst into this problem. Tech can solve important engineering challenges in impactful ways, but that is about all it can do.
Anyway, excellent piece. Thank you for it.
Service delivery matters deeply, but the nonprofit sector is not only a delivery system. It is also one of the places where belonging, solidarity, local knowledge, leadership, and shared responsibility can be formed.
I keep thinking about the difference between funding programs and rebuilding civic muscle. Both matter, but they are not the same thing.
Some of what communities need most cannot simply be funded into existence. It has to be built through relationship, membership, trust, and sustained presence.
That may be the harder work but it may also be the work we most need to rediscover.