The "Individualist" vs. "People-oriented" Founders of Nonprofits

Before we start today's blog post, let me take a moment to wish you a wonderful and personally satisfying holiday and a prosperous and really fun-filled New Year ahead. I'm going to take a week off now and won't be back until January 2nd after the post this afternoon.

The issue we're dealing with today was raised in a most interesting conversation I had with my wife, Bonita, the other day. She has very often been able to help sort out some of the deeper issues we've faced together in ten years of helping charities raise more money, and I do so appreciate her ability to analyze what's going on in difficult situations. That's why we're such a good team.

Well, we got to talking about charity start-ups and the motivations of their founders, and we tripped across this little problem: It seems the founders of new charities that have come to our shop can be divided into two types. There may be more out there, but these are the two we have seen.

One type of founder is very people oriented, and is open to the community's leading, able to freely communicate with others, receive their guidance and nurture, and return the favor with loyalty and gratitude. For these folks, amity and friendship take precedence over, or are able to inform and alter, self-initiative and personal drive. We might say that these folks are very "people-oriented;" they seem to love to congregate together, rely on one another for self-image, and for the clues to life's possibilities, dilemmas and hardships, and set group-determined standards of conduct and performance.

The other type of founder we've seen over the years is more oriented towards being an individualist, may actually be driven to individual effort, is often rebellious against the community and the ways it tends to delimit and impose its will over the individual's drive and impulse. These people could not be typified as "people lovers," and they don't tend to like the ways groups of people or communities act when they are together. It's not that they're "loners" necessarily, but when you hear that one of the reasons they want to form a new charity has to do with the fact that they want to get away from group (read "board") decisions, group pressure, etc. you know you are dealing with a person of this more individualistic type.

For purposes of this discussion, and for want of a better typology at the moment, let's just say that the first set of founders are more "people oriented" while the second group tend to be more "individualistic" in their approach.

Here's the crux of the matter, then: If you find yourself within a community (almost any kind will do: geographic, religious, interest group, political, educational, whatever) and you are of the "individualistic" persuasion, then when you start developing an idea about how you can serve the pressing needs of a specific group of people with your talents and experience, you basically have two options. You can start up a business and charge a fee for service to those who can and want to afford that service. That's the most "individualistic" expression you can have in our society. Or you can start up a charity and give the service for free.

but, if you start up the charity to give away the service, then you are immediately thrust back, again to relying on the community, and you will, like it or not, be governed by the community's needs, wants and values. That includes governance by a group of people (the Board); it also includes the donations you seek and must have for your charity to survive and thrive.

That is not going to sit well with the "individualistic" type of nonprofit founder. It is something they will assiduously try to avoid. But it will happen in many ways, chiefly through the phenomenon of Board governance (where the group manages or supervises and evaluates the performance of the founder/executive), and through having to defer to, relate to, cultivate and solicit the wider community of donors. A further problem complicates the picture: individuals and families have most of the money you will need, and foundations and corporations will have a lot of institutional strings attached that make your life difficult. Out of the frying pan, into the fire!! The more 'individualistic" type of founder is going to rather naturally run into strategic difficulty when setting up a nonprofit organization; it's just "the nature of the beast."

You see where we are? The choice of relying on "foundations and fun (special events)" for support, and the choice to form boards that are going to be naturally subservient to the founder/executive, is a strategic choice that is a natural choice that comes out of an orientation that is essentially antagonistic towards community, one that is essentially more "individualistic" rather than community- or "people-oriented." The problem comes down to this, once again, that running a charity on "foundations and fun" as a support base, and denying the charity true governance by a "community" that is a board of directors, just will not succeed in the long run. Trouble is around the corner and not very far down that street.

Let's deal with the "people-oriented" ftype of ounder this afternoon....