Founder-itis starts with the initial concept: "I can serve this need, I ought to serve this need, so therefore I will serve this need." Why is this wrong? Isn't that the way all great things start? Isn't that the way "better mousetraps" get invented? Well, in the past, yes, but founder-itis is older than the hills, too, and if we want to prevent that from happening, there is a better way to proceed, or at least I think so.
The reason a public charity in the U.S. works (back to Lawrence Lindsey's quote a few posts ago) is because a whole bunch of people come together to meet a community need. They all work on it; they volunteer for it; they give to it, they sustain it, they manage and govern it. It's a community effort; a team effort. People coming together, particularly in times of crisis, to meet a need; the community rallying around those of its members in need and helping ease pain or hardship or strife. That's the essence of the public charity: people coming together, forming a multi-faceted team, pooling resources of time, talent, skill and money.
What happens in a world where every Tom, Dick or Margaret is free to start up a "public charity" is that the founding person's individual idea (and ideal) forms the core of the new nonprofit. It isn't a community response at all; it's the response of one, single individual, or one small group of like-minded souls who think they see a need, feel compelled to meet that need, and then want to try to get others involved in doing what the founder wants done the way the founder says it should be done. In my view, that's not a valid public charity. It may be so legally, but it is not so in terms of functionality. Because what so often results is dysfunctionality.
So what we have here is a two-pronged problem: First, what is ideally should be a community response to a crisis or need is now manifested as a single person's idea of what should be taking place in the community, regardless of what the wider community perceives or feels. I supposed some would say that in the era of "bowling alone" we should expect that. But I see it as a problem, because it results in the formation of a whole host of little fledgling organizations that purport to be "public trusts" that are, in fact, mostly based sonly on putting the individual's values, perception of need and drive for action ahead of any publicly held values, publicly perceived need and publicly supported action.
The true public charity is an efficient way to deliver services. The individual's charity is a relatively inefficient way to deliver services because it ends up in so much duplication of time, effort and use of financial resources. But I have not once seen individuals wanting to start up local nonprofits stop to realize the importance of the fact that nobody but a few friends and well-wishers are behind them; that they don't have the community's support and encouragement, that they aren't leading a charge of public energy. ANd then they wonder why they get into trouble trying to raise funds from the public; they wonder why nobody supports the really good work they're doing.
Second, this results in a plethora of little charitable fiefdoms across the fabric of society, each one out there trying to serve the needs they perceive, arrest our attention and grab our cash to do what they want to do with it. So it becomes a kind of turf battle, with many smaller charities being set up in a community, each of which may be serving similar and overlapping populations.
Actually, this can result in a sort of "bum's paradise," if you're, for example, in the temporary shelter or prescription drug, or human services business. It means you (the "bum") can go to multiple charities and receive multiple benefits and instances of personal assistance. So now we have computerized systems set up across the county that track Joe and Sal and Mary as they go from one agency or charity to the next, and we electronically keep them from "double-dipping."
But that doesn't really solve the problem, it just polices the tendency of some to mis-use an already problematic situation where multiple charities and agencies are doing the same thing for the same people for the same three reasons: turf, turf, and turf.
I just know am going to get into further hot water tomorrow. My goose will be thoroughly cooked by the time this bit is finished! But we've got to deal with this. I think it's an important issue.
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