A Serious Look at Duplicative Nonprofits

I said that our second objective for regulating a new charity start-up is to discourage the creation of new charity start-ups in geographic locations where similar charities have already been set up. We want to avoid duplication of effort, while, at the same time, encouraging new charities to care for needs that have been left unmet.

I think one way to care for this would be to gather specific information about target populations and the numbers of charities serving those populations. That information, however, would have been gathered in the approval process as we described in this yesterday's post.

But a second step would be to have other charities already operating in the start-up's territory certify that another nonprofit in that specialty is, in fact, needed in order to serve the target population. This would mean that the founders of a new nonprofit would need to have met with the leadership of other, similar charities that already exist, and obtain the support of the leadership in those existing charities for the new start-up. I think this would do a lot for weeding out duplicative charities, and would force the issue of "turf" out in the open right from the beginning. This would put nonprofit start-ups on approximately the same grounds as hospitals -- having to prove that they are needed in order to serve the target population.

This means that the human service charities, or the arts charities, or the health groups or educational institutions would need to meet with would-be founders of new nonprofit start-ups to decide together whether there is:
1) an urgent need in the geographic area for such a new start-up;
2) sufficient support available from within the community to fund the work of both existing charities and that of the new start-up; and
3) an adequate strategic plan devised by the new start-up that is likely to ensure its success.

Experience is a good teacher, groups on the ground, in the locality – however cumbersome – are more likely to be better regulators of charitable activity within a given specialty in a given geographical area.

Now, I would agree with you that this is going to blow the lid off of new charity start-ups. Where "turf" is an issue, it's going to be extremely difficult for a new charity to get started. But those groups will need to show that they are covering what needs to be done, and the onus of that burden should be great enough to forestall turf-based greed among existing charities.

Where "turf" is NOT an issue, and progress holds sway, there is going to be careful assessment of just how a new start-up will contribute to the ultimate success and advancement of all such groups in the geographical and program area.