Founder-itis starts in the mind, with a disposition oriented towards individual decision and accomplishment. First there is the initial concept: "I can serve this need, I ought to serve this need, so therefore I will serve this need." Out of this initiative, dedication and focus the individual finds or creates avenues of service to a target population.
Then our service-oriented founder makes two discoveries: 1. to work effectively one needs other people to be involved, needs a structure and some organization; 2. to continue initial efforts and enlarge them one needs financial backing usually greater than one's own resources. To provide the resources, we need to be able to count on other people to give us money; and we know that there is a certain incentive added when the giving individual can make a gift that is tax deductible. We have in this country public policies that govern how an organization must be set up to receive both tax exemption for the charitable organization and a tax deduction for gifts made by donors.
So these two discoveries, coupled with the public policy that governs the voluntary sector, leads the service-oriented founder to create an organization that will carry out his/her personal mission using volunteers and paid staff provided by voluntary contributions from the public. This is something that we need to examine more closely, because it is in that interstice where trouble begins.
Let's take a closer look at the mental progression of ideas:
The founding individual starts with the thought "I want to serve this need. I can servie this need. I ought to serve this need." Then our founder moves to the tealization that "I need help from others and I need money." Third, the founder then makes the mental leap that concludes "I therefore need to create an organization that will carry out my mission and provide voluntarily contributed funds as a nonprofit organization."
Here is where founder-itis begins. It has to do with the involvement of other people, and with the desire to have more money that is contributed by others, and the desire to help motivate others to give by making one's organization a "Nonprofit" organization. And then the realization of this latter desire, being governed as it is by our society's public policy, necessitates the formation of a certain kind of organization, one that has certain attributes or characteristics that are going to complicate the founder's life considerably. These would include, for example, having to create a board of directors, a governance structure, then a corporation, then a corporate structure, a strategic plan, a budget, a fundraising mechanism, and so forth.
It is in this diversion, this mental twist of the road, that I believe lies the answer to why the troubles we lump together in the term "founder-itis" develop over time.
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 really 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 do not have the community's support and encouragement; that they are not 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. But we've got to deal with this. I think it's an important issue.
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