Starting a Charity? "On This Rock, I will Build..."

What often turns up as "Founder-itis" later in a nonprofit's journey starts with the initial concept: "I can serve this need, I ought to serve this need, so therefore I will serve this need." Certainly a noble and self-giving sentiment; the kind of sentiment wea ll need more of in this world.

Why is this wrong? Isn't that the way all great projects for assisting and improving the human condition start? Isn't that the kind of personal initiative that allows "better mousetraps" to be invented?

It's not that the sentiment is "wrong," but that it is centered on the self. It is a way of discovering a method of controlling significant parts of one's universe. It does bring forth good works on behalf of humanity, but it also gives rise eventually to a kid of personal self-perpetuation, and can even have the effect of shutting out others from participation. This is when we see "Founder-itis" happening in the nonprofit organization. So, if we want to prevent that from happening somewhere down the road, we need to find a better basis on which to found a nonprofit organization.

Let's step back a bit. 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 ideology) 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 very "public" charity. It may turn out to be so legally, but it is not so in terms of functionality. Because what so often results is dysfunctionality. And that's what we euphemistically refer to as "Founder-itis."

So what we have here is a two-pronged problem:
First, what is ideally 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.

That's a "problem," because it results in the formation of an organization that purports to be a "public trust" that is in fact based solely on putting the individual's values, perception of need and drive for action ahead of actual 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.

Second, this results in a plethora of little charitable fiefdoms across the fabric of society, each one out there trying to 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 is a sort of "bum's paradise," if you're in the temporary shelter business. It means you can go to multiple charities and receive multiple benefits and instances of personal assistance.

We will get into this further tomorrow.