Starting a Charity? Avoid Mission Overlap

I said in Friday's post 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 within the geographic area where you're thinking about starting your new charity. That information might have been gathered in the approval process as we described in yesterday morning's post.

But a second step would be to have conversations with other charities already operating in the territory about whether another nonprofit in that specialty is, in fact, needed in order to serve the target population.

This would mean that as the founder of a new nonprofit you would need to go meet with the leadership of other, similar charities that already exist, and obtain the support of those existing charities for your new start-up. That looks difficult, but it's a necessary step to make sure you're not duplicating services that are already taking place, and it will tend to force the issue of "turf" out in the open right from the beginning. Remember, if these other guys are having trouble getting funding, you addition of another similar charity is going to make money even tighter. That's not good for you or for the other nonprofits.

This means that the human service charities, or the arts charities, or the health groups or educational institutions 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 might tend to blow the lid off of new charity start-up effortss. 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, you're going to be giving this a 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. It's difficult, but it must be done.