Non Profit Addiction

Our dirty secret is that many of us non-profit professionals will invariably find ourselves over cocktails talking about how utterly f*cked up our jobs are.  It's a strange conundrum we have: loving our jobs, loving our work, loving what our organizations do and yet finding ourselves mired in dysfunction, overwhelm, ongoing resource constraint and, often, bad management.

This does beg two questions: A) Why do we do it? B) Why are so many non-profits so dysfunctional?

I'll focus on the first question for this post.  The second will likely be a series of posts as there is no simple answer to that question!

As we find ourselves hiding in a restaurant booth opening up about the latest grant snafu or spat between a program manager and the development team or stories of CEO incompetence, we check that our voices are not too loud as someone who may know the organization may be there.  Whether in HR, development, programs or finance we are also acutely aware a bad word could affect receiving funding, and with funding maybe things would get better and the work itself is so good, so....  And yet we still may find ourselves threatening to go to the "dark side" or "go corporate," exclaiming, "We don't get paid enough for this!"  We'll get it out of our systems and head home and buck up for another day of battles at the office hoping with that next conversation or big donation or board meeting, things will get better.

It has to, the work is too important, right?

So why do we do it?  I joke that I have a "meaning problem."  I know I could not be happy as a financial manager for a company just making some kind of widget.  I have always had a calling to do something that would change the world or make my community a better place in the face of injustice.   I certainly did not realize I would be doing that through numbers, but there it is.

A colleague of mine, a non-profit consultant, once joked that working in non-profit is like an addiction.  You love it, it's messed up, and you keep going back for more.  It may be held together with scotch tape and reused manila folders, and everyone is essentially doing three jobs while being paid for half of one and aren't sure if they will have them next year, and scraping together limited funds from the same limited pools every other non-profit is competing for.  A child has school supplies he may not have had, a woman starts a new business when she couldn't get financial backing from a bank, innovative green technologies are piloted in rural villages around the world and it's worth it!

Plus, there is the unfailing belief that if it were just for THIS it could work so much better, be it more funding, more experience, a better boss, better systems, a better policy, or being seen on Oprah.  Often the "that much better" is just on the horizon.  So we keep fighting the good fight, not just to make the world a better place, but to make the organizations we work for better places too.

Besides, what is the alternative?  Going to the dark side?