One of the tensions in the nonprofit world today, especially around questions of scaling, relates to whether our needs are best served through the creation and maintenance of ‘niche’ nonprofits that provide a few core services and do so very well, versus the development of a smaller number of large institutions that are each capable of delivering holistic services in their respective fields.
Do we want many Davids or a few (well-intentioned, of course) Goliaths?
Do we get to scale more effectively by fostering many nimble, ’boutique’ nonprofits, or by directing resources to organizations more equal in size to the problems they confront?
I have thought, though, for awhile, that this might really be the wrong question. That maybe we should be spending more time thinking about whether our services–our response to the problems–are scaled correctly, not whether the particular vehicles through which we’re delivering them–our organizations–are.
Because, when it comes to tackling the big challenges plaguing our society–illiteracy, poverty, gender discrimination, racial injustice, obesity and ill health, growing educational disparities, pervasive underemployment, rampant incarceration–context really matters.
It’s not just that smaller nonprofits with a more narrow profile of services may be ‘outgunned’ in these battles, but that even the service models of bigger organizations, the way that they structure and understand their missions, may be missing some links, too.
But when organizations expand beyond their boundaries–regardless of their size–I often sense considerable pushback, around the idea of ‘mission drift’ or concerns about others’ turf or fear that ‘core’ services (however those are understood) will suffer as the service scope grows.
In Creating Room to Read, the founder describes a very different approach, one where the organization fairly quickly saw that achieving its goals of literacy, especially for girls around the world, would require far more than the initial objective of building schools and libraries. In order to succeed, Room to Read would have to look at the skills that girls need and the contexts in which they often fail to develop, the social supports that can help girls overcome cultural taboos against advanced education for females, and the tangible obstacles they face (including transportation, meals at school, and childcare for siblings).
Importantly, attending to this context doesn’t always mean adjusting the scale and size of the organization itself, since there are other ways to ‘scale up’, and it isn’t perceived as ‘Christmas-treeing’, tacking on anything that seems appealing, without thought as to the distraction that additional services may pose.
Instead, it’s about boxing in our problems in order to attack them.
It’s about wrapping those we’re concerned about in the mantle of all of the essential supports they say they need, and figuring out how to do that through a combination of service expansion internally, strategic partnerships, and advocacy with public institutions.
In essence, then, I guess that I’m more interested in the ‘what’, when it comes to scaling to match our challenges, than I am the ‘how’.
I don’t know that I care, all that much, if we pursue models of many small organizations, working collaboratively, or investments in large and robust responses.
What matters is that we go wide, with our lens, looking at the context in which problems flourish.
After all, it’s only mission drift if you’re moving away from what really matters, or if you’re focused more on the narrow provision of services than a compelling vision of the world as it should be.
Otherwise, it’s just approaching our challenges from different angles.
Until we have them surrounded.
Not a fortress mom
Photo credit, alex ranaldi, via Flickr, Creative Commons license
I am not a ‘fortress mom’.
I mean, yes, I try to feed my kids healthy food, even though I can’t keep up with which plastics that I’m supposed to be worried about.
And I spend time working with Sam’s teacher and helping him pursue his education–we definitely fall into that category of upper-middle class parents using our resources for our children’s educational benefit.
What I mean is that I don’t consider it my job, or even desirable, to try to keep danger and threat and harm away from my children through sheer force of my will, or an abundance of cautious planning.
I’m not interested in trying to put up walls to keep out the world.
And I refuse to spend my energy policing their every move.
Instead, I feel called, as a parent and, I think, as a social worker, to care for my children–and, by extension–all children, through changing the systems that affect the world in which my children will grow up.
It is so tempting to revert to the individual sphere to cope with our fears and concerns, since, even on the household level, they are plenty overwhelming.
But I believe in the quote that is the header on this blog, that “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
It’s not that I don’t care–obviously, I hope–about my children’s well-being.
It’s just that I’m not too interested in trying to squeeze what I can for them, if that leaves less for everyone else, or in retreating inward as a way of protection, because it’s really not.
This ‘environment’ that parents are so concerned about–the influences on our children, the pressures, the pollution–isn’t some personified enemy to be vanquished or, at least, contained.
Instead, of course, it’s multiple and overlapping systems that can and must be manipulated to bring better outcomes.
The societal problems that I worry about for my kids:
are not my problems, but, instead, our collective challenges, to confront…together.
I’m not spending much time helping my kids cope with injustices we should not tolerate.
I’m not taking on the stresses that come from prescribing individual lifestyle changes as the ‘cure’ for societal malaise.
As a family, we’re looking outward, as much as we can, and teaching the kids that it’s okay to question why structures are the way they are, and why outcomes are so often unequal.
I’m advocating for more funding and stronger supports for public schools, better nutrition in the lunchroom, a fairer criminal justice system, immigration laws that make sense for our future and affirm our shared past, and gender equity enshrined in laws and seared into our hearts.
And I’m showing the kids how we do this work together, rather than seal ourselves off.
Because there’s no wall high enough to keep out the world.
Even if I was trying to build it.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged advocacy, family, social problems