On Correcting Assumptions (Post 7)

My final paper ended up not being about AmeriCorps.  Sorry, AmeriCorps.  Partially, there’s not enough information published about you.  And partially, I wanted to investigate the idea that there is hope in the world.

What?  I started out this blog by disagreeing with the idea, espoused by Bob and Mr. O’Neill, that people associating without a profit motive was a new idea.  I argued that, no, the profit motive is what is new.  In the last post, I talked about dangerous ideas.  This is one, that people are not innately greedy.  It is shocking and discouraging to realize how few people believe that we are not innately obsessed with profit.

Even so, I believe it. I believe that it is human to be satisfied, at some point, with what one has.  I believe that it is possible to act out of something other than a desire to maximize profit.  And I think, therefore, that nonprofits are not new at all, but an expression of something very old.  I wanted to write a paper that could following that logic with some very basic evidence.

And I did that.  In short, my paper followed the following logic.  Economists have a couple of ideas about why nonprofits exist.  In general, these ideas involve government and market failure, and predict that a nonprofit sector will come into existence to fix particular kinds of failures.  However, when these theories were tested against empirical data from the nonprofit sectors in several countries, they did not hold true.  So, it is possible that nonprofits exist for a reason other than market and government failure.  It just so happens that there is a body of theory saying that capitalism is really new, and that before it arose, markets were not even a part of human life.  Economy was determined and operated through social structure.  AND, research says that for a really long time, since people have lived in villages, they have engaged in voluntary associations.  That is, they have formed groups not related to family or territory.  So before profit and free markets existed, people were coming together and creating organizations.  I take this as evidence that the nonprofit sector has roots much more ancient that the market that currently decides human fortune.  So there.  Read the paper (below).

But really, if I’m right, isn’t that encouraging? Is there really any reason why all businesses couldn’t be nonprofit?  All organized for a mission of public good?  Recognizing that the profit motive is new in human history is empowering, because it gives us a lot more options for directions we could go to fix this whole damn thing.  Seriously.  Isn’t it something you’d like to believe?

I think this is a hopeful result.

I’d like to thank those members of the class that candidly shared their views and concerns about the world during this term, and offer thanks as well to those who listened openly. I think a lot of good, true, and encouraging things were said in general.  Bob’s well-intentioned elicitation of our views was a step in the right direction.  As I’ve come through college, I’ve been impressed by how deeply some of my peers get involved with their pet issues, which is what it takes to, you know, change the world.  We got to hear about a lot of that stuff for a change, which was really positive.  So, thank you for that.  Also, we usually don’t get to hear about people’s weekends, and that was occasionally interesting.

And Sarah, thank you.  You are very impressive.  I’m still telling most people who will listen about how we used to subsidize public education by preventing women from doing anything but teach.  Totally captivating idea.  It brings up the interesting idea that maybe we should ask some people not to participate directly in the economy.  Clearly there were benefits to having some people devoted to family, community, and education, and not working.  Yet another dangerous idea, I’m afraid.  But I think it’s okay to be dangerous.

On that note:

TedSweeney_280_FinalPaper

And, farewell!

On global relations (Post 6)

BAM!  Right out of the gate, the reader is accosted with STATISTICS.  Hard numbers.  Facts.  Stuff to wonder at.  A basis for debate and discussion…

Here are some conclusions drawn from what is, according the authors (Reid and Kerlin, 2006), the very first comprehensive study of US nonprofits working towards international goals:

• The international nonprofit subsector makes up just 2% of the US nonprofit sector. The vast majority of those orgs are in the area of international development and assistance.
• US International nonprofits are mainly located in the Northeast, California, Florida and Texas.
• There is a vast number of small international nonprofits, but government funding favors large orgs.  All international nonprofits rely heavily on private fund-raising (70 percent of revenue).
• Across the subsector, “88 percent of expenses cover program costs, 7 percent are administrative expenses, and five percent go to fund-raising expenses.”

• 2% of international nonprofits engage in lobbying and advocacy.

Perhaps more interesting than any of these factoids (to which we will return, don’t panic) is the information that the article that reported all this stuff has only been cited by two other articles (according to Google Scholar) since its publication in 2006.  Why is there so little academic interest in nonprofits working overseas?  (this should be distinguished from what the literature deems “the international nonprofit sector,” which is another way of identifying the third sector in recognition of its global nature.)

I’m confused at the lack of literature on nonprofits with an international focus, because I think these are immensely important organizations.  They are important because they can operate in the sphere of international relationships without being hampered by geopolitics and the standoffishnes of nation-states.  What I mean is, since Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows from government to government, it is clunky, tied to political and strategic relationships, and conservative.  However, nonprofits are absolutely free to be creative with international development aid.  They can, conceivably, try out new ideas like microloans more easily; they can react more quickly to situations where corruption is threatening development goals; they can attempt to encourage something other than the general and environmentally dangerous “economic development” that government aid (often tied to corporate interests) attempts to create.  This relative freedom from politics and vested interests makes nonprofits working overseas a potentially viable alternative for the activities of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which many people regard as a broken system at best.

There probably is significant academic work on this subject that I simply haven’t Googled out effectively.  But the point stands; international nonprofits have a lot of potential for helping us sidestep our not-effective-enough state-to-state international aid.

To change gears a bit (and I’m not sure we really will go back to those numbers, but they were sure interesting, huh?), I’d like to bring up an important and troubling issue, and deliver a possibly depressing rant.

The issue is brought up and well stated by Senator Zack Stark-MacMillan;

It was great hearing about Peace Players. It seems like they are doing some really good work in a very unique way. However, I’m always worried about groups that work in non-western countries. So when he mentioned about working to change the gender norms, I was conflicted because I totally agree that they aren’t treating woman equally but then I always wonder if it’s our place to make that judgement. I think people always go with the best intentions and I personally agree with what they’re trying to do, I’m just very concerned about changing other cultures. Even if you’re not trying to change cultures, mere presence or education teaches inherent western values without even meaning to. Things like individualism, the idea that people should act in their personal best interest, that we completely take for granted, isn’t immediately understood in communal cultures, where everyone works for what’s best for group. And while in the west we always talk about building communities, we are accidentally destroying the communities in non-western areas.

First and foremost, Zack’s concern is well-placed and commendable, and I totally share it.  But, I am concerned that we are entering a period in our history where we may not have the luxury of respecting all cultures.  I wish we could.  Saying that we can’t is dangerous, and I know that, and I am really really sorry, but we are facing some incredibly challenging environmental issues.  Simply feeding the world and giving people enough water to drink is going to be intensely difficult in fifty years, without anything else going wrong (like, oh, this, for example).

I think we have to make hard choices as a species.  It’s a scary thing to be, because we are the only species ever, that we know of, that has had the ability to make hard choices.  The hard choices we face, I am afraid, I am so sorry to say, are between the longevity of our species and human rights.  For example, in this country, people consider it a right to drive any kind of vehicle as far as they want.  That right, which is extraneous and not extended to most people in the world, is one which many of us would be comfortable eliminating in the interest of relieving environmental pressure, making our built environment so auto-centric, etc.  Another thing considered a right in this country is the application of near-unlimited health care services in the last eighteen months or so of life.  We are a little less comfortable taking that away, even though there is no doubt that resources spent at the end of life are resources not spent on other health needs.

And what about what is perhaps the ultimate right, the right to define the cultural norms for your group?  I think this might have to go.  I don’t think we have the luxury of allowing cultures to keep girls uneducated, given the effect on birth rates that education has.  If a particlar culture had the destruction of rainforests as a closely held cultural value, I don’t think we would have the luxury of respecting that either.  Think about Japanese whaling; mostly, the world is disdainful of the practice. But whale meat is culturally important in Japan!  Why would we say that a culture has the right to keep women down, while another one doesn’t have the right to eat what they want?

My goal is not to say that American values could be imposed on the world and we would become sustainable.  No worse idea exists, perhaps.  But in principle, I think we have to recognize that there are cultural practices that the global community should not tolerate, and that we cannot tolerate if we want our children to have the opportunity to live.

This post is too long and I have said dangerous things, so I am going to end it.  Please, if anyone is still out there, feel free to engage with this line of thinking in the comments.

On Human Permanence (Post 5)

I’ll begin this post with anger and fear, but hopefully end it with hope.  Wish me luck!

Oh my stars, I am angry.  Here’s a video you should watch so that you can get angry, too:

Arrowhead’s “Ecoshape” Disposable Water Bottle

Doesn’t that just make you furious?  “There are many small ways to help the environment,” says the voiceover.  Indeed, there are many.  Making compost, planting trees, and rehabilitating endangered species all come to mind as things that actually help the biosphere to support life.  Buying bottled water is deeply, antagonistically, achingly opposed to those things.  It effectively epitomizes the lazy, entitled, wasteful culture of which we are all a small part.  The laundry list of criticisms of bottled water has been documented extensively.

Buying a waterbottle with 30% less plastic is, make no mistake, a way to hurt the environment.  Arguably, you hurt it slightly less than buying the other kind of waterbottle.  30% less?  Not a chance.  The processing of the plastic, the collection of the water, the transportation of the finished product are all the same, and do far more harm than the plastic itself.  Also, by buying into Arrowhead’s (Nestle’s) pernicious green-washing, you do the incalculable harm to us all of showing them that we are gullible, desperate for someone to tell us that our greed and malaise are acceptable.

I react to these green-washing campaigns with anger.  I find them demeaning, profoundly dishonest, and dangerous.  They are not unlike the selling of indulgences in the middle ages.  However, in my more sedate moments (these are exceedingly rare) I can bring myself to see another perspective.  From that perspective, I should be encouraged that so many huge corporations perceive that their customers care about environmental stewardship and sustainability.  That implies a positive shift in the social zeitgeist.  It’s obviously the direction we want to go in.

Everyone is an environmentalist in a sense.  No one sets out to destroy the environment, to drive species into extinction.  No one likes destroying forests.  But over the years, the debate has been framed as environment vs. commerce.  This is partially the fault of combative players on both sides, but also has a lot to do with fact.  Capitalist commerce, as it is currently constructed, understood, and evaluated by human beings, is unequivocally and in-arguably  opposed to human permanence on Earth.  It is based on a constantly growing economy, and that is an impossible goal in a world of finite resources.

What we have to look forward to, under modern capitalism, is this cheery figure from the Limits to Growth study:

This is terrifying, especially since no one is out there credibly showing why this won’t happen, and all kinds of people are out there credibly fleshing out how this will happen, or even providing examples of things that are going to make it worse.  According to this graph, our lives are going to be 1) terrible, 2) short, 3) terrible and short, or 4) pretty bad, not very long, and waaaaay better than every else’s lives, which we will just have to ignore if we want to life with ourselves at all.  Ugh.

It think we have the power to wake up and admit that we are destroying ourselves.  How could we not?  Every day there is a new, clear report of just exactly how we are doing it.  At any time, we can choose to start paying attention.  Here’s today’s.  It’s big.  They figured out what causes ADHD:

The sample included 1,139 children 8 to 15 years old, of which about one in ten met the criteria for ADHD, matching estimates for the general population. Researchers then measured the level of organophosphate “metabolites,” i.e. the chemicals that these pesticides break down into within the body, in these children’s urine. What they found was that as exposure increased, ADHD risk increased; a tenfold increase in exposure was associated with a 50% increase in risk of ADHD, which is considered very large. Again, the children in this study are not the children of farmworkers or residents of agricultural areas — they are “representative of the general US population.”

So our national epidemic of ADHD, which educators have noticed and wondered at, is caused by the poisons we are feeding to our children.  This is huge news.  Are you angryscared yet?

So what of our central question from the readings and lecture, about how the environmental movement is teaming up with big business and is that a good thing?

I want to point out a handful of things.

#1: Bob presented environmental awareness and stewardship as a new phenomenon dating back not earlier than the time of John Muir and Ted Roosevelt.  I think this is wrong.  Though ecological disaster has dogged humanity (just ask those poor folks on Easter Island), many human group have had knowledge of ecology of the land they lived on, and have lived in reasonable harmony with it.  Land in china has been farmed continuously for thousands of years; that’s hard to do out of ignorance of the mechanisms of nature.  In the Georgics,  Virgil wrote about the knowledge of the farmer, and of taking agricultural cues from nature.  I don’t want to get all noble-savage on you folks, but it’s ignorant to suggest that we only recently realized that the environment had limits for human life, and could be guarded or mistreated.  That’s something that we’d forgotten and have now sort of remembered, not learned for the first time.

#2: I think we need to do more in our society to draw distinctions between large and small businesses.  There is a huge difference, on every level, between a small business, working within a local community to support the survival of the owner, their family, and a few employees, and a multinational coproration legally bound to maximize profits for shareholders.  The fact that both of these have somehow gotten tied up as opposing the environment in the environment v. commerce battle is a tragedy.

I think it is a problem that environmental groups have gotten so tied up with large corporations.  They have become the crown jewels of the green-washing campaigns that are acting as the smoke-screen for the destruction of our planet.  Obviously, though, they need the money, and they need it bad.

We need a new funding source for the restoration of the global environment.  Before we can get that, we need some agreement that the global environment needs restoring.  How we are going to get there, I’m not sure.  I think the best way is to focus on our local environments.  That’s where we have power.  We can demand new practices here at home.  We can demand practices that keep our money circulating where we are, rather than sucking it all to New York, London, and Dubai.  With our money circulating in local banks, local businesses, and local fuels, we can finally eek out some real self-determination in the way we plan our communities. But this is part of a longer bioregionalism rant, and I am over time.  Come ‘n’ get me in the comments!

And start feeding your children organic food RIGHT now.  Please.

On Self-Evident Value

What is art?  Britannica provides a reasonably satisfying definition: a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination. The word ‘visual’ is troubling; art, intuitively, is tactile, auditory, perhaps even olfactory.  But, for Britannica’s benefit, I’ll assume they mean all that by ‘experience.’  With that assumption, the definition works for me.  I even like it, because it makes no value judgement.  Art is not, by this definition, necessarily beautiful, pleasing, good, valuable, etc.

Intuitively, that’s right on.  Art is valuable in its own right, and means different things to different people.  It’s an element of a human quest for understanding that is difficult to judge or quantify.  It makes our existence richer, even while it can cause discomfort and controversy.

But that seems different from other elements of the nonprofit sector.  To a degree, its easy to quantify things like the provision of education or human services.  You can count the number of people served or educated, you can gauge the effect that the services or education had on the indicators that we trust to tell us how well people are living.  With art, in many cases, you can only say that people were given the opportunity to  experience something which is self-evidently important to human life.

In this age of economic pragmatism, it’s kind of surprising that so much philanthropy still reaches the arts.  I can see why it does, though.  First of all, most people grasp the self-evident importance of the arts.  Supporting the arts is personal for most people, because we all enjoy the arts.  In fact, for cultural reasons, people who are wealthy are expected to enjoy the arts more than others in our society.   These are the people with money to give; they have experience with the arts, but probably little experience with, say, methadone clinics.  It’s more prestigious to be a cornerstone contributor to the Met than it is to fund some of the inglorious human services work. I’m not trying to indict Met donors, just observing that the cultural importance of art keeps arts organizations alive.

That leads us to something that we probably understood at the outset of this ramble;  the arts are sexy and significant and important to most people, but they are not economic.  In an age where everything is being given an economic justification and being stripped of any other justification, art is an important example of something that we hold dear that we don’t make money from.  I’ve heard that we should support national healthcare because it would allow our workers to have more productive days; less time off for sickness and recovery!  The GDP will rise!  I’ve heard that we should cure drug addicts so that they can hold productive jobs, that we should get people out of prison because prison is too expensive, and that we should support education so that our children can get jobs, earn livings, invest, put something away for retirement.

All those things correlate, of course. Some of them are even good.  But as far as economics being the measure of all, the only justification that matters, I think we’ve made a big mistake.  Look; art is important for its own sake.  Isn’t health similar?  We support health even though it’s expensive, even though everyone dies in the end.  But trying to make people healthy, and living healthy lives, those things are important in their own rights.  Human dignity is the same.  Make no mistake,  that’s what we’re supporting when we support human services that keep people out of prison, that cure drug addicts, that feed the hungry.  And an education is important for its own sake.  Everyone deserves an education, not just so they can get a job, make money, and retire having contributed to the GDP, but so they can participate as an equal in all areas of society.

I think we should fight, ferociously, the force that says that all things must have an economic justification.  That’s not how people live.  Leisure, which we all engage in every day in order to maintain our sanity in a thousand tiny ways, makes no economic sense.  It’s important for its own sake.  Just like all the areas of human life that have gravitated to the nonprofit sector, an area of enterprise where the ends are not justified by profit-making potential, but by something far less tangible and much more moving.  Art is the purest example, but it is really the same as all the other things that are components of a dignified, healthy, free, and involved human life.

Final Paper Emerging, in a Piecemeal Fashion, from the Ethereal Mist of the Universe

Hello dear readers,

Since I love to blather on about federal commuity service programs (did you know that it is AmeriCorps Week!?), I have chosen to do my paper on the connection between federal community service programs and the nonprofit sector.  BO-RING, right?  Maybe.  I’ll try to zest it up for you, really make it a zingy, exciting piece of work.

Ted, what connection are you talking about?

Well, look, I haven’t got a thesis yet, okay?  I haven’t even posted post four yet (it’s coming, scout’s honor [I was not a scout but I am honorable{I'm not sure the scouts are really all that honorable anyway<I don't mean to offend scouts, I know some great scouts and I am super jealous of their experiences>}]).

But, (and digressions aside[sorry]) programs like AmeriCorps, PeaceCorps and Teach for America represent huge grants of manpower from the federal government to the nonprofit sector.  With AmeriCorps, nonprofits write up documents very similar to grant applications, but instead of saying how they will utilize money, they say how they will utilize a volunteer for a ten month service period.  If they cover all the bases, AmeriCorps sets up the position, college kids freaked out about entering the job market apply, and BAM, that nonprofit has a worker of almost totally unpredictable quality.  Is this helpful?  Would it be better to just give them the money?  What effects do these service programs have on nonprofits beyond the obvious ones?  I think this could end up being an almost-tolerably-interesting inquiry.

Here are some resources to get you started in understanding these programs:

From the New York Times: “Volunteers find muck and meaning in service.”

“critics are fighting a rising tide. According to AmeriCorps officials, applications have nearly tripled in the last year. From November 2007 to August 2008, the agency received 67,283 online applications; from November 2008 to last month, it received 200,682.

The increase has been so great that AmeriCorps has a prepared statement divining the reasons: the recession, of course; something called the “Obama effect”; and what it describes as a “strong altruistic streak among today’s young adults.”

Also from the NYT: “Don’t shortchange national service” (Editorial)

“The act’s core mandate is staged growth of the domestic volunteer force, which includes AmeriCorps, whose members are eligible for a small living stipend and a modest educational stipend after an intense year of work. The goal is to have 250,000 volunteers by 2017.”

Some more academic stuff, but it’s EXTREMELY FASCINATING:

Can AmeriCorps Build Communities?

Inside a Swiss Army Knife: An Assessment of AmeriCorps

AmeriCorps at 5 Years: A Success, But Not in the Way Clinton Hoped

That should getcha started.  Do you find this topic interesting at all?  What would you be curious to learn about the connection between federal service programs and nonprofits?  I would like to hear (and mercilessly steal and benefit from) your ideas.

Not profiting from Education

These are only loosely related to the course material this week, but I still recommend that you check out the following education-related materials.

The first is a Ted Talk by Bill Gates, which eventually outlines his plans to improve the quality of teaching in America.  His plan is to put video in every classroom, so that teachers feel watched.  This is an interested idea, and I think it’s a great one if you could ensure a constructive organizational culture in schools in general.

The second thing is an interesting article about a study on Teach For America alums.  It turns out that people who complete two years of Teach for America are, in general, less civically engaged, less likely to vote, and less likely to give to charity than people who drop out of the program part way through, or those who are accepted but decline their positions.  This is interesting and very troubling information on the program, and it fits very well with some of my personal experience from AmeriCorps, where many were frustrated to learn how difficult it is to really make a difference, especially when you are young, unskilled, and brand new in a community.  The government structure of the program, which did a poor job of tracking/caring about results, contributed to a sense that we were all wasting our time.  Many burned out and quit, others developed a keen sense of cynicism.  Others, however, made connections with organizations with which they still work, or communities they are still committed to (New Orleans). The thing to recognize is that these programs have to be constructed carefully, and the applicants need to be extremely well informed about what they are getting into.  Service isn’t a fit for everyone, and it’s not always productive or helpful for the world.

In our class text, O’Neil mentions that “In 1993-1994. . .the average base salary of public school teachers was $34,153, compared with $21,968 for private school teachers” (114).  Does a higher salary attract a better teacher?  I think this question is very interesting, and I think the answer, in general, is no.  This was a topic in a Political Science class I took on the American Inner City, where lack of education is seen as a major problem [aside; our teacher from that class, the peerless Ken DeBevoise, is about to be saved from termination by a really incredible student movement].  The class decided in general that, while teachers should obviously be paid a living wage, teaching is difficult and requires a level of energy and commitment that comes from a basic dedication to the art.  That dedication cannot be created with higher compensation.  The argument is made that smarter people choose other professions instead of teaching because the money isn’t good, but I find this questionable.  I don’t think that investment bankers, or research biologists, or middle managers would necessarily make better elementary school teachers.

O’Neill’s analysis isn’t really helpful in answering this question.  On the surface,  we see that private school teachers receive lower compensation than their public school counterparts, and have less education.  And, private school students are more likely to go to college (111).  However, the importance of of parental involvement in a child’s education is well established, and the mere impetus to send a child to private school instead of the neighborhood public school indicates interest on the part of the parent.  That parent has sorted out transportation issues, application issues, and tuition issues around sending their child to a private school. This kind of interest may have more to do with the outcome of the child’s education than the quality of the teachers in the private schools.

What does the literature say about merit pay? Marsden and Richardson (2009) found that merit pay schemes were very poorly correlated with an increase in employee motivation, and that the research supporting merit pay is extremely weak.  Charlie Crist, governor of Florida, bowed to intense public pressure last week and vetoed a bill which would have created a sweeping transition to merit pay in Florida schools.  People believe that the intense teaching-to-the-test that would go on under such a scheme would be bad for learning in general.

The question is a good one for discussion, and we should continue it in the comments.  It seems, intuitively, that teachers are effective when they are committed to their profession and committed to improving.  That commitment seems to have more in common with ideas of service than ideas of labor for compensation.  It seems logical, then, that nonprofits and public entities make up so much of the provision of education.  This is a part of our society where economic privatization may just not fit.

Faith and Motivation

Ah, 501(d).

I’m friends with a lot of atheists.  Angry ones.  Loud ones.  You know what my friends struggle with?  No, not the chasm of nothingness that they expect after death.  No, these friends struggle with how to feel about religious charities.  The Catholic church?  Evil, of course.  Nefarious.  But… but… well, let’s just say they are doing more to help third world poverty than any of my atheist friends.  It’s a conundrum for those that want to vilify the religious influence in our society.  It is wholly unarguable that organized religions do real, concrete, good things for people.  Habitat for Humanity? Religious. Where’s the secular organization doing that level of visible good? (arguably it’s here.)

I bring up all this, about my atheist friends (long may they not live in the kingdom of heaven), because I was totally one of them (okay, I am still one of them in terms of the whole there-is-no-god deal, just not in terms of the religious-charities-are-evil thing).  When we were assigned our first AmeriCorps project in Bay St. Louis, MS, I was pretty disappointed that it was with a church.  They don’t really want to help people, I figured.  They’re just trying to spread the word, to personally serve their God.  Selfish.  Archaic.  Weird.  I felt that a secular org would be more… well, I’m not sure.  Authentic.  Grounded.  Effective.  Yes, this was out-and-out prejudice.

Of course, the church was full of some pretty impressive people, doing some pretty impressive work effectively. Lagniappe Church didn’t exist before Hurricane Katrina.  But:

There was work to be done.  The man who became the pastor of the new church lost family in the storm, and wanted to set up a ministry that could rebuild the community both physically and spiritually.  Yes, they ran into theological issues, like, why the storm?  But they attracted some incredible skilled people, who in tern led hundreds of volunteers, many drawn from Presbyterian college groups across the nation.

What I want to talk about it motivation.

Why do anything?  Psychologists and philosophers argue about this, and have some pretty fascinating things to say.  But at the level of the layman, we think of it in terms of  rewards.  We get something back for doing something.  Our economy runs on a specific kind of reward; monetary compensation.  And profit.  Obviously these things are great motivators of human activity;  we have molded our lives and our communities around the movement and acquisition of money.  But there are other rewards, clearly.  I spent a year in national service because I wanted to help people, and I wanted to grow from that experience.  Many people act out of their personal history, trying to create a safe reality for others that did not exist for them at some specific point.  Others act for God.

And there’s nothing wrong with it.  Doing it for God is a perfectly good motivator, as long as it is tangibly helping real people here on Earth.  Of course, that’s my version of morality.  But this is my blog.

What is going on here, who cares, and what is your excuse for it all?

Yes, yes, wonderful questions.  I am Ted, a junior at the University of Nike Oregon in moist, friendly Eugene.  As part of my undergraduate major in Planning, Public Policy, and Management (What?), I am taking a introductory course on the Nonprofit sector.  I have been asked to prepare a blog of my reactions to the course material so that I can burden you with my musings we might all learn together.  If you’re satisfied with that justification (and I doubt you are, but I’m running the show), then let’s begin.

Ted, do you know anything about nonprofits?

Well, sure, some.  After my freshman year of college, I took a hiatus from higher learning to participate in AmeriCorps*NCCC (don’t even think about leaving out the “*” or the capitalized “C;”  They’re touchy about that).  For ten months, I hung out with a team of thirteen young movers/shakers:

Together, we worked for organizations in four states, doing odd jobs (“national service”).  Yes, we were required to wear those uniforms.  On the upside, we were fed.  Also, we had some pretty cool and unique experiences.  Our first project was in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (or “bullseye!” as Hurricane Katrina called it).  We worked with a church (or, a 501(d) org, as the IRS called it) building houses for people who had been left homeless by the storm.

Our second project was in Portland Oregon, working with SOLV (not an acronym, incredibly), doing “riparian restoration.”  That means removing invasive blackberry.  It is a very worthwhile thing to do.  You should do it.  Together, we can end the scourge! Be advised, however, that it is somewhat miserable.

Our third project was with the Recovery School District in New Orleans, LA (fun fact; the “recovery” school district was created before Katrina, because apocalyptic conditions already existed in NOLA schools).  We did a variety of things, including the beautification of temporary school buildings:

and occasionally worked directly with children:

Finally, we were sent to Sheridan, Wyoming to work with the YMCA, again on a variety of tasks including (very) early prep of a summer camp site, and working at their summer day camp programs.

So, I worked directly with three nonprofit organizations in the course of my AmeriCorps year.   From my peers on other teams I heard about scores more, both big (Habitat for… something, I’m blanking) and small.

I’ve also spent several summers working with a small organization which has been operating with a non-profit mentality and will soon get 501(c)3 status.  The Tsuga Community Commission operates a summer youth development program from children with parents deployed in the Military, through a grant from the National Military Family Association and the Sierra Club.

In sum, I have anecdotal experience with a variety of nonprofits, mostly from a grunt-level perspective.  In this class, I hope to gain a broader knowledge of the sector.  Nonprofits represent an important movement in human social organization, away from the dangers of capitalist exchange.  And, you know, that’s pretty cool.

A brief reaction to the class content so far

Some of the lecture so far, and chapter 2 of our textbook (O’Neill 2002) has dealt with the question of why nonprofit associations exist.  There is an assumption implicit in this question, that associations only make sense if they exist for means of profit or centralized government.  In fact, I think these two things, business for profit and formalized/centralized government, are the recent phenomena.  Karl Polanyi, in his 1944 work The Great Transformation,  pointed out that the drive for profit in a market economy is quite new as a motivator of human activity; prior to the Italian renaissance, human economic exchange existed within systems of social hierarchy.  I.e, people in different caste positions would receive pre-ordained shares of the resources of the group, or, as in some hunter gatherer bands, all resources were shared among the community.

Here’s my point; working together for a common goal organized around ethical belief and a conviction about the way the world ought to be, rather than for profit, has considerable precedent in human history.  The what’s-going-on-here attitude of O’Neill’s chapter 2 and Prof. Choquette’s lecture is misplaced.  It is the current role of profit-driven, free market exchange in deciding human affairs that is unusual, and would seem bizarre to our ancestors, who were mostly involved in informal, non-business, non-government associations.

WHOO!  Take a deep breath with me.  In.  Hold it…. Out.  Good.  This is going to be a heck of a lot of fun, don’t you think?  See you next week.