David La Piana

7.2% of American workers are in the nonprofit sector. And, according to new figures, the nonprofit part of the job market is growing faster than the overall job market.

Why are so many people flocking what are usually underpaid difficult jobs?

It could be, as Lester Salomon, author of the new study, suggests, that this is part of a larger movement toward a service economy. But that answer leaves me a bit cold. It seems that with the addition of more workers each year several things must be happening in some combination:

1) Existing nonprofits are growing and hiring more staff.

2) New nonprofits are starting and attracting sufficient resources to hire staff.

3) Activities that might have been performed by government or the private sector are devolving to nonprofits.

The first two are hopeful, healthy trends; the third is a bit more troubling. But the overall message is that the sector is vibrant, expanding, and looking to involve new people. Way to go!

A recent Board Café article (CompassPoint; 1/19/07) reported the findings of a reader survey about boards. Only 13% of respondents, 80% of whom are mostly board members themselves, thought that boards do a good job at fundraising. If you asked executive directors, even that anemic 13% might be too high.

So, what’s up? Why can’t boards raise money?

In my long and sometimes painful experience with this question, I have seen the following reasons:

1) Board members were recruited with no expectation to raise money, then had it dumped on them later — the classic bait-and-switch. Candidates are often told — by other board members – that fundraising is not an expectation.

2) Board members are not trained in how to raise money, just exhorted to go out and do it. As one client said, “What to they want me to do, go out and rob a bank?”

3) There is tension between having a constituent board and a board with access to money. Many nonprofits want it both ways — a board of the people, and a board that can raise serious cash. That is a tough combination in most circumstances.

4) Staff don’t know how to develop the board, so they just get frustrated and nag. Staff’s board development and management skills may be lacking. They pay little attention to the board, but lament its inability to raise money.

5) People who raise and give substantial sums want to have a voice in running the organization. If they are shut out of appropriate board governance then they will not be very motivated to fundraise. The executive director must engage the board deeply for it to raise money.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of such provocative books as Blink and The Tipping Point, recently wrote in The New Yorker (January 8, 2007) about the Enron case. It’s a fascinating article about responsibility and the nature of knowing. One point he makes, which I think has great appeal in our world, is to distinguish between a “puzzle” and a “mystery.”

A puzzle, he argues, is a problem where the solution is knowable if you can just find the right pieces of information. The question of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) prior to the invasion is a classic example of a puzzle. Intelligence gathering could potentially have provided an answer to this question.

A mystery, in contrast, is a problem where there may be plenty of facts. The issue is not lack of information, but making sense of the information you have. An example would be the question of whether Saddam intended to reconstitute his WMD program.

In the solution of complex problems, many wrong turns are taken because of a misunderstanding — is this a puzzle or a mystery? I started applying this concept to the nonprofit sector and found it helpful.

For example, environmental scans done as part of a strategic planning process are often looking for the answer to questions such as: “will the need for our services increase and will more people want what we have to offer?” The first part of this question is a puzzle. Need can be predicted based on data that may be more or less available. If you run a nursing home, demographics tell you that more people will need this type of service in the coming years, as the boomers age. Fact-finding research will get you the answers to this question.

The second part of the question–what impact the increased need will have on demand for the specific programs you offer–is more of a mystery. It depends on who you ask, the perceived quality of your services, and a host of subjective variables, such as user experience and reputation. Fact-finding will not reveal the answer. Instead you will have to assemble a picture of the future based on many suppositions. In the end it will be an educated guess.

So, the next time you are faced with a big question, first ask yourself: Is this a puzzle or a mystery? Then, devise your strategy for finding an answer accordingly.

In a recent post I mentioned mortgages, at least in high-cost areas like my own, as a major cause of baby boomers’ inability to retire.

I thought you might enjoy a little factoid I came across years ago: the origins of the word “mortgage.” It is actually from Old French, and consists of two words: “mort,” meaning death, and “gage,” meaning pledge. A gage was a person’s glove, which was usually thrown to the ground as a pledge to duel with another person.

So our familiar word mortgage really means “death pledge.”

A comforting thought, and proof, once again, that my training as a medievalist is not totally wasted.

Remember the old saying “Think globally, act locally?”

I was recently pondering a new twist on that sentiment. The sector is made up of both small, grassroots, local organizations that are intensely focused on a small-scale problem, such as poverty in a particular neighborhood, and large, sophisticated, national organizations focused on a regional or national or even global problem, like climate change.

But we are all in the same world, more or less, because we want to change the world.

What can small, local nonprofits learn from the bigger ones, and vice versa?

All nonprofits struggle with the same issues: building a great board, managing staff, delivering programs, and raising money. When I was an executive director, my organization’s budget and staffing grew many fold over my 16-year tenure. What had initially been (to us, as a small nonprofit) a significant annual funding gap of $10,000 became, as we grew, a chasm of several hundred thousand dollars: same problem, just more zeros behind it.

As a consultant I deal with many small nonprofits whose executive director must recruit, orient, and motivate the board. I also have a large national client that has a staff position solely dedicated to supporting the board. Yet all of these clients have the same board struggles.

The point is that small and large nonprofits face the same problems, perhaps at different scales, and probably with different levels of resources to apply to them, but still the same problems. By sharing the solutions they have come up with, nonprofits–large and small–can learn from and help each other.

On the way to JFK airport recently I got a ride with a very friendly cabbie of about my own age. Due to a truly noxious smell in the backseat – like a fare had died back there a week ago and he had only gotten around to clearing out the body this morning — he invited me to sit upfront with him, which really facilitated our conversation, not to mention stopping me from gagging.

He had somewhat limited English and a heavy accent that I could only vaguely identify. It sounded Spanish, but I knew it wasn’t. I thought maybe Catalan. I always ask cab drivers where they are from and almost always I am rewarded with a great story. This time was no exception.

He told me he had arrived in New York from Romania about two years ago. That made sense, Romanian is the only Eastern European language that is not Slavic. It is in fact a Romance language, more closely related to Spanish or French than to Russian or Czech.

We talked about life in Romania, a country that had lived for decades under a despotic communist dictator whose name I am sure I cannot spell — here it is phonetically: chow-ches-cow. Part of this dictator’s grand scheme was to create a more populous nation, no doubt to produce more soldiers for his army. So he outlawed both birth control and abortion, and told the country that it was every woman’s responsibility to have at least 4 children.

Given the dire economic circumstances of Romania in the 1980′s even people who wanted lots of kids could not afford to feed them. “There was no milk, no bread, nothing on the shelves in the stores,” the cabbie told me. The predictable outcome was thousands of women dying from botched back-alley abortions, and tens of thousands of unwanted and unsupportable babies left to vegetate in state-run orphanages that resembled warehouses — row upon row of cribs.

And now, I asked, how is it since 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union? Romania, he said, is now free, but economically, things are far worse.

Old people have no pensions. The privatized medical system sounds like it was modeled after our own, so only those with money can get medicine. Unemployment is rampant, as Romanian industry, long state-run and inefficient, can compete with no one. I asked if the UN or EU were helping out. He said no, they have not been asked. The current government — the freely elected one — refuses to acknowledge that starvation is widespread, that poverty is endemic. They live in a fantasy land.

There are 10% fewer people in the country now than in 1990, partly from premature deaths, and partly from the refusal of an entire generation of young people to bear children. After being forced to have babies, now the Romanians are exercising their new-found freedom to not bring them into a world of pain.

Then we arrived at JFK.

If you believe that the root of much of the unrest in the world is in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then you should read former President Jimmy Carter’s inspired new book: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It recounts the history of the conflict with a balanced, unflinching honesty that is much needed in the overheated debate that usually accompanies any discussion of the Middle East.

There is another reason to read this book: to counter the orchestrated effort to smear Carter and his book as biased and anti-Israeli. In fact, I first learned about the book’s existence, prior to its release, through an email from a friend urging everyone he knows to boycott it.

Now, when someone tells me I should avoid reading a book, I am just contrary enough to run right out and buy a copy. I read this one through in two days and was surprised, after reading it, by the rancor it has raised in the U.S.

I asked my friend if he had actually read the book, or was simply responding to a lobbying effort, and his response, sadly, was that in order to preserve our friendship, we should not discuss this issue any further.

Still, this is a book that should start, not end, discussions.

As 2006 crawled to a sad ending, we had two new low points to mark.

The first was the 3,000th dead American in Iraq. Traditionally, there are 10 wounded soldiers for every 1 killed in combat, but with improvements in body armor, the ratio may now be 20 to 1. So, add another 30,000 to 60,000 wounded Americans to the toll. And, don’t forget the more than 100,000 Iraqis killed in combat and uncountable numbers killed or injured during the occupation and civil war.

The second is the execution of Saddam Hussein. Even as Americans work through our many human rights organizations to end the death penalty at home, we see it applied by our friends in Iraq. If anyone ever deserved to die for his crimes it is indeed Saddam. But, somehow the specter of a government having gained complete control over a person through imprisonment then deciding to kill him turns my stomach.