I think we can all agree that most philanthropists truly want to be helpful to the nonprofit recipients of their dollars. However, because of the inherent power imbalance, it is often challenging, if not impossible, for a funder and a grantee to have a candid conversation about what it will really take to achieve the social change that they […]
overhead
How Is Nonprofit Overhead Still a Thing?
Lest you think we’ve made headway on overcoming the Overhead Myth (the false notion that nonprofits must keep their fundraising and administrative costs cripplingly low) you need only look as far as a recent Forbes article, “5 Nonprofit Leaders Share How to Keep Overhead Costs to a Minimum.” And this is perhaps even worse because it is nonprofit leaders themselves, […]
What's Wrong with Fundraising?
One of the things I’m really excited about is the potential for the financial crisis and restructuring we’re experiencing to completely transform how nonprofits are financed. I’ve written before about how we need to move away from the notion that “overhead” funding is bad, and how we need to restructure nonprofit accounting principles in order […]
Overcoming the Anti-Overhead Mindset
As I described in previous posts here, here and here, one of the ways in which the nonprofit sector is broken is that it is undercapitalized. It is not able to generate an adequate amount of capital in order to scale and solve the problems it seeks to address. This undercapitalization comes not from a […]