Shakely on Stern:
‘Ken Stern knows an awful lot about nonprofits, having spent the better part of a decade as chief operating officer, then president of NPR, one of the best-known, and controversial, nonprofits in America.’
Charity has limits. Just as a wealthy, hard-working adult will certainly insulate his children from many of life’s difficulties, the lessons of hard-work that allowed for the creation of the charity can easily be lost from one generation to the next, as new-blood comes in.
One such limit, in my experience, is that most human beings are subtly and profoundly affected by the language we speak, the company we keep, and the institutions of which we are a part. As long as we’re alive, and open to new input and experiences, this is going on, often unbeknownst to our conscious minds.
Over time, institutions with such broadly defined and idealized mission statements as charities and non-profits can founder upon their own designs. They can tend less towards divergent viewpoints and real-world experiences, and more towards shared beliefs and ideological purity. They can become soft, resistant to change, and poorly incentivized. They can become reefs of bureaucratic group-think although not due to any particularly malevolent design.
Idealists, after all, often self-select into charity work.
Into this breach, unfortunately, can enter the loudest voices and most passionate and committed ideologues. If you’re letting bad actors in (closed and righteous minds, narrowly focused), the clock is likely ticking before those bad actors either must be rebuffed, challenged or simply kicked-out of your organization.
How people are acting now is often a good indicator of how they’ll act in the future.
This blog likes to keep an eye on NPR, as they’re a child of the 60’s, and but for the work of LBJ’s Great Society lobbying to include ‘radio’ in the Public Television Act of 1967, they might not be around. Many NPR stories, in reaching out to the wider world, often return to the touchstones of feminism, environmentalism and some form of diversity/multiculturalism.
Amidst high standards for journalism and production values lies the tendency towards positive definitions of equality, justice (social) and peace. They tend to assume their ideals are your ideals, and such political idealists don’t tend to like analyzing the results of their idealism in the real world, let alone their susceptibility to radicals and violent ideologues.
Everyone’s starting a non-profit these days:
‘The ability to survive, even thrive, with programs that have been proven not to work is just one of the many oddities ‘With Charity for All’ documents in the topsy-turvy, misunderstood, and mostly ignored world of nonprofits’
Non-profits have become big business, partially following the ‘greatness model’ that worked so well for the boomers, when the getting was good. Unfortunately, there are limits to any model, and we’ve got serious economic issues and a lot of political dysfunction. The money has to come from somewhere.
Shakely again:
‘To clean up the messy nonprofit landscape, Stern offers some suggestions that are sure to cause concern in some nonprofit quarters, including increased government oversight, increasing the application fee to cover the cost of better IRS review and, most radical of all, putting a life span on the charitable status afforded nonprofits, then requiring a renewal after a certain period of time (maybe 10 years). It’s an admirable goal, but in a sector where the stated goal of private foundations is self-preservation and “once a charity; always a charity,” is the mantra, it ain’t gonna happen. Stern knows this, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from asking this and many other valid questions about a sector that is loath to engage in self-evaluation’
It may be as simple as following the money.
On Stern’s third point, putting a life span on the charitable status afforded nonprofits, Stern might agree with David Horowitz, of all people. He’s a red-diaper baby, an ex-Marxist activist cum anti-Leftist, anti-communist crusader. Making foundations and constantly agitating is what he knows how to do.
He had a then a new book out entitled: ‘The New Leviathan, How The Left Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics And Threatens America’s Future‘
Horowitz argues that such foundations as Ford (which donates to NPR) have become vehicles for the interests of political activists, portraying the matter of as a fight between capitalism/anti-capitalism and/or socialism. He mentions the Tides foundation here. They are big money, he points out, and Obama’s political career was largely made possible by activist political organization, and the money and manpower behind them:
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Stern and Horowitz potentially agreeing on some regulation of non-profits makes for strange bedfellows. Obama, true to form, was seeking a permanent form of activism. Activists, and the political idealists with whom they often find common cause, often don’t produce anything of value independently, and must rely upon existing institutions for their support, even as they seek to undermine those institutions.
How far could we apply the same logic to other institutions? How far might it travel?
It’s 1968 all over again, see Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s…
Related On This Site: A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama…
Race And Free Speech-From Volokh: ‘Philadelphia Mayor Suggests Magazine Article on Race Relations Isn’t Protected by the First Amendment’
Jack Shafer At Slate: ‘Nonprofit Journalism Comes At A Cost’…From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…We’re already mixing art and politics, so…How Would Obama Respond To Milton Friedman’s Four Ways To Spend Money?…
The market will make people better off, but always leaves them wanting more and in a state of spiritual malaise, which invites constant meddling. Can economic freedom and free markets reconcile the moral depth of progressive big-State human freedom: Milton Friedman Via Youtube: ‘Responsibility To The Poor’…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
