Solve, Not Serve: What Other Nonprofit Management Books Won't Tell You

By Kelly E Griffin

"This is not just 'outside-the-box' thinking. This is 'set the box on fire, throw it over a cliff, and start inventing entirely new shapes' thinking."

In Solve, Not Serve: What Other Nonprofit Management Books Won't Tell You, author Kelly E. Griffin proposes a long-overdue paradigm shift within the soc

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885042185

Book preview

A Better Place?

I began my do-gooding career right out of college at a behemoth nonprofit and never looked back. For many years, I was content that my work was helping people and—more grandly—making the world a better place. I didn’t realize right away that many of the organizations I was toiling for were only having mediocre impacts on the state of the world.

What woke me up was my role at KABOOM!, the national nonprofit dedicated to play for children. Research shows that play is critical for healthy child development, including physical, cognitive, and social-emotional skills.

When I was hired to help create and implement a new organizational strategy in 2013, the organization had been building around two hundred playgrounds in low-income communities each year, serving a few thousand kids. However, even drastically scaling up our operations to build, say, two thousand playgrounds a year and serve tens of thousands more kids would still leave millions and millions behind and not solve the problem on the scale it exists. We also had to face the fact that even low-income kids living in the neighborhoods that KABOOM! served still had fewer opportunities to play because their families were less likely to have time to take them to the playground and other kid-friendly places.

We realized that we needed a different approach if we were going to impact the lives of more children. We changed our mission statement from Giving every child in America a great place to play within walking distance, to "Ensuring that every kid, especially the sixteen million kids living in poverty, get the play they need to thrive.’

We first thought about where low-income kids were spending their time—often in adult spaces with their parents or caregivers running errands, waiting in line, and taking public transportation. This led us to consider how we could turn those spaces into play opportunities, so we began to think differently about infrastructure. We got creative about what would make a bus stop, grocery store, or laundromat more fun for kids.

It also led us to think about who influenced those spaces. We thought about who makes decisions about things like infrastructure, urban planning, and school policies, and we began to think differently about influence. We designed an influence strategy to influence decision makers (like municipal leaders and school system administrators) to create opportunities for kids to play more (like play infrastructure, keeping playgrounds open after hours, recess policies, etc.).

This different approach to both infrastructure and influence paved the way for us to not only reach more kids, but also reach them more meaningfully. If a low-income kid had a playful city bus stop in which to wait in the morning, recess at school, and a colorful hopscotch on the sidewalk along the way to the game-filled laundromat with mom after school, that kid was getting more opportunities to get the physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development benefits of play than if we had just built a playground near him.

This profound shift in KABOOM!’s strategy caused massive changes in nearly everything about the organization, from who we hired, with whom we partnered, and how we spoke about our work. Many of these changes were painful. Several funders did not support our new direction. Some staff felt displaced and angry. However, seeing that the changes were resulting in bigger and better impact made the hard parts easier. Every passionate, dedicated nonprofit employee should know this feeling!

This exposure taught me that strategic thinking can lead to real transformative impact. I also saw how difficult it was for an organization to drastically change how it operates. I wondered if other nonprofits were thinking this way or if they needed a bit of inspiration. So, I did some research on the history of nonprofits and how effective we are now, in 2022.

While we can trace the origins of the nonprofit sector to before the establishment of the American government, it was first recognized as a sector in the 1970s after the 1969 tax code created the 501(c)(3) designation. New nonprofits are founded every day; more than half a million nonprofits have been created in the last twenty years. As of 2020, there are 1.54 million nonprofits (Independent Sector 2022), accounting for 10 percent of the nation’s workforce and more than 12.5 million employees, the third largest workforce of any US industry (Salamon and Newhouse, 2020). Most of these are relatively small organizations. More than 66 percent have annual budgets of less than five hundred thousand dollars (Urban Institute Brief 2020).

With very few exceptions, each of our over twelve million nonprofit employees believe they are making the world a better place. Nonprofit employees are among the most passionate, dedicated, selfless, hardworking people in the world. I have worked with and learned from some of the most amazing individuals and have been inspired by them every day. In addition, more than 25 percent of Americans—68 million people—volunteer their time and talent in nonprofits every year (Urban Institute Brief 2020).

Sadly, most of us are at least somewhat wrong about making the world a better place. Many inequities and other problems in our society are greater and more serious today than they were a few decades ago. Although the Great Recession of 2008 supposedly ended, the longitudinal Human Needs Index found that human needs in three quarters of US states were greater in 2017 than they were in 2007 (Human Needs Index 2018).

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we had a profoundly unstable and uncertain economy. Poverty rates are trending equal or greater to the Great Recession and haven’t really improved much in fifty years (Census 2021). Economic mobility is stalled (Cowen, 2015). There continues to be increases in mental illness and substance abuse rates and deaths (World Health Organization 2022). Systemic racism and inequities in gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and age are still disadvantaging groups of people (Urban Institute Structural Racism 2020).

The pandemic exacerbated this dire situation, as rates of job instability and food and housing insecurity are trending even higher. The employment rate remains below pre-pandemic levels and millions of families are still behind on rent payments (although employment is rising and strains on household budgets have eased slightly since the darkest days of spring 2020). Due to our aforementioned systemic racism and inequity, the pandemic also had a disproportionately harsh impact on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and other marginalized groups in terms of access to health care, digital capability for remote work and school, and overrepresentation in high-risk essential jobs (CBPP 2021).

Recent studies find that most nonprofit organizations struggle to meet these needs. A database of over three thousand rigorously tested, evidence-based programs offers chilling information: Fewer than 37 percent of programs run by nonprofits have definite positive impacts. Only 50 percent of the programs had promising evidence of positive impacts, which doesn’t inspire much confidence (Pew Results First 2015).

Unfortunately, this database and other similar ones only include the most sophisticated programs, so most of the nonprofit work we all do day-to-day does not even get evaluated. Even if we are comfortable extrapolating data from the most sophisticated programs to all programs, this means less than half of what we work so hard to do has meaningful, positive impacts on people’s lives.

I am frustrated, because while nonprofit employees are making some things a bit better for some people, as a whole we are not really making much progress toward solving our worst social problems. As a nonprofit devotee, I want to do better! I want us all to do better!

I am compelled to dig into this topic because I have made a career of running toward big nonprofit changes like a firefighter runs toward a burning building. Over the last twenty years, I have helped more than a dozen nonprofits create and execute new strategies, working directly with CEOs and board leadership as both an internal staff person and an external consultant. I am also an executive coach, helping nonprofit leaders become more effective in their roles. Unfortunately, I have seen many organizations and leaders struggle with how to make the big changes in their organizations that would lead to real impact. As a result, many nonprofits continue to have only mediocre impact.

From my vantage point both inside and outside organizations, despite all our best intentions, I have seen a lot of what not to do. A lot of making timid, incremental steps. A lot of hemorrhaging time, talent, and treasure on minimally useful activities. A lot of avoiding risk and covering your ass. A lot of how not to be effective.

I am also compelled to share what I have learned from my experiences and observations, because it seems like many nonprofit management books and articles suggest for-profit business management principles only slightly revised for nonprofits. Thanks to the inimitable Vu Le, former nonprofit executive and brilliant writer behind the Nonprofit AF blog, I now think of that as bizsplaining. Frankly, I find bizsplaining really annoying. Since the missions, the impacts, and the funding mechanisms of nonprofits are fundamentally different from (the vast majority of) for-profit businesses, why do so many of these authors believe both should operate the same way? I solemnly swear that I will not bizsplain anything to you.

I’ve been in the trenches and have seen firsthand the failure of some of the stuff they tell us in those books and articles. I also interviewed dozens of awe-inspiring changemakers who didn’t follow the traditional advice and are making—or well on their way to making—massive impact. I am here to challenge some of what those bizsplainy books and articles say and share what really works!

If nonprofit organizations want to make real impact on social problems—and those of us who work there want to know we’re making the world a better place—we need to go much bigger and bolder. Massive problems are only going to be solved by massive actions. The vast majority of nonprofits are not set up to take massive actions, so the organizations need to make major internal changes to set them up for success.

This is not just outside-the-box thinking. This is set the box on fire, throw it over a cliff, and start inventing entirely new shapes thinking. Nonprofits need to abandon tentative, safe changes that serve people. They need to adopt radical, transformational, tectonic-plate shifting changes to solve problems like poverty, hunger, homelessness, racism, abuse, and discrimination—or at the very least, get closer to solving them.

Unfortunately, many of us in the nonprofit sector don’t know how to make these changes. A variety of factors make this kind of bold confidence elusive. Taking risks is hard and scary. We understandably worry about what funders and donors will think and do. We worry about failing and being punished for those failures with shame, ridicule, and career-harming retributions. I want all nonprofit leaders (current and future—leadership can come from anywhere) to find the conviction, grasp the knowledge, and take the big risks necessary for big gains.

This book is for you if you work in, volunteer for, or fund a nonprofit and want to stop being frustrated all the time; if you want to be part of truly meaningful, transformative change in our world. This book will challenge some traditional thinking and motivate you with stories of true impact—on individuals and on our society. This book will inspire you to lead from wherever you sit.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to say you helped eradicate polio and saved millions of people from severe illness and death, or that you played a part in creating a TV show that resulted in early-childhood learning gains for millions of kids, or that you contributed to providing 96 percent of Americans with easy access to free libraries? There are people out there who can say those things, largely because they contributed to the kinds of organizations that did some of the very same things I highlight in this book. They concentrated on real impact, not outputs and scattershot programming. They built the right kind of leaders with effective structures around them. They identified and leaned into brave decisions. They recognized what is unique about our sector and only borrowed what was helpful from the for-profit sector. Lastly, they navigated the funding landscape with savvy and aplomb.

What social problems will the next generation solve? Could you help eradicate homelessness? Could you play a role in ending over four hundred years of systemic racism? Could you be a part of curing cancer and saving millions of lives? All Americans should want the nonprofit sector to succeed. However, it is those of us who work in, volunteer for, and fund these organizations that have the real power.

I once saw a political cartoon that I often think of in relation to nonprofit work (even though it was about another topic). It’s a depiction of two people mopping the floor while beside them a faucet is on full blast. C’mon, my fellow nonprofit people, let’s turn off the damn faucet. Let’s Solve, Not Serve!

Part 1

History Has Its Eyes on You

The American nonprofit sector has been around for centuries. However, never in our country’s history have our problems and challenges felt more astounding and intractable. Never has the need felt this obvious across so many issues at once—poverty, public health, systemic racism, immigration, and others.

Consequently, never in our history has the nonprofit sector had a greater opportunity to rip these social problems out at the roots. This country has never before had more attention on our problems, more accumulated wealth, and more ability to communicate with and organize its people.

Now is the time to fight our huge social problems. Now is the time to solve these problems. In Part 1, we will explore the potential of the nonprofit sector and why now is the perfect time for our sector to rise to the occasion.

Chapter 1.1

Why Us

Nonprofit organizations provide many of the most distinctive features of life in the United States. It is through self-governing nonprofit organizations that Americans have expressed—and managed—their religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity…

—David Hammack, author and Professor of History Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University

The Birth of the US Nonprofit Sector

In the United States, the origins of the nonprofit sector predate the formation of our government. The early settlers formed charitable and mutual aid networks like hospitals, fire departments, and orphanages to help their neighbors and confront social issues.

After the American Revolution, once we had our new government and a dominant middle class, we developed a limited welfare state where our government committed to protect the health and well-being of its citizens (Arnsberger et al, 2008). Some of our foundational American political beliefs, such as the limited role of government in general, low taxes, and the separation of church and state, provided fertile ground for charitable organizations. As a young country, we decided to establish charitable organizations to fill the gaps in government social welfare programs. It has also been posited that early Americans embraced charitable organizations over government programs because they feared monarchy or bureaucracy (Arnsberger et al, 2008).

In the early twentieth century, a number of American industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller created private foundations to direct their wealth to altruistic pursuits. These industrialists thought it was their duty to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate. Generally speaking, only white males were able to amass wealth at that time.

After the Civil War ended, charitable institutions grew to include those that helped Black people and other disadvantaged groups. For example, Reconstruction inspired people like banker George Peabody and philanthropist John F. Slater to establish early philanthropic foundations to support education in the South (Black Education 2000).

Nonprofit organizations grew slowly but steadily between 1900 and 1960. Some legal and administrative rules and practices, such as simple procedures for creating a nonprofit, promoted the growth of the number of organizations. However, there were also significant restrictions on growth. Black people, women, and dissidents often encountered resistance when seeking nonprofit charters (Hammack, 2001).

Civil Rights and Nonprofit Growth

Nonprofits saw remarkable growth in the 1960s for three major reasons: increasing American wealth, the Civil Rights movement, and the expansion of government caused by both that movement and the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson (Hammack, 2001).

In this era, Americans had more money to spend. Average per capita incomes more than doubled from 1945 to 1990, and Americans quadrupled their spending on all services—including those provided by nonprofits—in the same timeframe. However, it was not just