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by thr0wawayf00
1308 days ago
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I used to work for one of the largest software vendors in the non-profit space worldwide and it fundamentally changed the way I look at the non-profit world. The big ones have essentially become these weird quasi-think tanks that passively influence policy or actively engage the community to achieve an often political agenda. For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in schools. But, they can go around and "buy out" small non-profits into fulfilling their agenda. This is usually pretty easy to do because small non-profits are almost always cash-starved, and it can be really hard to say "no" when some outside figure is willing to provide a massive percentage of your operating budget in perpetuity in exchange for avoiding certain topics (like mutual consent) in schools. This very scenario happened to an acquaintance of mine. She wanted to teach consent in schools after the #metoo scandal, spent 2 years grinding to improve access to consent-based communication for kids and then someone offered her obscene money under the condition that she make tweaks (i.e. "don't talk about consent in school because that will encourage children to have sex", that kind of stuff). She took the money because she saw a way out of needing hustle so hard for cash, but of course she sold her soul at the end and regretted it. And none of those interactions ever get recorded. Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world. I'm sure some of them are, and I'm sure there are tons of well-meaning people working for some of them, but that world was so much darker than I ever imagined, at least from the periphery. |
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For example, consider a simple animal rescue non-profit. While it may on its surface just seem like "this organization should just exist to try to find homes for pets needing adoption", it's actually more helpful to look at a more fundamental question: "What causes animals to be put up for adoption in the first place." It turns out that in most states there are a host of systemic, government-caused problems that are directly responsible for the reasons why many people need to surrender their pets to shelters in the first place. So yes, the animal rescue non-profit is still in the day-to-day business of finding homes for homeless animals, I would say a good organization would actually do more to try to change the status quo and fix the root cause problem, and that often intersects with government policy.