| A lot of what you are saying here resonates with me. I work part-time for a local charity in my town and have been involved in various others at times. There are a number of problems charities normally face which may explain your findings to some extent, including: - well meaning but incompetent staff. People don't seem to understand that wanting to do good doesn't naturally translate into the ability to do it. - no real management. I suppose this may be local phenomenon, but where I am (UK), there seems to be a tendency for small charities to be managed by wealthy housewives as a kind of hobby job. There is very definitely a social network of them that dominate the charities in my town. Often this means the management will be consistently absent from the organization. You can also see my previous point. - no real check on the management. Charity trustees are often people who just want their name to be associated with a charitable organization. I can think of several trustees of the charity I work for who probably have only a vague idea of what we actually do. - funding constraints. Charities in the UK who receive funding from government departments are usually monitored in terms of the volume of work they do rather than the outcomes they produce (which are much harder to quantify). Thus the incentive is often to not try to improve efficiency as reducing the work load may negatively impact funding. Obviously my examples are to some extent just personal experiences that may not be universal. However I would guess that most non-profits face similar problems and that these problems may help explain why you got such a negative reception with your projects. With regards to volunteers though, what did you to do assess their competency to perform the tasks they were willing to help out with? I ask because part of my job is to manage my organization's volunteers (which mostly come to us on work experience placements from the job centre). They frequently start working for us claiming to have various skills and then we discover that they often don't. For this reason I am usually quite unhappy about accepting new volunteers - when I have to get rid of them is is much harder (emotionally, for me) than sacking an incompetent employee. This might also help explain some of the resistance you encountered to what you were doing. |