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Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive?
helios17 writes "Non-Profits like this have traditionally gotten started from the money grants provide. Most grants award vehicles, computers, and even pay for organization rental and utility costs. The problem fledgling and even established non-profits are encountering is the dwindling number of grants allowing for Operating or General Support costs. What good is a vehicle received via grant if you can't afford to put fuel in it? With the number of Operating or General Support grants shrinking and those available funds competed for heavily, should we be looking on line for help? Can efforts like this be a better way to approach it?"
Lobbying is obsolete.
Why are the grants drying up? Despite the much-hyped "austerity", in reality the government has spent more money in each of the recent years than ever before.
So where is all the damned money going???
Assuming that this isn't sarcasm, there's a lesson to be learned here. If you are willing to operate on a shoestring budget, you can accomplish a lot. But you also have to be willing to look at your idea and honestly assess it's value and whether or not it's time to close up shop and move on to something else.
I worked for The Seattle Foundation for a while (a while ago) and they serve as sort-of an intermediary between people wanting to donate and non-profits seeking funding. Donors vastly prefer to fund capital acquisitions over operating costs - it's just sexier and feels cooler to people who think in terms of growing things (money, power) by default. "Hey, I got them this new truck," sounds better than "I paid for gas and an oil change for this old truck they've had for a decade." You will find donors who believe in a cause and fund both, but they also want to have the freedom to say no and not be taken for granted.
I have to wonder if some of this is the changing values of our population and culture.
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
I have worked for a variety of non-profits and written grants for them. I'm surprised that there ever was money for operating expenses available for tech-based non-profits since every foundation I've petitioned for grant money has specifically said that they do not provide operating costs. Instead, I write grants with a specific project in mind. This could be "build a new wing to the university library", "Fund staff to inventory the museum collection in storage," or "run a week-long day camp for inner-city youth that teaches non-violent conflict resolution methods."
Unless you have some kind of revenue stream, you are going to be relying on donations and volunteers just like a community clothes closet for the homeless. Sounds like now that the gravy train of easy money is drying up these tech non-profits are being forced to demonstrate how they benefit the public good. I'm sure that there are many worthy causes, but now their in the wild competing for the same dollars and mind-share as food pantries, elder advocacy groups, and animal shelters.
You never hear about the government laying people off unless they misbehave, and government salaries and benefits are way higher than the private sector.
Can I move to your planet? It sounds like a good place to get a job.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Why should your non-profit survive when compared to any of the others? The overwhelming majority are staffed with good people with good intentions who work for very little money. The problem is one over-saturation for the market and a donation fatigue from a public that is burned out. There are hundreds of thousands of non-profits in the US alone and every single one of them thinks that /they/ are the most important.
When a business starts to think that they 'deserve' our money we accuse them of entitlement (e.g. Circuit City) and vilify them. A non-profit really isn't any different in that they serve a function that costs money and in order to survive need to take in money. Like a business they can merge, be bought or go bankrupt.
Frankly if more non-profits started to merge it would enable greater economies of scale and efficiencies, just like a business. It would also enable them to spend more money on their mission and less money on overhead. Services from secretarial to bandwidth to phone banks could be shared at greater efficiency across more organizations.
Perhaps my answer seems callous, but the bottom line is that no organization is entitled to survive. Non-profits need to embrace what the business world has done and go through a series of mergers for the greater good. Are your clients better served by your merging with another organization because you are stretched so thin that you are no longer effective?
People typically start and run non-profits because their ego tells them that they can do better than the person already running a like kind service. Society as a whole would benefit enormously if non-profits put their missions before their egos. These warm hearted organizations need some cold blooded business acumen.
example:
old slogan: we give used computers to poor people
new slogan: by recruiting young people into the Infosec milieu, we help america defend against the goddam commie chinese hackers and the motherfucking russians who are trying to make our power system go offline so they can invade our country, kill our leaders, and convert us to non-americanism.
They also had a good culture that did not engage in much territorial expansion, like the Europeans did.
China's history is chock full of territorial expansion. That's how it was created in the first place and how most subsequent empires became established, for example. And it has modern military adventures such as the conquest of Tibet or the overthrow of French Indochina.
The big dispute was over Chinese trade with foreigners.
For a few brief decades. China has had many other disputes over the millennia.
The big question, is who won the Cultural Revolution?
The Culturan Revolution wasn't a "dispute", but rather the stamping of ants, 1984-style, to show who was in charge. The ants lost. The ones doing the stamping won.
Don't confuse "culture" with "capability". China in the past didn't have the capability to project its power very far. It was able to win wars in Sri Lanka for example at extraordinary cost. Today it like every other major country has global reach. I believe it will be different and the culture will turn out to be not all that different after all.