In her viewaa common one among our tech titansathe nonprofit sector today is deeply dysfunctional and inefficient.
Once the donor has identified a problem worthy of her personal passion, the magnificent power of technology kicks it.
More than likely, of course, traditional nonprofits wonat be up to the task, being engaged as they typically are with a sloppy and unpredictable mix of human needs.
Although she isnat quite as exuberant as her husband about the carnivorous tendencies of software, itas clear that if your nonprofit canat meet the donoras rigorous statistical expectations, then some Gen-Xaer will launch a new tech-savvy nonprofit that can, reprising Amazonas cannibalism of Borders.
And itas not surprising that the original program for that meeting called for a aPhilanthropic Challenge on Economy and Finance.a It invited nonprofits to come to San Francisco and make snappy elevator pitches to the assembled foundations, followed by arapid-firea questions in a Shark Tankalike atmosphereayou know, just like the venture capitalists do down the road in Palo Alto.
But in this detached and abstract world of death-conquering high technology, what about the nonprofits that you manage and work for today?
In the pages of the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Quarterly, Maria Mottola, Gail Nayowith, Jon Pratt, Paul Light, Cindy Gibson, and of course our own Ruth McCambridge and Rick Cohen raised powerful objections, not just against the obscenity of making nonprofits perform like dancing bears, but more important, against the problematic penetration of high-tech values into the nonprofit sector.
As they pointed out, the work of nonprofits is particular, engaged, immediate, patient, long-term, faithful and compassionately attentive to the infinite variety and complexity of the everyday human suffering it has been called to relieve.
The proper work of the nonprofit sector cannot be pursued by the glittering gimmicks of the high-tech world.
I would like to think this was a aLexington and Concorda moment, the first skirmish in a larger nonprofit insurgency against high-tech imperialism.
Now itas time for them to listen to us about the true character of work in the real world of the poor and suffering, where human mortality is every day before our eyesawhere the conquest of death is nothing more than a rich personas pipedream, unhappily drawing millions of precious dollars away from the urgent human needs before us.
