This week’s readings continue to outline the difficulty of assessing nonprofit effectiveness. I think I have read about this familiar topic before, though it is genuinely worth additional contemplation. After taking a short respite from my ongoing academic reflections (also known as the first spring break), I resolve that we must interpret effectiveness as an immeasurable entity.
First, effectiveness is a construct, assembled from understandings of other ideas and real world phenomena to which we ascribe meaning based on our subjective knowledge and experiences. No one understands effectiveness in the same manner as another, let alone in the context of different nonprofit organizations. Next, social issues and causes, which numerous nonprofits toil to solve and support, are also constructs with far-reaching and historical implications. We attempt to define social issues based on supposed “root causes,” using the analogy of plant anatomy to tacitly defer greater understanding. Perhaps, social issues are so deeply interwoven among each other that we are doing a great disservice to ourselves in attempting to define individual social issues as distinct and possessing distinct causes. To create an equally constructive metaphor, social issues are the threads in an untieable knot, connecting our shoes during a footrace we must win. Clearly, the solution is Velcro (or those cool Nike Airs Marty McFly used in Back to the Future II, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Wa5L-fkkM), which involves adopting a different manner of approach altogether. As obvious as the idea is, consider all social issues as stemming from the human condition (i.e. society, which is social, oddly enough), whereas “the” root is found in our curious, and often arbitrary social institutions, norms, and traditions which we follow because they are all we know.
Though there is ever-present room for new theoretical foundations to describe these esoteric ideas, new theories will just add to the pile, specifically the pile of books and papers assigned to students. I deduce that we should appreciate the complexity of these sorts of concepts and continue to engage in dialogue. We are all students participating in the exercise of learning that some ideas are beyond all of our comprehensions. Naturally, we should stick to the multi-millennial mission (of the human organization, established sometime before clocks were invented) of “one slow step forward at a time,” though hopefully in greater harmony and prosperity as our world advances. After all, the world may very well subsist without our species and our accompanying loads of garbage. So let us make the best of it.
And let us proceed with the Charity Navigator exercises. I am as ready as I can be.
I think the metaphor you used referring to the untieable knot was very interesting. After the readings we were assigned for this week (and the rest of the discussions that we've had in class this semester for that matter), I've seen this pattern of issues that do not have one solution. We have been looking at the differences that various organizations use to "solve" these issues. It is a complex game that involves these organizations performing a balancing act that requires them to fulfill the needs of the organization as well as the performance measures that prove to be meaningful to many of its stakeholders. It is a continuous learning process that needs to continuously change as the needs of society grow and change.
ReplyDeleteAndrew: I continue to find Herman & Renz suggestion about effectiveness compelling. As you note, they argue that it is a social construct. As such, they suggest, the meaning of effectiveness should be negotiated among stakeholders to generate indicators that are meaningful to all involved with the organization (notably beneficiaries, funders and the the organization's staff).
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