Monday, March 7, 2011
Selling Out Our Values and Losing Our Soul?
I found chapter 3 in the Forces for Good text to be somewhat redundant. It seemed that the authors took this one idea of partnering with private corporations/gaining support from them and turned it into this major dilemma. I understand that it is a slippery slope when trying to keep funding for a nonprofit organization, but I think that the authors continue to stress the same ideas over and over again. It's important to keep as many people happy as possible when dealing with such funding issues and continuing to keep your "promises". One question that was asked was "Are we at risk of selling out our values and losing our soul if we begin to engage in commerce"? I found this to be a little bit drastic. I think that if an organization is run by people with ethics and values, partnering with these businesses is a strategic and intelligent move. It will benefit the people that utilize the resources offered by the organization and will only continue to help it grow. That being said, it is of utmost importance to keep the mission statement in the forefront of all decisions that are made.
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Your post seems to suggest that we don't need to worry about selling our ethics and values as long as we have good people leading organizations. Is that the case? Don't leaders' management choices involve trade-offs? That is, all actions reflect the choice to do one thing and not another. As Kate's later post points out, the choice to pursue commercial revenue (through customer cultivation) may lead to different outcomes than choices to pursue revenue through fund raising (cultivating donors).
ReplyDeleteI'm not implying that leaders' management choices do not involve trade-offs. My main point is that it is necessary for organizations to look greatly into the motives and functions of a corporation that they may be considering to partner with. As in the case with McDonalds and the environmentalist group, if a common good is going to come from it, I think it is a very logical thing to do. It isn't to say that the environmentalist group should stop advocating for community members to get involved, it is just another resource that may be extremely useful for funding and advocacy.
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