The Non-Profit Industrial Complex

A few weeks ago, I had a distressing conversation with an NGO founder. She told me that she was exhausted ‘running’ programs and operations, ‘dealing’ with funders and ‘managing’ people. In her last meeting with one of her funders, she was told that they were not scaling their work fast enough, her program was not yet ‘standardised’ and that her funding and operations model were ‘inefficient’. She is taking time off to think about whether she should continue or quit.

I kept thinking of the words that she had used. Efficiency of operations? Growth and scale? Managing people and standardisation? These words are from the industrial era.

And we all know what was happening in the world during the industrial revolution.

Colonising was in full swing. Imperial Europe had captured 84% of the world’s land surface. White men controlled what and how ‘natives’ could grow, eat, socialise, live. ?Nations were to be ‘civilised’ and young men trained in governance were sent off to administer and oversee native populations, maintain order, and put them to productive work.

Taylor brought in scientific principles of management. Division of work between labour (doing the work) and managers (deciding how the work will be done) was prescribed. Specialisation of tasks, standardisation of operations and command and control models of managing people were introduced with the assurance that the most efficient production processes had been discovered.

Mindset changes were taking place. Machines were designed and humans trained to run them. We began to believe that humans could conquer nature, extract resources and and that all problems can be solved through technological solutions and scientific breakthroughs.

Colonisation, scientific principles of management and an extractive mindset and belief system that man can conquer nature through the use of technologies and resources! This industrial world view of the 19th and 20th centuries continues to dominate the for-profit world till date.

But if we will not be wrong in saying that these very same industrial ideas have come to dominate the non-profit sector today.

Many NGOs today seem to work with a coloniser world view. There are ‘new’ districts and states to enter, more stakeholders to work with, more people and communities to save, new problems to solve and new solutions to manufacture. We may not use the term ‘colonise’ or ‘civilise’ or ‘extract’ to talk about the communities we want to enter into, but we certainly use ‘transform’, ‘change’, ‘develop’, ‘skill’, and ‘re-train’ when we talk about them.

We seem to believe that every problem has a clear technical solution. If students are not learning in schools – then teachers have to be trained. If teachers are struggling with teaching – then technology comes to the aid. We are relentless in our march towards the identification of newer problems that need newer solutions. And our production and consumption patterns constantly increase. We boast about how our organisations have grown in employee numbers, programs and territories! We assume that the more we grow in our numbers and programs, the more efficient and productive we are as organisations. Funders keep asking for more – more stakeholders, more touch points, more metrics, and more outputs. Meanwhile underlying systems and local capabilities grow weaker and more exhausted.

Many NGOs have adopted a version of the for-profit human management playbook as their people strategy plan. Division of labour, managing human ‘resources’, specialisation of work through complex vertical and horizontal hierarchies– all are seen as signals that we are running our enterprises efficiently and providing good value to our ‘investors’. Professionals from corporations have entered the sector to manage NGO resources better. They use words like ‘transformative scenarios’ and ‘synergistic planning’ and project an air of efficiency and competence. Meanwhile, our field and community workers grow stressed and alienated from the work that once had so much purpose for them.

This non-profit industrial complex works hard in aligning the interests of the State and powerful funders to force non-profits into service provider roles, providing services for the underprivileged and the marginalised that is the responsibility of the State itself. No other role seems viable. Underlying systems of inequity and inequality lie unchallenged.

We know what the outcomes of an industrial world have been. Breakdown of planetary boundaries of resource consumption, climate change and global warming, extinction of species of plants and animals at an extraordinary rate, extreme inequity and inequality in the world, an epidemic of poor mental health and distress among people of all ages, violence and war for land and resources, to name but some of these consequences.

The consequences of an industrialised non-profit sector are now evident. My friend and many others are experiencing some of these consequences first hand. It has exhausted NGOs and have left fundamental structural and system issues unchallenged.

And maybe there is little that we can do to turn the tide.

But maybe, small steps are possible.

Here are some of my ‘maybe’ steps: We understand how the non-profit industrial complex operates so we can seek alternatives. We collaborate and work on foundational system changes and local capacity building so that the NGOs can exit the spaces that they occupy. We challenge the narrative of ‘growth at all costs’ and ‘we can conquer all’ through technologies and the use of resources. We accept that system change is slow and takes time and is an uncertain journey. We slow down and focus on deep, empathetic, regenerative work, being of service to communities rather than providing services to them. We think of our organisations as flourishing spaces for people to do purposeful work rather than thinking of people as resources. We think of the planet and its sustainability at the core of our work. And we seek a wide range of funders who share these world views.

There are many other ‘maybes’, other possibilities. It would be worthwhile for us to explore them before the industrialisation of the non-profit sector is complete and absolute.