Will there be Nonprofits in 30 Years?

On Wednesday, September 13, my friend? Emily Rasmussen ?will appear on a panel with other pros from the sector to answer the provocative question:

Will there be Nonprofits in 30 Years?

The preamble to the?free webinar hosted by?Dorothy Johnson Center for Philanthropy centers the discussion on recent reports on downward trends in giving.

Emily and others point out lots of countervailing trends (e.g. crowd funding, collective giving) but what also surfaces–and bears more coverage IMHO–is a candid look at the near deification of the 501c3 as the main model to enact social change. A problem that has plagued us since the late 1960s when the tax designation came into being.

That we leave the solving of the nation’s (world’s?) biggest problems to organizations that have no guaranteed revenue stream, aside from one dependent on the largesse of others, seems to have proven inadequate.

I hope the answer to the panel’s brave question is “yes” but, even more so, I hope that the familiar string of numbers, letter, and punctuation that is the 501(c)(3) gives way to a robust and innovative alphabet soup of change-making structures (LLCs, DAOs and PACs, to PPTs, SIBs, and B-Corps, and new ones not even conceived of yet).

Would love to know what you think – and what new ideas are starting to percolate.

Please share your thoughts below, and bring those thoughts to the Johnson Center event on 9/13!