Culture

Philanthropies of Scale

Dec 30, 2013 Esther Dyson

The problem with charities is that they have no motivation to become more efficient. The question is not how to create a chain of soup kitchens, but how to develop leadership that creates intrinsic incentives for the staff.

MIDLAND, TEXAS – Since starting my own nonprofit organization, I look at other nonprofits with new eyes. There are far more of them than I ever realized. As an angel investor, I did not normally engage with them. Now I worry that they are terribly inefficient.

As I travel in small towns, many of the businesses that I see – most of them, it seems – belong to large chains, with mass-purchasing contracts, standardized training procedures, consistent quality, and, I assume, profitability. The nonprofits, by contrast, are mostly small and are often run by people with passion but not much expertise or management skill. They benefit from dedication rather than efficiency – which is honorable but not easily scalable.

This is a challenge for the general proposition of self-help, and also for my own new venture: the Health Initiative Coordinating Council (HICCup), which will advise five communities competing to win the HICCup Prize for the greatest improvement, according to five metrics, in health (not health care) over five years.

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Paola Grenier Jan 7, 2014

Scaling up of non profit works and activities used to be known as government provision. There is a real tension between wanting nonprofit to become generic, efficient,and effective service providers and what many people would consider their more fundamental role in society which to provide a space for people to connect, to share and negotiate social values, to help create and sustain the delicate fabric of society. Clearly providing much needed health and other services to people in need is critical - just the nonprofit model is probably not the answer. Exactly what is when government is no longer a legitimate initiator and provider of services, is a completely different question. But perhaps all those who are coming in from business to help nonprofits become more effective could be more innovative by coming up with a better organisational and sector model for this.
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Nathan Coppedge Jan 2, 2014

Translations of index, hierarchy, and modularity might fit into this, in terms of modular citizenship.

For example, there is the concept of the open office, broader concepts of QOL preparedness ('community outreach'), in short a role for prophecy and interactivity in communities which benefit from health and other types of programs.

My general thesis on this subject is something about the role of infrastructure in conjunction with new paradigms. Infrastructure is the larger idea, and new applications should fit in to that woodwork.

Some of the questions involved (such as those addressed by modularity, index, and hierarchy) are really intermediate steps, closer to being 'woodwork' than being 'infrastructure' or 'applications'. Many of the new potentials that emerge are similar to community interfaces and creative zoning techniques. However, these things really benefit from a holistic approach to design (human design, or interface design), such that the integrative capacity of the multiple 'functions' is not overlooked.

I'm hopeful for example, that mental health patients will be able to live their lives something like a very artistic video-game, therefore suspending disbelief about moral, political, and irrational requirements upon their minds and bodies. There should be other programs that are just as an effective paradigm as this.
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