900,000 Nonprofits and Growing

Some of these collaboration readings raise an interesting point: We encourage competition and enforce anti-trust legislation in the nonprofit world, yet we view competition to be unnecessary and wasteful in the non profit world—we even seem to encourage, albeit unsuccessfully, a giant merger eliminating the smaller organizations. I’d never thought of that. I never really thought that the smaller nonprofits were wasteful, but it has occurred to me that they could do so much more with a single, large budget if they merged together and cut some staff. What a mistake!

I feel as though I should have known better because I have seen collaboration up close. I’ve spent some alternative spring break weeks working with urban hunger programs—one in New York and one in DC. On both occasions, my group was being hosted by a nonprofit group that exists for the sole purpose of sending volunteer groups out to the various soup kitchens, food banks, and homeless shelters in these cities. This nonprofit’s role is to set up volunteer groups on what amounts to a week-long tour of volunteer opportunities related to hunger. It seems extraneous, but it is also a source of collaboration among the nonprofits that accept the volunteers. Plus, as a volunteer, I had a chance to see how the organizations work together to serve the homeless constituency as a whole while at the same time, getting to know the unique populations that utilize specific services in specific areas.

As a result, I’ve come to the conclusion that the increasing quantity of active, small nonprofits are beneficial to the clients they serve. Besides, if they were truly unnecessary, I believe that they would run out of funding.