The Iron Rule For Nonprofit Organizations

My work with people in nonprofit organizations is guided by and offered in the spirit embodied by an excerpt from a 1990 article the Industrial Areas Foundation published, titled Standing for the Whole.

“We believe in what we call the iron rule: never do for others what they can do for themselves. Never. This rule, difficult to practice consistently, sometimes violated, is central to our view of the nature of education, of leadership, of effective organizing. This cuts against the grain of some social workers and program peddlers who try to reduce people and families to clients, who probe for needs and lacks and weaknesses, not strength and drive, not vision and values, not democratic and entrepreneurial initiative. The iron rule implies that the most valuable and enduring form of development — intellectual, social, political — is the development people freely choose and fully own.”

Connecting Nonprofit Organizations And Their Funding Requests

There’s something far more important than writing grants: getting grants!

There’s something bizarre about how poorly nonprofit organizations seem to understand a matter as important as securing financial resources through grants.

If it weren’t misunderstood, the people who attempt to go after grants would not be labeled grantwriters — the ones who are supposed to master the nuances of “grantwriting”, as it is so often called. If you think about it, the term is literally ridiculous. How do you write a grant? You don’t. There are times, however, when it may make sense to write proposals to get grants — a reasonable proposition.

Beyond being nonsensical, the term grantwriter also minimizes what’s most important about going after grants — and it is not the writing, believe me. And, because it’s not the writing, it is foolish for organizations to continue expecting those doing the writing to do so by themselves — with no input from the other people who have the responsibility for orchestrating a nonprofit’s programs and operations.

As a trainer or a consultant, I work from a perspective that challenges what passes for conventional wisdom in how people seek grants for their organizations. Here are the characteristics of this approach.

You go after grants only when it makes sense as part of a long-range plan for organizational development. Lots of times is doesn’t make sense, as seductive as external funds are.

You never develop proposals for external funders — until you’ve done it for and within your own organization first.

Writing proposals in isolation makes absolutely no sense. Even if you luck into a grant developed by an individual, the chances are excellent that your organization will not do a good job of delivering what has been proposed. Organizations must own their funding proposals if they are to benefit from them and maintain credibility.

Developing effective, sensible funding proposals depends on clearly understanding the characteristics of an organization and its intentions for action.

So, creating proposals makes sense because of the benefits it offers for also developing organizations — your organization can be strengthened by going through the process of writing for funds, and may even get funded, always a tough proposition.

Working With Others

I was recently asked to speak to a gathering of nonprofit reps in north state CA on the subject of strategic alliances. This allowed me to emphasize the matter of mission clarity that I believe is essential if nonprofits are to be as valuable as they must be, but at times are not. The following is taken from the presentation, titled “Are We There Yet?” & reproduced in its entirety on my blog.

“So, it seems to me that we need to clean up our own side of the street before we decide to cross it. If we don’t understand and value the precept that our organizations exist to help our folks help themselves — by what might be any number of means í rather than putting the emphasis on the process/the means, we’d best be careful interacting into alliances. Why double up the misguided?

As you might figure, I’m inclined to believe that the mission of nonprofits is not simply to offer participants high quality services, but also — and more importantly — to help participants help themselves to attain some measure of what they would agree is success in overcoming what gets in their way — to fully participating in democracy, Bob Johnson would say it. Doesn’t seem to me to matter if it’s an arts organization or an effort to organize a bunch of people on the margins. If we can get this straight in one organization, imagine what we might accomplish when we work together in a bunch of organizations.”