Most nonprofits never attain a state of sustainability.  Many organizations attain a point of minimally paid staff and a well-intentioned but under-engaged board.  Life in these organizations, where many of our friends and colleagues work, can be filled with joy and satisfaction.  However, agony and frustration can offset the positives to the extent that the well-being of employees and volunteers is eroded.  Staff may be extremely passionate about the mission and talented in delivering services but inept at securing sufficient levels of funding and adequate diversity of funding source.  The board many be unable to provide assistance.  In these situations, organizations languish in states of extended famine and intermittent feasting, unable to effectively withstand conclusion of grants and expiration of favored status with government or private agencies and individuals.  For these organizations, frequently small and dependent upon one primary staff person, the end of organizational life is always just around the corner.

If we care about the well-being of these valiant Don Quixotes of the nonprofit world and their dreams, how can we help?   How can we help key staff and board members to consider strategic restructuring that will preserve missions with substantial community value?  How can we help organizational leaders to embrace life extension for their missions through mergers as preferable to organizational death with perceived honor?

We need to offer our friends and colleagues the course of dignity possible in organizational  transformation and mission transfer.  We need to frame preservation of mission as a successful outcome.    By helping these friends and colleagues to recognize the value of transformative change, we do more for them than allowing them to maintain an illusion of sustainability that puts the very survival of the mission at risk.  The well-being of the community is paramount and maintenance of a valuable mission trumps the value of individual human careers.  We need to help those for whom we care to gain perspective, to rise above their personal investment, to attain a vantage point to rationally weigh the value of mission preservation in relation to the value of organizational autonomy or even existence. 

Ultimately, we do well to help boards with this assessment.  Board members represent the community “owners” of a nonprofit on behalf of our society.  When staff are ready to close the service delivery doors or when they are reticent to identify/create/explore opportunities for organizational transformation, it is the board that is left with responsibility to perpetuate or terminate the mission.  We do well to help boards to preserve the community asset of a niche passionately carved out by staff and volunteers over the lifespan of an organization.  We owe it to the people who created this value, to find an organizational home for the mission that has a better chance at life before desperation or neglect result in an untimely organizational death that all too frequently creates avoidable human suffering and the type of organizational death that makes a mission difficult to resurrect.    

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3.22 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."