...in my humble opinion...

It is now officially dead week of Spring term 2010. While some people are “dead” because they have nothing to do besides bar-hopping with friends before summer tears them all apart, many people are “dead” from lack of sleep, paper deadlines, last minute midterms (not cool), and the yearning for summer. I fall into the latter this week but I have good faith that I’ll get everything done. Do or die, right?
This is my last blog posting for this class and I’m a little weepy about it. This class has been my favorite classes this term and one of the more interesting out of all the classes I’ve taken at U of O. I have learned so much more about my world and my country because the class is set up to insure that the studies are always applicable to current events. Through this class I have restored some faith in the human race through learning how a few individuals can take a dream or cause and use it to help people with little monetary reward for themselves. I never realized the difficulties and sacrifices involved in forming a nonprofit and I now hold more respect for individuals that take that path. I am now officially a nonprofit advocate that not only researches them in my free time, but now brings them up in conversations. I’d like to thank Bob and Sarah for leading a great class together and for giving me a new optimism every Monday and Wednesday night.
The last week or so we have been focusing primarily on ins and outs of foundations. For me, foundations have always been that thing that I hear about and then immediately move past for more thought tangents. I had always overlooked the fact that there are different types of foundations that are made by completely different people for endless causes. As in most things, companies have their own corporate foundations that work to both help the community and themselves through public relations, advertising, and forms of further research in some cases such as pharmaceutical companies. In these cases it is sometimes hard to think of corporate foundations in a good light when they are using charity as a way for them to make more money. However since corporate foundations are usually well endowed and 98% of foundation funds go to nonprofits, it becomes hard for nonprofits to turn away thousands of dollars in grants even if it came from a BP foundation like the Conservation Leadership Programme.
I found it interesting how foundations sometimes have to change their mission to adapt to a new society with new needs. It’s interesting how massive amounts of money fall into causes like Hersey’s foundation for the Hershey Industrial School and the grants that come out of Fossil, Oregon from grandmas. This is because Milton Hershey and those Fossil grandmas (no pun intended) formed a connection with a community and wish to help by giving back. Although the grants from the old women may be small in comparison to a pharmaceutical company’s foundation, the woman from Fossil’s money holds more value because it is directly serving the community without asking for anything in return. David from the Oregon Community Foundation gave several examples of this small town charity that funds everything from scholarships to shelters. Before his presentation I had no idea what Oregon Community foundation was or what it did. I think it is a great program because it gives cautious and specific donators a legitimate resource and works with their decision. I am very proud to have such a large foundation like this serving all of Oregon.

This week from the book we read about international nonprofits and Michael O’Neill’s opinion of their increasing importance. I don’t know if it was the year that the book was written (2002) or O’Neill’s politics but I found myself strongly disagreeing with his subtle advocacy for the work of international nonprofits. He mentioned on the first page of the chapter that:

“Globalization, which increasingly affects American business and government, is also a major reality in American nonprofit work.”

Although I believe this is absolutely true, I feel that the rest of his chapter defends the American tradition of budding in to other country’s issues and along with it, offering assistance when there is something in it for us.
I feel that international nonprofits are a whole new ball game than that of local nonprofits serving a specific cause and community. Although they do provide many good services, most of the time it is done with biased American views and ulterior motives. On page 173, O’Neill discusses “international organizations’ focus on complex, long-term issues such as food production, public health, education, economic development, and conflict prevention” by using the Green Revolution as an example. However, O’Neill did not include the horrible consequences that followed USAID’s effort for food security. Besides relying heavily on pesticides (which led to cancer in many parts of the world) and water, the green revolution destroyed many agricultural biodiversity and wild diversity. On top of everything else, famines still persisted because the real problem was the unequal distribution of wealth, not the lack of mono-crop corn.
I’d like to look back on the first quote about globalization acting as a major reality for American nonprofit work, and I’d like to point out the direct correlation between the work of the nonprofits within globalization and the benefits that businesses receive because of it. If we look at the work the nonprofits did during the Green Revolution, we recognize that their strategy of growing more food was merely just a band-aid for the real political problems where famines were occurring. So I’d like to ask who the Green Revolution really was helping. I bet Monsanto didn’t do too badly from all the pesticides and fertilizer they sold. Starbuck’s probably did okay from all coffee they sold that came from mono-crop coffee plants where rainforests used to grow. The only ones that benefited from the Green Revolution were businesses. I don’t know if the nonprofits participating within the Green Revolution meant for it to be like that or if they just lost sight of the real underlying issue, but I think that nonprofits should always remain local or should enable the locals abroad to fix their own problems on their own terms instead of making decisions about what is best for their people and culture.

This is a video of an interview with Dr. Johnson Nkuuye who is discussing the danger of the new farming technologies that will be used in Africa as a part of the UNDP's Millenium Goals for another Green Revolution. He discusses the problems with foreign help implementing irrigation and new technologies for free and then leaving, and in return leaving the natives worse off. Sounds really familiar...

First off, I would like to give my condolences to Susanna Gabay’s family and friends. It’s always hard to understand these situations, especially when they involve a young person who is your age. Despite how people may feel about her death, the most important thing to remember is to celebrate her life and not get caught up in the logistics of what you could have done or what you could have said.

So, after class today I went to the library to try and get all these readings done for this week’s posting. It has been a struggle. Besides the news about Susanna, the readings are a little hard to get through. I felt my eyes glaze over and my mind wandering as to what I will put in my burrito while I was reading the “Broader Movement” article. However, I did find a few good statistics.
From 1995 to 2007, conservation and environmental organizations have grown about 4.6% per year.
- This is due to the steady growth of environmental awareness within the last fifty years and the recent wave of attention that has been brought to environmental issues such as global warming. However, one thing that I thought was interesting was that 2% of environmental nonprofits become inactive a year.

I also found it fascinating how inactive nonprofits are due to the amount of federal funding that is distributed within the nonprofit sector. In “A Good Cause Gone Bad”, Christine McDonald discusses how many of the large environmental nonprofits are more like corporations. Even though this concept of large organizations acting like large corporations can be understood when one takes into account the bureaucracy that becomes involved when organizations become larger, I think the main reason why these nonprofits tend to follow this pattern lies in their federal funding. Just like large corporations who both have the monopoly on a product and receive tax cuts from the government, large nonprofits also tend to follow this “Executive Director, bonus salary” persona because the government gives them the means. From a government standpoint this makes sense because large nonprofits hold more weight when politicians have an agenda where they want to have a well-known advocacy group as a partner. Large nonprofits also come in handy when they want to address an international cause such as Red Cross and their efforts in Haiti. Even though large nonprofits are able to lend more goods and services, the fact still remains: When an organization becomes too big they also pose a threat and can do much more damage than bonus salaries.
I think that more of the government funding should go to grassroots programs that can form local coalitions with other nonprofits in their area. I feel like programs that are formed within a community can help a community more because they have the subjective view needed to address the problems.

Art is a tricky field when it comes to defining it. Many nonprofits struggle with the concept of art, and although they may give the means to support the inspiration of the artists, they also hinder its growth because of the founders of the organization's biased views on what really is art.

Would art be better without the restraints the nonprofits put on it, and furthermore, would the community then step up as patrons and support it if there were no art-centered nonprofits?

My question was spurred in class when i began wondering what and how art would be like within communities if government funding ceased in conjunction with nonprofits. There weren't always nonprofits around to provide funding as an art associated organization and civilization has done a fine job of representing creativity and expression on their own.

Many forms of art were not taught nor funded and are now more a part of our culture than ever such as Jazz, hip-hop and the current controversial art expression, graffiti. All of these at one point have bared negative by the mass population but now have grown to be an essential representation of the cultures and people within the United States.

Here is a link describing nonprofit's obstacles with graffiti and their perception of whether or not it should be qualified as art.
www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/Blog/Controller/viewEntry?permalink-title=art-or-vandalism--nonprofits-take-on-graffiti

This week’s readings were over Chapter 7 on Advocacy and Chapter 8 on Arts and Culture. Both of these topics were very interesting to me and sparked some of my own personal experience within these areas.
The chapter over advocacy within the nonprofit sector was particularly interesting when the progression of movements was discussed. It’s amazing to think that such large movements could start from such humble beginnings. The suffrage movement is a great example of this. Starting with abolitionist activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the suffrage movement was brought to the public’s attention which lead up to decades and decades of women fighting for their right to vote. More influential women hopped on board like Lucy Stone who organized the National Women’s Right Convention which in return brought another feminist household name, Susan B. Anthony. To me, this is remarkable to think about because these women started with no political power and through hard work and perseverance they prompted the fight that eventually led to a women’s vote in 1920. Within this example, many aspects of societal movements can be observed. The process of a few citizens recognizing a problem, organizing and holding conferences, and holding direct action protests all led up to getting the whole country to recognize and get behind their cause. This movement was a building block for the various nonprofit women’s groups and clubs founded afterwards and the later struggles for affirmative action and the fight for more rights for women within their jobs. Although it might seem a little farfetched, the suffrage movement greatly contributed to the underlying attitude regarding issues such as abortion where the pro-choice opinion stressed the importance for a women’s right to “choose”.
The book further explains this progression by describing how “Fundamental issues such as women’s rights and environmental threat were not going to disappear because they were no longer trendy”. I found this sentence particularly true as few women now identify directly with being a suffragist, but instead now identify as radical feminists who are battling how the media defines them and giving the green light to those who are breaking out of gender roles. These new ideas are trendy and are slowly progressing into societal norms which will eventually have to be implemented into legislation in order for our government to keep up with the attitude and beliefs of the people. Two hundred years ago women couldn’t even obtain legal rights to her family’s land if her husband died. Our culture has come a long way from that through movements that started with a few women and have progressed into what is now the current movement known as third-wave feminism.

In Chapter 8 the issue of Arts within the United State’s nonprofit sector and government sector was discussed. Several times the book brought up the issue of whether or not the government should fund more art-focused nonprofits. It is no secret that nonprofits always need more money for their projects but it is arguable if the money is worth the price the government holds on the creative outlet of our country. The government basically already owns what we hear on the news and the subjective opinion we have on the world, so it seems that art is the last remaining outlet and medium that citizens have to express themselves and their beliefs. I think this statistic that the book provides explains the self-regulating importance that art holds within in our country:

“A national study found that in 1999 consumers spent $10.2 billion on admissions to performing arts events, as compared with $8.2 billion on spectator sports and $7.4 billion on motion pictures.”

This statistic illustrates the power and opinion the consumer holds within their opinion of the importance of art within their culture despite the distinction between “art and entertainment”, because I believe that entertainment is a way to both showcase art and to help it continue through the vote of an individual that is represented by their dollar spent.

During this week’s required readings, we focused on chapter 5 over health care in the United States. Although the book gave numbers for the trends of health care within the last century, the chapter left me with more questions. After reading the chapter I researched a little more into what really is a HMO. The trusty Wikipedia helped me grasp it a little further when I realized that they were basically our insurance companies. More now than ever with Obama’s recent health care plan and the strain on social security and Medicare, the layers of issues that are involved in health care are almost too overwhelming for me to give my opinion on.
The first thing that caught my attention in the book was the brief information provided in the parentheses at the bottom of pg. 99 that shared that most HMOs are now for-profit organizations. The credit to this trend is found in the government’s exploitation of the United States citizen’s health. In the beginning of the 1970’s, Kaiser Permanente decided they wanted to switch from a non-profit to a for-profit organization. As seen in the documentary “Sicko” by Michael Moore, this is proposed to President Nixon who frowns on the whole idea of “these damn medical programs” until he learns that Kaiser Permanente’s new strategy to health care is providing less medical care to patients. The next day Nixon publically announces his new plan that is going to make sure that every American has the best health care. Two years later the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 was passed that basically made it possible for these newly proclaimed businesses to receive grants and loans and changed the certification process from a state job to a federal job. This act also introduced the duel choice provision which gave HMOs access to critical employee-based markets. In short, it gave HMOs the means to make more money and the freedom to spend it how they please because they no longer fell under the regulations of a nonprofit. I found another good video by Michael Moore from his show “The Awful Truth”. In this show entitled “Funeral at an HMO”, he attempts to persuade the HMO Humana into giving one of their members (customers?) a pancreas transplant that has been a result of his diabetes and essential for his survival. The video is amusing, as the two men go to the Humana corporate headquarters and hassle their Communications Representative, but the one simple and interesting point that Moore addresses is the annual salary of $4 million plus stock options that their Chairman received in 1997. That one statistic within the video really put HMOs into perspective for me. At the end of the video Humana changes their policy and allows for the man to have a pancreas transplant after all the negative publicity aired. This too struck me as interesting because is reassured the power of the average citizen to change a multi-billion dollar corporation by exposing its ruthless regulations. Especially for a HMO, a member’s trust in the company is vital.



This shift in health care over the last 50 years is very frightening to me. When it comes down to saving someone’s life or saving money for the HMO company, our system of health care should be immediately addressed. But because there is so much money to be made in medicine from the cost of medication the cost of procedures, it becomes hard to see the bigger picture, which is essentially the lives these companies sacrifice in order to make more profit.

In the chapters 3 and 4 that we read this week, one of the main topics that stuck out to me was the immense and positive impact that religious organizations had and have within the nonprofit sector. However, I’ve always been a little reluctant in giving religious organizations credit when credit is due. Although my family wasn’t religious, my mother decided to put me through private Catholic education from grade school through high school because she believed it was a better education for me. That fact is up for argument, but the past few years I’ve really come to appreciate the knowledge I’ve gained about Christianity and Catholicism through my time spent within private education. Catholicism and I never seemed to see eye to eye and for many years I discredited everything positive they did within my communities and others. However, through the natural process of growing up I’ve become a little less self-righteous and have come to see all the positive work that religious organizations have contributed to this nation.
Over Christmas break I went on a road trip on a school bus my friend owns instead of spending time with my family. Although it didn’t fare well with my mother, I learned a lot about myself and the world on that trip. One particular event on Christmas Eve struck a chord in me when we all found ourselves out of money and tired of eating canned beans. That night we ended up at a church dinner feed for the homeless. It was a little surreal because I had always been on the other side of those feeds through volunteering for my parish in high school, but it put a lot of prejudices behind me about my views on the homeless (seeing as I was then one of them) and my views on religious organizations. There was no preaching or mention of religion, but just a simple dinner and funny conversations with San Francisco’s homeless.
Recently, the Catholic Church has been having a particularly rough time in the news, and despite my views on the religion as a whole, I believe it is important to realize all the good that has come out of this organization. A person’s faith is one of the most powerful entities and influential methods for changing a society. The strength of organized believers in an ideology has the potential to solve many of society’s problems or in some cases such as Nazi Germany, take a different route. When problems arise within a society such as overwhelming sadness, fear, or unsatisfactory feelings, people want something to believe in to give them hope. That is often where religion comes in, such as the historical high in membership that Churches saw after World War II (Nonprofit Nation, pg. 65). Although I feel that religious organizations can sometimes use this need for hope to manipulate people, I can’t hide the fact that without religion within our country our nonprofits and social services wouldn’t be anything like they are today. I found it really interesting how benevolence seemed to develop within our nation. The evolution from a few wealthy benefactors to billions upon billions of dollars circulating through religious organizations is a phenomenal progression. I believe this greatly has to do with an individual’s human nature of desiring lend help and at the same time the desire to find a positive community to be a part of. Because the people of the United States put their confidence in religion over “corporations, unions, the media, or federal, state, or local government” (Nonprofit Nation pg. 62), it therefore becomes the most powerful force for impacting society. This is important because ideally one can assume that the services religious organizations provide don’t have the same ulterior motive that a business or government would have. The power churches hold can seem daunting for me sometimes, but it also puts into perspective how privileged Americans are to have religious organizations as option at all.