Making the Hard Hard Choices

I’ve been – we’ve all been – watching the Harlem School of the Arts saga unfolding publically over the past few weeks, with sadness and regret. A long time coming, the situation’s genesis predates the economic crisis but the organization clearly needed some breathing room to turn things around, that just wasn’t there.

What do I see as the relevance for other nonprofits, even those not in a dramatic decline? This is the phrase in the New York Times article that leapt out at me: “The fund-raising wasn’t there, but their expenses continued to be the same while there were revenue shortfalls,” said Kenneth J. Knuckles, president of The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone.

Let me repeat that: The fund-raising wasn’t there, but their expenses continued to be the same while there were revenue shortfalls.

How many of us have had to make hard, hard choices in the past couple of years: cutting programs, laying off or furloughing staff, closing sites…? From our catbird’s seat assisting nonprofits we’ve seen a number of creative – and heartbreaking – decisions that groups have made, as income (especially from government and corporate sources) has inexorably declined.

Perhaps Cause Effective sees more of these situations because we’re the “fundraising option of last resort” – i.e. nonprofits come to us to diversify their funding when it’s clear that the budget gap is increasing between their expenses and their income; and that what they can raise from their traditional fundraising methodology is woefully inadequate for today’s economy.

And it takes time for that to turn around, so we’re often sitting with chief executives in the space of radical choices…the scalpel, the cleaver, the space of sawing off a limb to save the tree.

For Cause Effective personally, that meant subletting a good portion of our office space – more than half our site – to two other small firms (one nonprofit, one not). The income we gained from that, quite literally, took the place of one large grant that we’ve lost over the past couple of years. This wasn’t easy – one of our staff members ultimately created a work station at a desk in the conference room shared by 12 of us – when he gets displaced for a meeting, he finds somewhere else to hang his hat, or else he works from home.

But we did what we needed to do to hang on financially and commit to continuing the impact of our mission. Our client base – you, the nonprofits that need our expertise and assistance – deserved no less from us.

I’m a great believer in the “until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes” school of withholding judgment, but I do believe there’s a time to come down from the angel theory of nonprofit fundraising – to wit, the school’s board chair, Christopher Paci, has been quoted recently as saying: “If an angel or group of angels come to the doorstep immediately we’ll be able to save the school.”

Well sometimes angels do come through in extraordinary situations – but you can’t run a nonprofit in the everyday by relying on the descent of angels.

Mr. Paci continued by saying: “Reality is bleak, and that’s what we’re up against.”

Yep.

Now – and always.