Nonprofit Boardinghouse Reach

I ran into a nonprofit CEO today who told me something I don’t hear often: “We have as much money as it takes to do our program. We don’t have to fundraise.”

Why did that surprise me?

It wasn’t the economy, or the difficulty of going back to the well yet another time.

In fact, it wasn’t anything she was expressing about the hard slog of fundraising that startled me.

It was the fact that, for most nonprofit visionaries I know, their reach always exceeds their grasp.

Way back when, there was something called “Boardinghouse Reach.” As my uncle, who grew up in a large family that took in boarders during the Depression, explains it, it describes the way that boarders could reach all the way across the table, over other people and their plates, to get to the salt or the bowl of potatoes or the extra piece of pie. It means taking care of one’s own needs, reaching beyond right what is right in front of you, to grab what you want from afar.

It’s a funny term – it’s pejorative, implying a lack of manners; yet it’s also admiring, as in someone who knows what they want and goes for it.

There’s something of that in every nonprofit visionary.

They imagine what’s not there…they see a need to be filled…and their reach always exceeds their grasp.

Their vision precedes their funding and – almost always – exceeds it.

Which is what makes nonprofit visionaries so exciting to follow and so easy to fundraise for – and so important to fundraise around. Because there’s always a new need to fill or a new program to launch…and those take money. More than is easily at hand.

In essence, it takes that kind of audacious nonprofit vision to move people to engage in fundraising – an activity that’s often uncomfortable and awkward, at least at the beginning.

What gets people over the hump?

It’s boardinghouse reach – and the scramble to raise the resources to keep up with it.