Life Without Leverage

The other day I showed up for an important meeting that I'd spent two weeks preparing for only to sit in the lobby for 45 minutes before being told that Celebrity X-- the person with whom I had a scheduled meeting--was unavailable. I'd been up all night finalizing a pitch deck for Celebrity X so I wasn't ready to walk out so quickly. But when I offered to come back, I was told that I could but that there was no guarantee that X would see me. Now, here's the thing. I wasn't alone. My CEO had flown in from Los Angeles in part to join the meeting. It was that important. X's endorsement and support could alter my organization's immediate future. I was disappointed, embarrassed and angry.

Yet my boss just shrugged and said to the gatekeeper, "Thank you." Then he turned and asked if we should go. I sighed and nodded. It was yet another setback in my year plus as an Executive Director. We were waiting for the elevator when I noticed that my CEO didn't seem bothered.

At the elevator I felt compelled to apologize. Granted, it was my meeting and my relationship. But it was still his time. "Why are you apologizing?" he said, stepping inside the opening door and pressing the "L" button in one motion. "We don't have the luxury of leverage," he chuckled.

In the past year I've come to accept three truths. The first is that there are a lot of charities with great missions chasing the same dollars. This puts us in what I would call a structurally disadvantaged position. The second is that aside from the tax deductions we provide, charities aren't viewed as value creators (this is slowly changing), yet most of us are entirely dependent for our day to day survival on public officials and private donor sector dollars. The third is that the average person thinks they know a lot more than they do about the nonprofit sector. You can read about poverty or education and even write about them for a living, but unless you work for a charity you really don't understand the scope of the challenges and how much worse things would be without a sector solely dedicated to keeping the floor from caving in. It's not a knock or a dig. We in the charitable industrial complex just know that the work we do in without recognition or reward benefits society as a whole. We know we're as indispensable as the police and private equity. We know that without people willing to help others for a living while being underpaid, civilization would look a lot more like fury road than downtown Brooklyn.

We also know that's not how the private and public sectors see things. No one will ever come out and say it, but as far as society is concerned, the nonprofit sector exists at the pleasure of the sectors that really make the world go round, the ones that create wealth and jobs. Charity is, well, a social good, yes, but it suffers from two distinct public relations challenges. The first is that it isn't vital to the economy, a view supported by the fact that it exists in its own special tax filing category and operates by a modified set of financial rules regarding how it draws, spends and accounts for its income. Charity in this sense is an add-on feature, the dessert we splurge on when times are good. As charities we're supposed to understand the rules of the game and be grateful for the support we get.

The second challenge is that a lot of Americans associate charity with penance. Our courts dole out community service as an alternative to incarceration. We assign wrongdoers volunteer hours at a homeless shelter with the vague hope that it'll be an edifying experience, and then we turnaround and expect people to willingly give up their time and money to those very same shelters? Isn't that odd? Yet, this is the predicament under which charities operate.

The hardest pill to swallow as the ED of an organization that serves urban black and brown communities is that our work and its value often go unnoticed. By definition, we operate on the social margins. We're surrounded by need, a mandate to fill it and a shortage of resources to get the job done. We make do with what we are given, which isn't much. We're expected to be grateful for every dime we raise, and we are. We strive after short-term government grants that come with exhaustive reporting mandates and threat of severe penalties and private gifts from the wealthy that come with so many strings that it's easy to lose sight of our mission. Parents regard my staff a glorified babysitters. Schools treat them like their less educated second cousins from the farm. Companies call us up for kids as an annual team-building experience: spend a few hours planting a garden with less fortunate kids and disappear for the next 364 days. My lot isn't a whole lot better. Sixty percent of the emails I send never get a response. My phone calls frequently go straight to voicemail and are rarely returned. The work alone is hard. The psychological abuse that charities endure--the constant reminder of your place on the pecking order--is brutal.

I won't put words in my CEO's mouth but I will say that his attitude was instructive. If I intend to last in this field then I'd better make peace with my place on the food chain. I didn't and would likely never have leverage. As an ED my job is to ask people for things, mostly money, for my kids, hope that they appreciate the value of what we do and don't take it personally when they don't, which is bound to be the majority of the time.

Luckily, the story didn't end there.

I happened to check my phone as we were headed to the train station. I had three new messages, all from X. "Where did you go?" "Are you still here?""Come back!" I texted him back and he insisted we come back up. Naturally we did. He met us in the waiting area and ushered us past the gatekeeper, who, in the moment, I came to realize had never even let him know we were waiting in the first place. He led us into a board room where his marketing team awaited.  X made introductions, expressed his avid support for our work and left us to work out the details for a partnership. Thirty minutes later we walked out of the board room with the broad strokes of a deal that could, in fact, alter the trajectory of my organization.

As we headed to the elevator for the second time in less than an hour, I couldn't stop talking about the twist of fate. My CEO had a more judicious perspective. The facts on the ground hadn't changed. We still didn't have leverage per se. What we had was access to leverage. In our line of work that's about as good as it gets.