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The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle


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The central argument is about infrastructure and nonprofits struggling to function as organizations and being able to serve their beneficiaries. The article talked about misleading reports, founders' unrealistic expectations, and underfed overhead. Misleading reports in nonprofit organization is said to be one of the key problems. Gregory and Howard write that "scrutiny found that 75 percent to 85 percent of these organizations were incorrectly reporting the costs associated with grants." Nonprofit organizations are giving the wrong data. They reported that their "overhead rates ranging from 13 percent to 22 percent," while their "actual overhead rates ranged from 17 percent to 35 percent."

There is a problem within the nonprofit sectors because of the funders' unrealistic expectation to the grantee. Many funders are aware that "nonprofit organizations report artificially low overhead figures, ..." Funders and those at the top of the organizations are aware of the infrastructure of the nonprofit sectors, but some are not willing to report their real data while others want to take the risk.
Gregory and Howard reports that "an organization that decides—on its own—to buck the trend and report its true overhead costs could risk losing major funding." This right here shows why there are many misleading reports in the nonprofit sectors.

I have not really looked into my organization's data line-by-line.

I do not have stories to write about because I have not been given the chance to look deeper into my organization. Most of what I have done was the base-line.




Comments

  1. Victoria RestlerApril 10, 2018 at 5:43 PM

    Thanks for this thoughtful analysis Angie. I wonder what kinds of questions or documents you might explore to better understand how PSU is impacted by this dynamic.

    ReplyDelete

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