What lengths would you go to in order to survive?
Would you lie?
Would you cheat?
Would you steal?
What if you needed money to survive?
Without that money, everything falls apart.
Would you bend the rules? Skirt them? Break them completely?
Where would you draw the lines?
In part 1 of Fantasy Land, I introduced you to the make-believe world that I work and operate in. You can read that by clicking below:
In part 2, I’ll outline the lengths that the residents of Fantasy Land will go to in order to maintain their funding.
It’s a Jungle Out There
In the real-world, an organization creates a product or a service that solves or addresses a particular problem or issue. If it’s effective enough among an array of choices, then the free market and consumers respond by purchasing it or paying for the service. These organizations operate in a “kill to eat” world. If they don’t succeed, they don’t eat.
It’s a regular jungle.
When a real-world organization fails to solve or address it or when a competitor comes along that does it better, faster, and cheaper, that organization diminishes or ultimately fails. It’s adapt or die, and you only get so many chances at revenue streams before free markets and free will shift to better organizations for a customer’s needs.
In other words, to survive, they have to demonstrate clear results and win over a variety of customers on a regular basis. You must constantly attract new customers, while simultaneously trying to retain your existing ones.
A restaurant that serves consistently bad meals will lose their customers and go out of business.
But what if you don’t have to worry about customers?
THE Customer in Fantasy Land
Non-profits in Fantasy Land require revenue, just like a business in the real world. But they serve a customer base that can’t pay them.
The homeless person needing a shelter doesn’t pay the Salvation Army for a meal and a bed. The mentally ill man doesn’t pay the local counseling organization to treat him. The destitute addict typically doesn’t pay for services at a substance abuse clinic.
These organizations serve a customer base that can’t pay them.
Yet, they continue to exist without paying customers.
How can you survive without paying customers? Who pays for all of that?
Typically, the government does.
Sometimes, it’s the local government. Often, the state steps in to assist. And more often than not, your favorite local charity receives generous government grants from Uncle Sam.
That means the real customers of Fantasy Land aren’t the homeless, the mentally ill, or the addict.
It’s the government.
In future posts, I’ll expand on the inherent conflict with that.
Suffice it to say, though, while a business needs to meet the needs of a large and diverse customer base, the charity in Fantasy Land needs to only please a relative handful of customers, and perhaps just one or two.
All Your Eggs in One Basket
In spite of what you might hear from non-profits and charities in your community, government funding is not “unstable”. Has government funding shrunk that you’ve heard in the last 30 years? The last 50?
No!
It seems to expand at an alarming and exponential rate. Read my post on the “War” on Poverty if you’d like to see what I mean.
The size of governmental funding continues to increase, so in spite of the cries from how unstable and uncertain their funding is, your local charities and non-profits have access to nearly unlimited funding.
The real challenge is that their overreliance on government funding puts all of their eggs in one basket.
That means that they’re in competition with others in Fantasy Land to acquire the government funding they need to survive.
Everyone is tripping over themselves to please one customer.
Flexible Ethics with the 800 Pound Gorilla
As I said at the top of this post, the ultimate question of any organization is what they would do to survive.
And just like in the real world, it’s a jungle in here, too, as organizations seek to survive. They need funding to survive, and when there’s one giant customer, the 800-pound gorilla, then, you do what you have to in order to please that gorilla.
Stab another organization in the back?
I know of two organizations that partnered together on a food program for kids in poverty. One year, one of the organizations decided to apply for the government grant on their own without telling the other organization.
They got the grant.
What did the other organization do?
They continued to operate their food program as well with other funding (some of which also comes from the government). Now, we have duplicate programs, operating in silos, with animosity between them and a refusal to work together serving underprivileged kids anymore.
Not exactly a win for our community.
Lie in their reporting?
I was asked a few years ago to sign a recommendation letter indicating that a local youth organization received more local funding than they actually did. I pointed out the inflated number and corrected it. I was berated by the head of that organization when I refused to lie and sign the original.
My crime?
Honesty and integrity.
Those traits threatened to reduce the federal matching funds if they used the real amount. They asked me to lie in order to increase how much federal money came to our community.
Yet, people trust them to solve poverty?
Lie on the Census?
Yep…I know that happened as well. Lies of omission anyway. I know of several local organizations in the summer of 2020 begging for help with the Census. Part of their instructions included finding as many people as possible to count.
This included “undocumented migrants”, the Fantasy Land euphemism for illegal immigrants.
They carefully worded the instructions, but they did so in a way to encourage them not to ask too many questions of residents living in our community illegally.
They cared about pumping up the numbers to increase the federal funding (again).
In my near-decade in Fantasy Land, I’ve yet to see any of them pay any real price for this. There’s little accountability and zero consequences from what I’ve seen.
In Fantasy Land, all bets are off as the various charities and non-profits compete to appease the 800-pound gorilla to receive their slice of the pie. They’ll lie, cheat, and steal to get the funding they need to survive.
They’ll do anything, ethical and unethical, to appease the gorilla and get the money.
The question isn’t what they would do, or even what won’t they do.
The real question, as we get ready for part 3, is how far they will go FOR the gorilla when the gorilla makes their funding dependent on their compliance.
Because when the 800-pound gorilla tells the non-profits in your community to jump, they respond:
“How high?!”