Welcome to "Fantasy Land"
A multi-part look into the make believe world of charities and non-profits
Happy Friday, Flyover Country!
Today, I’m introducing part one of a multi-part series highlighting how the world of non-profits and charities that you think you know, operate in an alternate reality.
That’s right.
I work in Fantasy Land.
I mean that in the literal sense.
I’ve learned that the natural laws and normal rules cease to apply or exist in this world and those of their closely affiliated partners in academia and government.
I’ll give you a stark example.
In my county of around 200,000 people, approximately 1,100 non-profits and charities operate. That’s one for about every 180 people.
Seems excessive, right?
In a roughly three-year period including the pandemic year of 2020, most of these non-profits lost state funding during a budget battle, watched as local United Way funding dropped by nearly 60%, and then got hit with a once in a century virus that introduced a novel concept of shutting down society.
Take a guess how many closed.
I’ll give you a hint.
Zip.
Zero.
Nada.
Any one of these factors alone, particularly the COVID shutdown policies, should have been a deathblow to dozens of these organizations. Yet, somehow, these non-profits managed to survive the perfect storm of all three of these events.
How?
I’ll get to that in a second.
By May 2020, our community witnessed dozens of small businesses, typically restaurants, that shuttered permanently as their revenues cratered. The most effective of them quickly adapted to online orders and Door Dash, and when able, created outdoor seating arrangements to take advantage of warmer weather to get customers again and restart the stalled revenue engine.
PPP loans assisted a number of local businesses as well, but it couldn’t save some from being toppled by these irresistible and natural laws of economics.
So, how exactly did all of those charities survive?
In Fantasy Land, many (not all) non-profits and charities function more like a cancer.
Ouch.
Truth hurts.
As much as many (again, not all) of these organizations love to lecture you on how much good they’re doing in fighting for the homeless or the mentally ill or the children, this lecture serves to distract you and guilt you into not looking too closely under the hood. The reality is their top priority is sustaining themselves.
And a cancer must spread to feed its own survival.
I’ve witnessed local non-profits and charities morph in similar ways, but instead of attacking healthy tissue to sustain their life force, they gorge on the trough that is government funding.
I’ve watched as organizations started with a very clear an precise mission to provide a crisis hotline for the community, staffed by volunteers and college students turns into Frankenstein’s monster by adding on mismatched parts and programs to qualify for state and federal grants that have little to nothing to do with the original mission.
How many restaurants do you know that add on a bookstore and then an oil change place and then a massage parlor?
In essence, that’s what many of these organizations do. They lust after government money, and what started out as mission-driven clarity to address a specific and local societal problem transforms into whatever they need to be in order to continue to suck at the government teat.
And if you’re willing to abandon your original mission to chase money, what aren’t you willing to do?
And that’s the sinister and troubling trend I witness in Fantasy Land.
I write Flyover Country to attempt to highlight and draw attention to dangerous trends that most of my fellow residents of Flyover Country remain oblivious to. I publish as frequently as I can to try to wake up and mobilize more of my well-meaning, but largely oblivious neighbors to the threats on our doorsteps.
You may even wonder, why does it matter, Cal? Why should I care that no charities in your county closed their doors during a once in a century kind of event?
I can assure you that dozens, if not hundreds, of these charities and non-profits should have closed from any one of these events, let alone all three combined in 3-year period. Many are redundant. Most are ineffective.
Yet they continue to exist.
Why?
They operate not in an effort to eradicate issues of homelessness, poverty, addiction, or mental health.
They operate to feast on governmental funding and survive. See a stark and lucrative example of this (to the tune of $22 TRILLION and counting) in my post from August 2021 below:
When an organization becomes that dependent on the drug of government funding, they’ll do whatever is asked of them to get their next hit. Consider all that you see in the headlines currently. Think about the incessant push of ideologies like “equity” or “pronouns”. You’re besieged with non-stop, in your face, activism.
There are no safe spaces anymore where politics and ideology don’t invade your life.
And much of that starts in Fantasy Land.
As I move into future parts of this series, I’ll provide real-world example that highlight that your local charities and non-profits bend reality to fit their needs.
Because in Fantasy Land, the normal rules don’t apply.
In the next part of this series, I’ll introduce you to the lengths some of these organizations will go to in order to get funding. The lengths that they’ll go to is, to put it mildly…troubling.
See you next week!