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Having worked in nonprofits for years, I have truly learned the hard lesson about how hard it is to raise funds for altruistic endeavors! It's so much easier to

Having worked in nonprofits for years, I have truly learned the hard lesson about how hard it is to raise funds for altruistic endeavors! It's so much easier to raise funds from someone who expects a return to their life in one form or another. We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "We have the wealth on earth, yes, but fundamentally people are selfish. I think this behavior is largely driven by fear of losing everything, even for those most privileged." I think it's a little more complex than that. Something that still doesn't seem to be well understood in the non-profit field is that of dependency. The idea "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" should be the guiding principal of pretty much all non-profits (with the only exception, in my opinion, being for disaster relief). The idea being that the end goal is self-sufficiency. I'm not a millionaire, nor am I likely to become one in my lifetime, but I recognise my own patterns of donating to charity, and I can see the charity/non-profits that I'm most likely to donate to are either involved with disaster relief, or are doing something that makes a lasting change. When I've donated to charities outside these groups, I've resented the expected "thank you for your donation, can you donate any more please". At that point, the charity has become, in a small way, dependent on my generosity, with no end in sight. I'd imagine there's similar resentment for millionaires and billionaires also.