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" Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money." Sure you can, by volunt

by sdfsaf 7y ago

" Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money." Sure you can, by volunteering on the board of directors of said charity. Like my wife does, helping organize a charity large enough that it runs a free hospital, a dental clinic and home for otherwise homeless people in a major US city.

jlokier 7y ago
That isn't what is meant by democratising management in the GP comment. In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them. By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours. With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time. What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy. Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission. (I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)

by sdfsaf 7y ago

jlokier 7y ago

That isn't what is meant by democratising management in the GP comment. In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them. By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours. With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time. What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy. Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission. (I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)