Uncharitable investigates how for-profit strategies could and should be used by nonprofits.
Uncharitable goes where no other book on the nonprofit sector has dared to tread. Where other texts suggest ways to optimize performance inside the existing charity paradigm, Uncharitable suggests that the paradigm itself is the problem and calls into question our fundamental canons about charity. Dan Pallotta argues that society’s nonprofit ethic creates an inequality that denies the nonprofit sector critical tools and permissions that the for-profit sector is allowed to use without restraint. These double standards place the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage. While the for-profit sector is permitted to use all the tools of capitalism, the nonprofit sector is prohibited from using any of them. Capitalism is blamed for creating inequities in our society, but charity is prohibited from using the tools of capitalism to rectify them—and ironically, this is all done in the name of charity. This irrational system, Pallotta explains, has its roots in four-hundred-year-old Puritan ethics that banished self-interest from the realm of charity. The ideology is policed today by watchdog agencies and the use of so-called efficiency measures, which Pallotta argues are flawed, unjust, and should be abandoned. By declaring our independence from these obsolete ideas, Pallotta theorizes, we can dramatically accelerate progress on the most urgent social issues of our time. Uncharitable is an important, provocative, timely, and accessible book—a manifesto about equal economic rights for charity. This edition has a new, updated introduction by the author.
By:
Dan Pallotta
Imprint: Brandeis University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 227mm,
Width: 154mm,
Spine: 21mm
Weight: 458g
ISBN: 9781684581245
ISBN 10: 1684581249
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 30 December 2022
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction to New Edition Introduction 1. The Morality of Outcomes Nonprofit Ideology A Model of Christian Charity Conclusion 2. The Foundations of Our Misconstruction Economic Apartheid The First Error—Constraints on Compensation: Charity and Self-Deprivation Are Not the Same Thing The Second Error—Prohibition on Risk: Punishing Courage, Rewarding Timidity The Third Error—Discouragement of Long-Term Vision: The Need for Immediate Gratification Institutionalizes Suffering The Fourth Error—Discouragement of Paid Advertising: If You Don’t Advertise Here, Your Competition Will The Fifth Error—Prohibition on Investment Return: The Limits of No Return, and a Stock Market for Charity Conclusion 3. Stop Asking This Question Efficiency Measures—The Puritan Guard Efficiency Measures Miss the Point Efficiency Measures Don’t Measure Efficiency Efficiency Measures Are Unjust Overhead Is a Fiction Summary New Questions and a Very Large Assessment Apparatus 4. Courage A Cold World? Strategic Plan Reclaiming Our Dreams Acknowledgments Case Study—Pallotta TeamWorks Methods and Controversy Collapse of the Company Impact on Organizations’ AIDS and Breast Cancer Fundraising Notes Bibliography Index
Dan Pallotta founded Pallotta Team-Works, the company that invented the AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer Three-Day events, which raised over half a billion dollars and netted $305 million in nine years—more money, raised more quickly, for these causes than any known private event operation in history. The company had more than three hundred and fifty full-time employees in sixteen US offices, was the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, and fundamentally reinvented the paradigm for special event fundraising in America.
Reviews for Uncharitable – How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential
Everyone who cares about nonprofit organizations and their potential accomplishments-from journalists to sophisticated donors to foundation officials-should read this book. They'll surely be convinced that fundraising ratios and program expense ratios are a silly, useless, and even fraudulent way to compare efficiency across nonprofit organizations. * Stanford Social Innovation Review *
