Reinventing the Wheel

A painting of a bike I did for someone for Christmas one year (2009?) when I handmade all the canvases by stapling cloth over this thick cardboard.

I’m thinking a lot about reinventing the wheel these days. Nonprofits are great at it - it’s arguably one of our core competencies. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much time and money has been spent by every little organization to find and collate information that every other organization, large and small, has also found and collated. Every place I’ve ever worked in has some kind of directory - a place that referrals and partner organizations are stored, noting what they do, who works there, what their processes are, how and when to use them. Every organization has also spent hours looking for pro bono services to help them with their legal filings, and HR practices, and graphic design. I think about my friends in the nonprofit world and realize that between all of us there are probably thousands of hours of labor that have been spent finding information that someone else has already found and documented on an internal server somewhere.

There are reasons this happens - money, for one, where instead of just finding someone to hire you have to find the money to find someone to hire and if you can’t find the money you have to find a volunteer and even if you do find the money you have to do your due diligence (because no one trusts nonprofits to spend money well, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been over that). And there is the semi-reasonable argument that different organizations need different kinds of information in their niche directories. But there’s also fear: that if we share these resources, the partnerships we’ve cultivated will get overloaded or leave us for another, cuter org they now like more; that transparency will somehow make things worse, not better; that if we can’t own the resources we built then we can’t prove to our funders that we have real value.

There has got to be a better way - right?*

Nonprofits have a tendency to silo ourselves into issue areas. We talk about intersectionality, and there is movement toward it, but the system is built on bifurcation. Foundations and donors fund issues, not the concept of a nonprofit. We are expected to be and stay niche. If you work in immigration, you go to these funders; if you work in environmental issues, you go to those. There may be overlap - some foundations may give to both environmental and immigration work - but it is still highly specific. It’s rare to be in a true cross-section of service providers. Of course, people don’t actually live issue areas. You may be an environmental advocacy organization but that doesn’t mean you won’t meet an undocumented person needing representation at their next court date. But since you work in environmental policy (I’m just committing to this example now, stay with me) you don’t have a list of immigration legal service providers in the area. So you have one of two options - you say, sorry, can’t help you (and maybe feel a little guilty) or spent an hour researching local providers and hoping the ones you find are good. And - boom, you just spent an hour finding information someone already has instead of the work you should** be doing.

And then there’s operations - everyone has spent hours of unpaid time building out employee and volunteer manuals, hunting down pro bono employment attorneys to vet them, revising them, because there isn’t enough general operating to pay a professional to just get it done.

On the one hand - I love niche. I only give to small, local service providers. (I’ll save *this* conversation for when end of the year giving goes into full effect, get excited!) I’m not interested in consolidating power into the hands of a few, large organizations who can manage information. If we’re going to do that, make it the government, that’s supposed to be their job anyway. But I AM interested in figuring out how to make life easier for the little guys who don’t have the funds or staff so that they aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel.

I don’t normally do this - WE SHALL SEE HOW IT GOES - but I have opened the comments here. I would love to hear how your organizations are or are not reinventing the wheel and what your solution(s) would be to alleviate this. (Also if you want to approximate how many hours you have spent finding information someone else already found, please do. It’ll be fascinating and depressing!)

I have to believe that there is a world in which small organizations can stay small while also not destroying themselves trying to stay open. Bigger shouldn’t always be the answer to better - I want a world in which small can be great.

*This is maybe the central thesis of my life right now, especially when it comes to nonprofit management.
**A vague eye-roll around the word “should.”