The Authentic Organization

As I embarked on this project, I invited readers of Nonprofit Online News to share stories of authenticity and it absence. In most cases, I will obscure the identifying information about the people or the organizations involved.

Although it’s not my favorite perspective, the conventional definition of a “social enterprise” is an organization or a program of an organization that trades in goods or services in support of a social objective. Social enterprises are uniquely vulnerable to a certain kind of mission drift, as the organization’s operations are dragged along by the revenue model and stakeholders are left with a sense of alienation.

One of my readers wrote of such a situation (edited for privacy):

I have recently left an organization that uses the title of non-profit to profit from federal inmates. The organization provides half-way houses for federal inmates transitioning back into the community. They are paid well for these services. The concept is grand, it can and has provided a needed service for those folks coming out of prisons, but now it is just business with no regard for the inmates.

They hire staff and require them to work one year before being eligible for benefits, there is no succession planning, leadership is by tyranny. The passion has been lost, the vision blurred and the need to help others obscured. I was asked to falsify official documents to the bureau of prisons, which I refused. And I resigned my position.

There was a discussion recently on the ARNOVA mailing list about mission drift and whether large organizations are more susceptible than small ones. No clear conclusions were drawn. I think it’s clear, from both the ARNOVA examples and my reader’s story, that a successful and scalable revenue model is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.

Although we can’t know for sure without much more information, some of which may be lost in time, I can imagine a combination of factors at work here. It is likely that both the leadership and the management techniques were set up to reinforce the revenue model only. Key operational tools such as metrics and reports most likely kept that revenue model at the center of everyday assessment, rather than the mission that the model was meant to serve. Of course, money is easier to measure than mission, in most cases.

What else might have contributed to such a drift? What could have been done to prevent it?