Nonprofit Summit Told Sector's Influence Growing
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The nonprofit sector has the potential to supplant business and government as the dominant sector in society, predicts the editor of a magazine covering the sector.
“We’re in a very exciting time in the nonprofit sector. I fully expect the nonprofit sector will be the dominant sector in the coming generations,” remarked Ruth McCambridge, editor-in-chief of the Nonprofit Quarterly. “That’s just the way the economy is going.”
McCambridge was the keynote speaker at the seventh annual Nonprofit Summit, sponsored by the Raymond John Wean Foundation, which took place Thursday at Youngstown State University.
Because of the breakup of the industrial sector, the Internet and other factors, “[w]e’re seeing a rethinking of what it is our economy is supposed to look like, how is our wealth to be shared and how we participate in making this a better country,” McCambridge said. “We’re going to be looking more and more to the nonprofit sector because it does reflect the will of communities.”
The nonprofit community has opportunities “we’ve only begun to understand,” McCambridge continued. She pointed to the example of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which was founded to address blight and other issues in the Boston neighborhood. Its founders eschewed existing nonprofits to create an organization that would drive how neighborhood issues would be addressed.
“You feel that the rebuilding will last much longer than if someone came in from the outside and did that for them. It’s something that we create, that we contribute to and therefore we will protect it as we move along,” she said. “It means something different to us. It’s ours. I think that’s what this sector is all about. It’s about us developing collective will about the way we want something to be, whether it’s the environment or whether it’s the economy or it’s the way children or fed or whatever.”
McCambridge expressed concern over the increased concentration of wealth in the United States. The richest 400 people in the country, according to Forbes, have gone from owning $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion over the past year, a 15% increase, she noted.. Since the end of the Great Recession, 95% of economic gains have accrued to the wealthiest 1%.
“That is the kind of growth that has to be broken apart,” McCambridge warned. “We cannot live in a country with that kind of inequity.” The response to “that kind of consolidation of wealth is to get busy and say that’s not the way we want to live in this country.”
While philanthropy has a tendency to follow fads, which can be “very destabilizing,” an entity such as the locally based Wean Foundation is “firmly embedded” in the dynamics of the Mahoning Valley and allows itself to be driven by the intentions of its residents, McCambridge said. “That is a very different type of philanthropy than a top-down kind.”
The growing influence of the nonprofit sector goes “hand in hand” with the Wean Foundation’s belief that only engaged citizens can solve the problems of the community, and the scenario she paints is plausible, said Gordon Wean, Wean Foundation chairman.
“We all know government has less money than ever,” Wean said. “If the nonprofit sector is the one that is really trying to engage the community -- not sell them something, not get elected, but to really engage the community and help them, state what it is they want to do -- I see that as being all powerful because it’s the ultimate democracy.”
Wean shares McCambridge’s concern over the increased concentration of the nation’s wealth. He contends the business community should share it as well. Demand drives business, and if fewer people have disposable income demand is lower, “which is terrible for the economy. It never gets revved up again,” he said.
“It is dangerous and it’s been an unintended consequence of certain policies, but it’s a real result nonetheless,” Wean warned. “It is a dangerous element in the country.”
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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