Nonprofit AF

Script for Lord of the Rings, if it were set in nonprofit and philanthropy

Posted on March 17, 2025March 18, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: A house built from a hill, with a round door, covered in plants, including a tree growing out of it. There’s a sign on the fence that says “No admittance except on party business.” This is a scene from Hobbiton, a set built for the Lord of the Rings movies. Image by Thandy Yung on Unsplash]

Hey everyone, hope you’re hanging in there. I’ve been watching my favorite movies as a break from the horrors of the real world. Some are very inspiring. Lord of the Rings, for example, has lots of parallels to our world, including an all-consuming evil and band of heroes trying to save the world. Which, of course, makes me think about what if LOTR were set in our sector. Below is the sample script. Let me know what you think.

***

SCENE 1: RIVENDELL

GANDALF: Despite our best efforts, Sauron has awoken. We have never faced such a threat. As we speak, his forces of foul orcs and Uruk-hai march across all of Middle Earth, laying waste to the land, bringing terror and destruction, especially to the most vulnerable.

ELROND: We must form a fellowship and journey to cast this Ring of Capitalism into Mt. Doom while the rest prepare for war. That’s the only way to defeat Sauron and his evil.

BOROMIR: One does not simply end capitalism. Even with the finest warriors in the land, the odds do not favor us.

FRODO: Still, we cannot stand still and watch the people we care about get slaughtered. You have my organizing skills.

ARAGORN: And you have my advocacy expertise.

LEGOLAS: You have my grantwriting skills.

GIMLI: And you have my logic model.

ELROND: Excellent. Then let us—

SAM: What about you, Mister Elrond sir? You have all the gold and mithril. Will you contribute them to the fight?

ELROND: We have been giving out 5% of our gold every year for you all to fight evil. If we give out more to fight Sauron, we will deplete our cache and then what happens when Sauron is defeated, where’s the funding to rebuild?

SAM: But Mister Elrond, we won’t be able to defeat Sauron if we don’t have enough resources. He’s burning everything to the ground. There won’t be anything to rebuild!

LEGOLAS: He does have a point…Maybe we should increase the gold we give out, from 5% each year to—

ELROND (raises up one hand): We elves do not meddle in the affairs of the lesser beings of Middle Earth. We watch from a distance, giving out 5% of our riches, and then we go to the West to the Undying Lands, the Land of Perpetuity, where as usual none of this really affects us.

Thanks, Foundations, but 6% or Even 10% Payout is Not Enough

Posted on March 4, 2025March 4, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: Black and white photograph of six police officers in riot gear–shields and helmets–standing in a row, barricading the street and sidewalk. Image by StockSnap on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing OK during this time of Fascist Extremist Assholes Reign (FEAR). If you’re free this week, March 4 to 6, please join me at the virtual Nonprofit Marketing Summit: Evolve, which is FREE. My session will be on March 5^th at 11am Pacific Time, and is called “Nonprofits, Bans, and Burnout: Surviving in 2025 Without Losing Our Collective Minds (or Tax-Exempt Status).” Please register here, attend, and say comforting things in the chat in case I break down weeping into a stuffed unicorn.

***

Last week, the MacArthur Foundation received a lot of praise for committing to increase its payout rate for at least the next two years from the legal minimum of 5% to 6%, which will add to the foundation’s total giving by about $150M. Here’s an article on it (Content warning, the article immediately displays a picture of Agent Orange, Russia’s most valuable puppet, in case you are trying to regulate your stress level). Here’s a piece from MacArthur’s president, John Palfrey, encouraging other foundations to do the same:

“We are inviting other philanthropies to join us: set it at six. We hope others in a position to do so will consider voluntarily raising their baseline payout rate to 6 percent, from the 5 percent as mandated by law, for the coming two years, at a minimum […] Philanthropies are well positioned to respond during periods of crisis. Many stepped up during COVID-19 and put out more funds when the social sector needed it. Today is a time when severe budget shortages again call for an infusion of additional capital.”

Dear Funders: Your Endowments Will Be Worthless in a Fascist State

Posted on February 18, 2025February 18, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: Books in flames. Image by Movidagrafica on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, this post will be disorganized and will possibly piss off some people. The kids didn’t have school today, so I spent time hanging out with them and didn’t have much time to work on this. The proverb about parenting and how “the days are long but the years are short” is terrifyingly accurate. It feels like yesterday I was bathing them in the bathroom sink; and now they are sassy as hell:

“Daddy, tell us stories about how poor you were as a kid, like about how you got one salted plum each week as a treat because your parents couldn’t afford candy!”

“Yes, and about how you didn’t have real toys and had to make tiny boats out of banana leaves!”

With the horror happening all around us all the time, I find comfort in my kids. Children are a good reminder of why we do this work, and why we can’t give up, even when the tides seem insurmountable, as they often feel right now. I love their imagination, which is filled with hope and optimism, balanced by occasions when relatively minor events can suddenly become catastrophic, like the time my then-three-year-old thought the world was ending because he left behind a cool stick he found when we visited a park. (I went back to get it later).

Funders, stop bringing spreadsheets to knife fights!

Posted on February 4, 2025February 4, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: A hand holding a serrated knife, seeming ready for a fight. Image by Paul Volostnov on Unsplash]

A few weeks ago, which now feels like an eternity ago, Inside Philanthropy gave me the award for Philanthropy Critic of the Year, saying “Through his blog Nonprofit AF, he’s long advanced a critique of funders that is irreverent, hard hitting[,] and often cuttingly funny.” It’s nice to be recognized for my ramblings, even if IP didn’t even use the Oxford Comma in the recognition, which is rather hurtful.

Among the other awardees are two that stood out to me:

Highest Return on Investment: Donating to the Heritage Foundation: “We’ve long argued that public policy grantmaking offers the greatest leverage for funders. Exhibit A is Heritage’s long record of outsized influence, which is set to hit a new peak in a second Trump administration with Project 2025 or its equivalent.”

No Kidding Award: The Generosity Commission: “Debuted with much fanfare in 2021, the blue-ribbon commission set out to study the decline in ‘everyday’ donors and found that, well, yes, small-donor giving is down. There’s more in the commission’s hefty report, but was it worth all the rigamarole?”

While it irks me that the Heritage Foundation gets lauded and platformed, there is no denying how horrifyingly effective this funder has been. What we are seeing now with the destruction of democracy and the rise of fascism can be greatly attributed to the work of the Heritage Foundation and aligned right-wing funders. And it will only get worse, as we will find out when Project 2025, which we failed to stop, gets implemented in full and erodes our rights over the coming years, if not weeks.

Script for The Matrix, if it were set in nonprofit and philanthropy

Posted on January 6, 2025January 8, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: A hand, pointing straight at the camera, while concentric circles of ones and zeroes in green text, as well as a curtain of green codes, appear in the foreground and background. Image by geralt on Pixabay]

Welcome back to work, everyone. I hope your holiday break was restful. I was able to hang out with my kids, and when they were asleep, binge-watched all the episodes of Shogun; it was glorious! But now we’re back to the grind, and it is cold and miserable. Sometimes, I think the people who believe we exist in a computer simulation may be on to something, and I find myself looking around, trying to break the fourth wall, hoping whoever is running this simulation would just give us all a reprieve from all this. Maybe they could simulate a world where the forces of good win for once.

Anyway, I’m reminded of the movie The Matrix, where the main character, played by Keanu Reeves, realizes he’s been living in a simulation, trapped along with other humans by sentient machines that are using humans as batteries while creating a fake reality to subdue them and keep them from rebelling. Of course, that makes me think about our sector, and what it would be like if The Matrix were set in nonprofit and philanthropy: