I have a lot of friends and acquaintances considering a job in the nonprofit sector. I’ve been employed within small (under $2 million budgets), community nonprofit organizations for three years now, beginning straight out of college, but have also talked to many people with many different experiences and histories in the sector and outside of it about their experiences. The following is my boilerplate advice to people that asks me about working, or finding work, within nonprofits.
Assuming that you are an intelligent, well-educated (or seeking to be), self-motivated and upwardly mobile individual, your interest probably spans a combination of two distinct (or should be in your mind) issues:
- You want a job, with a modicum of stability, freedom, and disposable income.
- You want to change the world, or a least do it less harm than otherwise.
My advice for you:
Find a corporate job that you like, or don’t feel too guilty about, and that provides you with plenty of disposable income and time. Find a small, local nonprofit (or church, or social group) that meets your standards for doing good, and invest your disposable income and time with them. Join their governing board, connect them with your professional and personal networks and help them grow in a direction you believe in. You will enact more change from a higher level than you could, in most situations, by being a direct employee of that organization.
Non-categorical rationale:
Nonprofits have jobs, but they don’t have a lot of them and it’s hard to break into one that distinguishes you from your peers: you can find a job answering phones, but it’s difficult to get one with responsibility and authority. Nonprofits are bad (or relatively worse than their commercial peers) at: recognizing ability, enabling it, and rewarding it.
Nonprofits are insulating. Because you are constantly understaffed, under-budgeted and under-resourced (time, training, equipment) it is difficult to find the time to truly reflect. It is difficult to critically look at what you are doing and what you have done; to connect with other practitioners and look at what you are doing as a group; to reach outside the sector to learn from others and see how you fit into that broadest context.
A job is a job, wherever you’re working. This may sound selfish (and it probably is) but you should be concerned that, whatever your job is, you:
- are challenged
- are encouraged to try and learn new things
- are acknowledged (even celebrated on occassion)
- can advance to greater responsibility and authority
- are provided a separate personal life
- are afforded physical and mental health (no 80 hour weeks or screaming matches)
- have fun or enjoy your work a majority of the time (no puritan work ethic for me)
By looking after yourself on an individual level, you will ultimately be in a better position to have compassion for those around you and be better positioned to act upon that compassion.
I couldn’t disagree more with your viewpoint. The nonprofit sector employs about 10 percent of the American workforce. There is no shortage of nonprofit employment, just see the number of jobs available at Idealist.org or OpportunityKnocks.org.
As far as authority and responsibility, I see more opportunity in the nonprofit sector than the corporate sector because while there are lots of nonprofit jobs, most nonprofits still have a relatively small staff size, which allows you to do more and gain recognition for that work (less bureaucracy and middle people to take credit for what you did)
As with any job, you need to make the most of your situation. If you’re content answering phones, that’s what you’ll do. If you’re not, you’ll ask for additional projects and be able to expand your role.
Anonymous–
Thank you for your feedback as it helps clarify the advice I’m trying to give. I agree that there are many nonprofit jobs, but I don’t believe that, even at 10%, they offer the same diversity and mobility as the commercial sector. Nonprofits do offer different opportunities, but the breadth and depth of those opportunities are less.
(As an aside, I just did a general search on idealist.org for full-time, nonprofit jobs within 50 miles of Boston. It turned up zero. Monster.com listed thousands.)
I think that one of the greater issues for people going into a nonprofit career is that they want to affect “change”. Many entry level nonprofit jobs—even if you are making the most of them—are not satisfying in this respect. By the time you have worked yourself up to a position of authority (or at least of mobilizing resources), you’ve maybe lost that sheen or have been overly institutionalized.
An important point I’d like to get across, and maybe this is more along the lines of “Civic Literacy”, is that it can be easier to get into a nonprofit from the top, via their governing board, than it is to get in from the bottom.
I think you really need to find the right organization. For myself and many people I know, they have found wonderful entry-level nonprofit jobs. In some places, you’ll have a basic entry-level experience, in some, you will find your dream job. It really is no different than the for-profit world in that respect.
As for the nonprofit jobs, see the link below for an Idealist search matching what you reference… full-time, nonprofit jobs within 50 miles of Boston. I got 746. It may not be thousands, but I’m sure among your thousands on Monster are duplicates that go back much further and work at home opportunities that frequently inflate Monster’s numbers
http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/SiteIndex/AssetSearch/search?asse…
Anonymous—
Hmm. I must have got caught in Idealist on the order in the form of State then City—so much for my ability.
I completely agree that they need to find the right organization regardless of what sector it’s in.
There is though, which is why I give the boilerplate advice, a tendency to assume that the charitable outcomes of that nonprofit (and being a part of it) displaces the day-to-day activities and issues that are inherent to any job.
I love my nonprofit job and know many other people who love theirs’. But in reflecting on it, what I love about my job has really nothing to do with achieving my organization’s mission or righting a societal wrong; it’s the daily satisfaction of getting things done, being challenged and having the opportunity to explore my skills and learn new ones. On a broader level, I’m glad that those lead to more than just ROI, but knowing of our social mission does not make a good day at work any better or blunt the dissatisfaction of a lousy one.
So perhaps it would be better to ask someone to make a stronger distinction in their mind between the change they would like to affect, and the job/organization they are applying to.
(And thank you so much for your feedback!)
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