Summary
Nell Edgington, a well known American consultant who serves US domestic nonprofits is of the opinion that nonprofit leaders maintain too many self-limiting beliefs and mindsets.
In her new book 'Reinventing social change: Embracing abundance to create a healthier and more equitable world' she explains how these self-limiting beliefs have seeped into the collective mindset and DNA of the nonprofit sector. In the book, Nell strongly advocates for abundance thinking -- instead of scarcity thinking, one of those dominant self-limiting beliefs.
In this podcast episode, I discuss with Nell the central arguments of her book.
Nell’s Bio
- President of consulting practice Social Velocity: Social Velocity helps nonprofit and philanthropic leaders create more effective social change.
- Fellow Leap of Reason Ambassador -- an invitation-based network of nonprofit leaders, funders, government regulators and consultants and academics who all are motivated to make the nonprofit sector more performance-focused
- Former senior-level leader at a US public broadcasting TV station (Austin, Texas)
We discuss:
- Scarcity mindset: the mindset that nonprofits never are enough nor have enough: not enough money, not enough good board members, etc. – in other words, the ethos of 'never enough'. She observes such a scarcity mindset in individual leaders, boards and funders, but also at the sector level
- Why Nell agrees with Dan Palotta’s well known, though contentious TED talk that the market should decide what salary to pay nonprofit CEOs, or how much money to invest in fundraising, or how big of a financial reserve to build; and that nonprofits should not accept self-imposed restrictions
- The problem with the 'helper syndrome': if we 'over-give', we deplete ourselves -- something quite distinct from giving generously
- Why historically, charities (perpetually in need of money) have been run by women while men have worked in the private sector where money was made. This created a very gendered makeup of the sector
- Why nonprofits can reframe their relationship to funders and maintain more agency that way: funders have money they want to invest in social change, while nonprofits have solutions to offer -- and thus they can be seen as equal partners
- Why if you ask each board member individually what unique assets they can give this will drive more board engagement and greater efficacy
Quotes
“Let’s pull back the curtain on how the sector is broken”
“We need to fix and heal ourselves first before we can work on social change externally”
Resources:
LinkedIn
Website
Book link
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