Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up For Itself and Really Change the World

If you put these five things together—you can’t use money to attract talent, you can’t advertise, you can’t take risks, you can’t invest in long-term results, and you don’t have a stock market—then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole system cha

I instead refer to the sector throughout the book as the humanitarian sector. Others call it the social profit sector, the third sector, the independent sector, or a number of other things. Any one of them is better than nonprofit.

the list goes on—and each group has its own segregated annual conference—TED, ARNOVA, Social Enterprise World Forum, Council on Foundations Annual Meeting. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of separate large conferences on social change.

In the process, I founded a company called Pallotta TeamWorks, and we created a whole new category of civic engagement—the long-distance fundraiser and the long-distance life changer—which to date has raised in excess of $1.1 billion for important causes and given new meaning to the hundreds of thousands of people who have participated in them.

Because the general public donates 75 percent of the $300 billion given to charity every year. Because elected officials and regulators create public policy and contract guidelines based on what they think the public wants.

Since 1970, the number of nonprofit organizations that have crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier is 144. The number of for-profits that have crossed it is 46,136.25 Eighty-eight

The more charities give the public what it wants—low “overhead”—the less those charities can spend educating the public about what they actually do. And the public considers any effort by charities to educate them about what the charities actually do to be wasteful overhead to begin with. The less the sector educates the public, the lower the publi

In Uncharitable I described how the system of values and ethics governing the conduct of charity today is actually a religion that was formalized some four hundred years ago by the early Puritan settlers in New England. I discussed how that system was designed to secure the Puritans’ salvation in heaven and avoid eternal damnation in a hell hereaft

Change is a faster caterpillar. Transformation is a butterfly.