People First, Then Profit

People say that you mean what you’re saying when you can say what you want to say when you aren’t mad. When you’re spitting mad, it’s almost like a stream of consciousness thing. You get so mad that you just start spewing words and in that stream of word vomit, you say exactly what you mean to say when you mean to say it. That’s why most people say to just sleep on it. And so I did. Here goes.

I’ll be doing a lot of configuring and focusing on the mission house in the next little bit here, and in configuring the mission house, it’s making me think of it’s potential nonprofit status. It’s also making me think of what nonprofit means. These days, there’s heavy pressure on nonprofits to keep their funding. It’s not the worst thing obviously, especially not if you need money to run your organization. However, a line gets crossed when you get so concerned about the funding that you lose track of your purpose because your new purpose becomes to not only get the money, but to keep the money.

You start making charts and diagrams and fundraising and writing grants and appearing on TV and posting on blogs and Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds and trying your best to be relevant on YouTube. Just so people who’ve funded you, people you want to fund you, and people who will fund you can see you being a presence online and having some sort of social capital. All of a sudden, the people you’ve sworn to protect–human beings with real families and real life dilemmas–are not people anymore. They are living beings who are a means to get your funding. And keep your funding. So instead of getting people in the door with a problem and out the door with a solution, you find yourself not so upset if people keep coming in the door. Because then your mission is still working. Your numbers are still up. Your nonprofit is still legit. Your funding is still coming. And if your funding is still coming, you’re still succeeding even if your clients/guests/patients are not.

And that’s not how nonprofits should be working. That’s not how I’d like to be working.

What would happen if the problems were solved? Think about it. If you’re an owner, a staff member, or a volunteer of a nonprofit organization, just think about: what would happen if the problems you’re trying to address in your organization were solved? Would you be ecstatic, or not so much? If the problems were solved, maybe those clients, guests, patients, or whatever you’ve chosen to call people in need, wouldn’t need you and your organization anymore. You might lose your funding. You might have to close your doors. You might end up being a bit less than relevant to those funders and grantmakers and YouTube commentators and facebook followers. But it’s not supposed to be about them or the government. It’s about the people you serve. It’s always supposed to be about the people you serve, first and foremost, because if you’re a true humanitarian or a true nonprofit, you would never want to create such codependent relationships where you can’t exist without people’s pain and struggle, and those people can’t thrive in life without your business.

It should be the goal of nonprofits at the very beginning to come up with things to solve, or more positive output than negative input. Nonprofits should not be limbo or purgatory for those that seek help or change in their lives. Let’s face it: the world outside is not like a nonprofit’s best day. A person in need can’t go out into the city that they try their best to call home, and just be accepted, have the proper training and the tools, get the proper education or the proper nutrition without going through so many loopholes and over so many hurdles. They just can’t. But a nonprofit can do it’s best to provide those factors so the world isn’t so hard. Or they can change the world.

**screeching car sound insert here**

Or. They can change the people in it for the better, which in turn changes not only their world, but the world as a whole.

The GSO Compassion Mission may be a huge project. Let’s face it. It is a huge project. I’ve just started to sit down and have some talks with a very helpful organization called the Center for Community Engaged Design (CCED), and they’re helping me with the interior design aspect, showing me how parts of the house may be even bigger than I thought. That’s not the worst thing in the world, because it’s better to expand than to shrink in some cases. These interior design meetings will help with funding, ironically enough, but whoever funds this project or pieces of it, will be funding themselves as much as anything else. You help others and you help yourself. You fund others and that comes back to you in kind.

The GSO Compassion Mission is a huge project but it’s not impossible. And yes, one of the extreme long term goals is to have this process–this mission house–be replicated across the country and then around the globe, fostering sustainable energy, educational innovation, and physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally transformed humans who take that positive transformation and use that to transform their friends, their neighbors, their families, their homes, their environments, and their worlds. And if enough people do take that energy and do that exponentially…well then, I think we’ll be on to something. And if that change is so positive that the original GSO Compassion Mission and Compassion Missions across the state of North Carolina, the United States of America, or even the world start to feel the need to downsize a bit. Or they start to close up shop and operate out of smaller office buildings or smaller plots of land or smaller greenhouses, well then–that’s not a problem. That’s never going to be a problem because that means we’ve done our job. And we’ve done it well enough that we’re not as necessary anymore. And that should be fine, because it was never about us to begin with. It was never about me to begin with. It’s about the people that can be served. And that’s all it should be about. And if, over time, after all of these things have been accomplished and the funding is gone and it’s time to close up shop and go home, then that’s what we’ll do. Pack it up, go home. Be with our families, our husbands, our wives, our friends, our pets, ourselves because we’ve all been along for this crazy ride and coming to a stop isn’t the worst thing in the world. And we should just know that we’ve done what we’ve needed to do and it’s done.

No biggie.

My goal with this initial GSO Compassion Mission is to have it be sustainable enough to the point where it puts out more energy than it takes in. Where people can generate positivity and profit or revenue on their own so that the funding isn’t necessary and people start to see their investments come back to them in kind. Where the GSO Compassion Mission gives back to the people it serves, it’s community, and it’s funders one step at a time. One whole human at a time. And throughout all of that, if I have to walk away from it or pass it down to someone else, or watch as a predecessor has to close the doors, I’ll be fine. I’ll continue to do my work, raise my kids or my dogs or cats or be with my significant other and just live my life and tell my kids about this one house I built this one time. And all the people it helped. All the lives it changed.

Eh, I’m getting way way ahead of myself. The point is: people first, then profit. And if you do it right, the people will make that profit happen for you, nonprofits. It just might not be the kind of profit that you find valuable now, but when hindsight becomes 20/20, it will be all the profit you need.