A conversation with The Nonprofit Crisis author Greg Berman (Part 1 of 2)

Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.

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Greg Berman is co-editor of the New York-based Vital City, a leading journal on civic life and urban policy that features thoughtful contributions from scholars, activists, and practitioners with different underlying worldviews. Earlier this year, it devoted an entire issue to “Nonprofits and the City.”

In 1996, Berman helped co-found a nonprofit group now called the Center for Justice Innovation, which focuses on criminal-justice policy research and programming. He was its executive director for nearly two decades—stepping down in 2020, when it was still called the Center for Court Innovation.

Berman, who is also a distinguished fellow of practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-authored 2023’s Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age with Aubrey Fox. And his heedful new book The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars, has just been released.

The clear-headed and kind Berman joined me for a recorded conversation last month. The just more than 17-and-a-half-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, after talking about Vital City and the Center for Court Innovation, he discusses the nature of the nonprofit crisis, the fairness of some (cross-ideological) critiques of the nonprofit sector that he writes about in The Nonprofit Crisis, the effects of political polarization on responding to the crisis, and the need for some introspection in and reform of the sector.

Vital City purposely publishes “authors from a range of political perspectives,” Berman tells me. “We’re trying to be big tent,” featuring conservatives, “moderates, and liberals, and people that are leftist as well. As long as you come to us with a commitment to data and evidence and a love of cities and a good idea, we’re interested in publishing you.”

At the Center for Court Innovation, “we were creating a range of alternatives for judges, so that they could sentence defendants to mental-health treatment, job training, to community restitution, to drug treatment,” he says. “A number of our programs were documented to actually reduce the use of incarceration and reduce recidivism as well, importantly, and also promote public trust in in government and public trust in justice.”

Around 2015 and ‘16, according to Berman, he began to detect an erosion of public trust in nonprofits. “I always worked at the kinds of jobs that no one had ever heard of,” he says. So when people asked him what he does,

I would always shorthand it and say, Oh, I work in the nonprofit sector, and you could just feel people’s responses to that were almost 100% positive, right? There was this kind of assumption, if you said you worked for a nonprofit, you must be a good guy, right? You must be kind-hearted …

Then, in ‘15-’16, “something changed in the air,” Berman continues. He

was no longer getting this kind of knee-jerk positive response to the idea of working in the nonprofit sector, and as I began to think about it and look around and read, I started to see signs of ebbing confidence in the nonprofit sector—that public trust had not collapsed totally, but there were these warning signals that you would see certainly in some of the polling, certainly in the number of Americans who are choosing to donate to the sector, certainly in the number of Americans that were choosing to volunteer. I would go on what was then called Twitter and—not that that’s a representative sample of anything, but it’s representative something, I guess—and see people on both the left and the right kind of attacking the “nonprofit industrial complex” and that just felt very different from the world in which I grew up.

I’ve always basically worked in the nonprofit sector and so, to me, … the crisis for the nonprofit sector is ebbing trust in nonprofits. I think that trust, in fact, is the essential ingredient that makes these things go. Without trust, you can’t get individuals to donate, you can’t get people to volunteer, you can’t get the staff to do the work, you can’t get the board members to trust the leadership. So I wrote the book to try to focus the attention—I mean, it’s written for a general audience, but it’s also written specifically for nonprofit leaders, to try to encourage them to focus on this problem.

He sees critiques of nonprofits from both the left and the right as containing “germs of truth.” From the left—cautioning that he’s “speaking on broad strokes”—he considers it fair to say that many nonprofits are run in an autocratic fashion by long-tenured leaders with entrenched power, for example. From the right, again cautioning about “broad strokes,” he considers it fair to say that a large swath of the sector is inhospitable to conservatives and effectively has turned its back to large segments of the public, for another example.

Causes and conditions, the core problem, and the current

While many nonprofit leaders associate nonprofitdom’s current state of crisis with President Donald Trump, in Berman’s view, Trump is more of an accelerant than its root cause; the underlying crisis of trust would exist regardless of who is President. He readily acknowledges the President’s and his administration’s rhetoric and actions present real threats and require immediate responses from those organizations at whom they’re directed—but, echoing a position he takes in a recent Vital City article, he says, “Nonprofits would be making a mistake if they focus all their energies on responding to the Trump administration’s threat without seeing what I think is the core problem underlying and leading to the threat.”

He thinks nonprofits and foundations should also engage in introspection about how their own practices and behavior helped create conditions giving rise to the threats, rather than defensively responding only with “what feels like a return to hashtag resistance.”

“One of the big problems that I think that the sector has to address is an utter failure to—for part of the sector, at least—… even use language that’s intelligible to something like half of the American public,” Berman says. “I do think that there is kind of a reset happening and people are starting to take seriously the problem,” however, “and you see both foundations and, to a lesser extent, NGOs starting to grapple with the problem of hyper-partisanship and political polarization and the role that they may have played over the past decade or so in fueling that.” Berman’s “encouraged by that development, and I think that’s a step in the right direction for the field.

“I’m sympathetic to the leadership of these organizations,” he continues. “It’s a really hard line to walk … I would say—which is easy for me to say, because I’m a little bit on the sidelines now—you got to walk and chew gum at the same time. You have to both do the defense, but also do the reform.”

In the conversation’s second part, Berman talks about whether his critiques of the nonprofit sector apply more to grantmakers than grant recipients, whether there’s a distinction between civil society and the nonprofit sector, generational differences within and mission creep on the part of nonprofits, the benefits of incrementalism in any practical change or policy reform of the sector, and his recommendations for nonprofit leaders in reacting to the crisis.