A conversation with The Nonprofit Crisis author Greg Berman (Part 2 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. During the first part of our discussion, which is here, after talking about Vital City and the Center for Court Innovation, he addresses 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.

The just more than 16-minute video below is the second part, during which we discuss 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.

While he doesn’t write about grantmaking institutions as much as he does about the grant-recipient nonprofits because “I’ve never been a grantmaker and I feel my relationship to grantmaking organizations is as recipient, or as professional supplicant as I sometimes like to refer to myself” and “just felt less qualified” to comment on grantmakers, Berman tells me, philanthropically supported nonprofits are

in so many respects downstream of philanthropy and to the extent that the critique of nonprofits as out of touch with mainstream American thinking, unaccountable to any kind of interest other than their own operations, using language that ordinary Americans can’t understand, arrogant, speaking down to people, yeah, sure those things are much, much worse in philanthropy than they are

among the supported nonprofit groups.

Asked whether there’s a difference between civil society and the nonprofit sector, he says, “It’s funny that you mention that. I just published a piece in Vital City called ‘Trump vs. Civil Society,’” which is here, and a friend of his

sent me an e-mail complaining about the headline and that it was not an accurate headline. So, yes to be technical, I don’t think the nonprofit sector and civil society are coterminous. I think that civil society is a broader category that includes a host of things—bowling leagues, Bible-study groups, book groups, neighborhood watch, a bunch of voluntary kind of gatherings that are beyond just the nonprofit sector.

I think that there are a lot of nonprofits that don’t really feel like the kinds of civil associations that Tocqueville was talking about in Democracy in America, that feel more like businesses. So I take that point, but I think that there’s large such large chunks of the nonprofit sector that I feel very comfortable saying are part and parcel of civil society. … It is hard for me to think of the category of civil society without the nonprofit sector.

Workforce cohorts, social justice, and mission creep

Berman sees a major generational component to the nonprofit crisis. As Millennials became the dominant workforce cohort around 2016, they brought different political orientations and expectations about work, including a strong desire to “personalize” the workplace in accordance with their broader consumer and online experiences. In the nonprofit sector, this has had and continues to have particular ramifications.

“I write a lot about Millennials in the book and I hope it doesn’t read just like a screed—an old person saying, you know, Get off my lawn,” Berman says. “I try to be sympathetic to their perspective, even though I don’t share it. I do think the advent of cell phones and the internet has fundamentally changed that generation from my generation.”

He says he

can understand why that generation came to work and felt like, Oh, why can’t I personalize the workplace too? I can personalize anything else in my life.’ So I do think the generation has had some negative impacts on the nonprofit workforce, but I don’t want it to read as just an anti-Millennial screed, or I hope it doesn’t read that way.

Related to both politics and charitable nonprofits’ missions, Berman argues that social-justice commitments should not take priority over those missions. Citing the research of political scientist Matthew Grossman, as he does in The Nonprofit Crisis, Berman says when nonprofits expand beyond a narrow organizational focus and tie or allow themselves to be tied to the broader ideological project of the left, they are likely to undermine their influence and effectiveness.

In our conversation, as a specific example, Berman also cites David A. Farenthold’s and Claire Brown’s recent lengthy New York Times article about how the nonprofit Sierra Club’s embrace of social justice harmed it and the pursuit of its mission. “[P]laces like the Sierra Club have done themselves a huge disservice over the past decade by losing their narrow focus on, or exclusive focus on, what their core mission is,” according to Berman. Conservative groups can risk doing themselves the same disservice, of course.

Steps and suggestions

For nonprofits in general and their leaders in particular, Berman applies his earlier book Gradual’s advocacy of continuous, incremental steps toward change or reform—which would mean, in this context, actively but carefully tightening focus on their core mission and avoiding any politically tinged or other “mission creep” beyond that, expanding democratic decision-making internally, and cultivating timely leadership turnover instead of having long, “retire-in-place” tenures. “[O]ne of the most-important leadership decisions that a CEO can make is deciding to actually step down and do it in a way that’s thoughtful and in the best interests of their nonprofit,” he says.

Asked how we would know whether and when the nonprofit crisis is over, Berman suggests several potential indicators: survey data showing rising public trust in the sectors, increases in the share of Americans donating and volunteering, and a cultural barometer of sorts—phrases like “nonprofit industrial complex” showing up less often in public discourse, signaling that the sector is no longer so widely viewed as so self-serving. “I think that would be an indicator that people’s trust in the sector” is back, he concludes, “and the nonprofit crisis is beginning to dissipate.”