The danger of corporatisation in not-for-profits
There is a structural problem across the entire not-for profit sector where board director is a line item on a resume not a contribution to an organisation created to serve a community.
In case you haven’t heard about Adelaide Writers’ Week’s rapid descent from globally respected festival to utter shitshow, the short version is that much loved and respected Writer’s Week Director Louise Adler invited Palestinian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah to speak at one of the panels. Dr Abdel-Fattah has vehemently protested the atrocities committed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza. Depending on your affiliations, her protests are viewed as either dangerously antisemitic or courageously anti-genocide but it was her latest book, Discipline, exploring who gets to be heard and why people choose to speak, that was the basis for her invitation to appear at the festival. Despite the debacle that was last year’s Bendigo Writer’s Festival after similar attempts to silence Dr Abdel-Fattah, the Adelaide Festival board of directors overruled Louise Adler and cancelled Dr Abdel-Fattah’s invitation because her presence would not be “culturally sensitive”. In the week since, 180 writers have boycotted the festival, Louise Adler and all but one board member have resigned, and now the Writer’s Week festival has been cancelled. An entirely avoidable clusterfuck from start to finish.
Peter Greste, Isabelle Oderberg, Richard Flanagan and Hannah Ferguson are among the many people who have written about the danger of silencing writers and I don’t have much to add to what they have already said so well. But there is a structural aspect to this sadly stupid story that hasn’t been covered yet – the widespread damage done by the corporatisation of Not-For-Profit (NFP) boards of directors.
I haven’t worked for any organisations in the arts world but peering over the fence from the NFPs doing prevention and response to men’s violence against women, the back yards look remarkably similar.
The board of an NFP is supposed to provide strategic guidance and assistance with raising funds. They’re meant to keep the organisation on mission, sticking to the purpose for which it was created, whether that is providing crisis service to abused women or a festival for writers to talk about ideas. What they are not supposed to be is a career stepping stone for inexperienced middle management and second tier politicians who have an eye on lucrative corporate board positions.
Before 2013, board members for NFPs in the community sector were mostly emeritus positions, allocated to the elders of the sector who were no longer willing to work long hours for little to no pay but couldn’t bring themselves to walk away. Their experience and wisdom were valued and used. It was a system with flaws – there wasn’t a lot of financial expertise and management was often a dirty word – but at least the annual reports weren’t full of weasel words and meaningless sector-babble. Board members might (and did) fight with CEOs about how to run the organisations but they were usually both fighting with principles and expertise. Ignorant self-righteousness was the exception not the rule.
If you cock your head and squint, you can find a perspective that blames the union movement for this transition. At the beginning of 2013, unions finally got the community sector some decent pay and conditions (thank you) and suddenly a whole lot of middle managers with stalled careers in the corporate sector realised they could snag a three figure salary and a c-suite job in an NFP because an MBA and a well cut suit can look impressive to people who have never worked with them before. Panting along at their heels were all the people who want to be on corporate boards but didn’t have the experience or connections to get there. Advised by their life coaches to kick start their board experience with a position on a small NFP – one that does nice things for the kiddies would be great – and work up from there, they’ve flooded community services and arts organisation boards and kicked over all the tables. They’re often incapable of understanding or even trying to learn about the organisation’s purpose and service, they’re just there to manage risk. Tenure is about enhancing their reputation. They want annual reports with lots of colourful graphics and non-controversial motherhood statements. They want support from politicians and lobby groups to help them move onwards and upwards. Courage, change, resistance, political pushback are dangers to avoid not aspirational goals. Achieving nothing more than a nice infographic and a well-lit photo-op is their ultimate aim.
I’ve watched too many career-building corporate-worshiping board chairs at NFPs stack the board with carbon copies of themselves then gang up and white-ant the CEO who they find “too militant” and “radical”. She just finds them exhausting. Eventually she leaves and the board replaces her with someone who “understands how things should be done”. The new CEO, who has little to no experience in the sector, cleans out all the militants and radicals hired by the last CEO and replaces them with more carbon copies (the MBAs in suits). The management end of the organisation moves entirely to policing language and minimising risk and forgets it even had a purpose, while the front line workers increasingly carry all the load of remembering the purpose and implementing it. Staff turnover surges and no one in management can work out what went wrong or how to fix it.
Imagine a car company filling its board with experts on sound systems, air conditioning, leather chairs and phone chargers but not a single engineer or anyone who understands large scale manufacturing or the design and function of cars. Imagine a bank filling their board with marketing gurus and experts on plastic cards but no one who understands whatever it is that experts on banking need to understand. I’m no fan of the corporate sector but I recognise they know how to organise themselves to achieve their purpose. The ANZ bank stacks their board with people who have decades of experience in financial services. The BHP board is stiff with experts in mining and global finances. Coles, Telstra, Rio Tinto, all of them have board who can give expert advice on making money by screwing their frontline workers and the environment just enough to maximise profits without giving grounds for a lawsuit.
NFPs in the anti-violence sector used to ignore the corporate sector as thoroughly as corporations ignored them, but now they worship at the altar of corporatisation. So taken up with their own self-importance, they don’t realise how laughably irrelevant they are to the corporate monoliths who rationalise customer deaths and massive environmental damage as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Scraps of funding tossed to a palatable NFP are useful for a feel good sentence in their annual reports and staff newsletters but it’s not worth the millions or even billions the sector needs to do the job it is supposed to do. Only government can (or should) fund essential services.
If you’ve ever wondered what patriarchy looks like, it’s exactly this. Structural, deliberate underfunding of a sector designed to serve women and children (in the arts, it’s to serve ideas and critical thinking, an almost equal threat cast as equally irrelevant by the people who fear it). Corporatisation denudes NFPs of wisdom and expertise, replacing them with ignorance and futile ambition. The result is a sector that cannot fulfil its fundamental purpose: to keep women and children safe (or to facilitate the free exchange of ideas).
Police, military and men’s sports are not funded like this, in tiny, short-term bits and pieces, allocated only after vicious competition with similar services. Imagine suggesting that police or military services should be offered by multiple different organisations that have to compete with each other for funding doled out in drips, 18 months here, 2 years there. It would be laughable. How could they possibly work together or deliver efficient services or plan for the future under such ridiculous restrictions? It would be rightly shouted down as a destructive and malevolently ignorant idea designed to make police and military services utterly inoperable.
The debacles of the Adelaide Festival, the Bendigo Writers Festival, and Creative Australia’s removal and reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi to the Venice Biennale are all outcomes of exactly this process, you know about them because their audiences are the public. There are hundreds you don’t know about because the people they affect are underpaid frontline workers who stay silent to protect an ideal they know is dying: keeping people safe, keeping people informed, keeping people free.
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