The Problem With Nonprofits

Bill Shore, founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit Share Our Strength.

Do you think nonprofits are starting to get better at this?
Yes. I'm involved in an organization called College Summit, whose president is a guy named Dean Furbush, who was the CEO of FreshDirect in New York, the Internet grocery delivery company, and before that was the chief economist at Nasdaq. He's a very impressive businessperson, and he's now running a nonprofit. The sector is starting to attract people like that, who have business skills but want to put them to work in a nonprofit setting.

As you said, nonprofits are even hiring M.B.A.'s.
A lot of nonprofits are so focused on achieving social impact that they often don't spend enough time thinking about how they add value to their partners or how they protect the enterprise itself. We've evolved a lot, and we have five or six M.B.A.'s on staff now. We've hired people who have a sense of having to deliver value back to our partners. People who have M.B.A.'s take it for granted that there's got to be return on investment. That bleeds over into the rest of the organization in a very positive way.

With nonprofits struggling to retain talent, are you having more trouble recruiting recent college grads?
The biggest issue for a lot of [kids] is two parents who are saying, 'You know, you're not going to be able to support yourself.' I think the best that can be done is to give them evidence that there are organizations that are dealing with this in a more progressive fashion.

Do new grads still seem enthusiastic about working for nonprofits?
I do feel like there are really a lot of good people out there. I talked to the outgoing president of Wellesley College last year, and I asked who the biggest employer of Wellesley grads was, and it was Teach for America. I think it's at least the second or third biggest at Princeton and Dartmouth and half a dozen other big-name institutions. That's a remarkable statement and a really revealing statistic. That tells you something about what the mind-set of this generation is.