You can donate $20 to a non-profit, but you can't donate "a few hours of CEO work" the same way, it just doesn't work. So it's more of an "all or nothing" kind of position.
Expecting someone to donate $20 of their salary or a few days of their time? That's not a big deal. Expecting someone to donate 100% of their salary or 100% of their "work time" for a year or more? That's a HUGE ask.
It's no surprise there aren't any takers.
> all sorts of folk
Even if we did take your statement as a datapoint (hopefully one among many...), this clause could cover a small town or an entire continent.
It's amazing that in a community of Y-Combinator founders, there is such a malformed understanding of what it means to run a large organization.
Don't get me wrong, CEOs have inflated salaries. That is a society-wide problem, not just non-profits. To argue that non-profits should just forcibly change the bar for CEO salary (1) is the wrong place to enact this kind of social change, (2) would ensure that you only get the least qualifying candidates, (3) could lead CEOs into possibly devious action to increase personal wealth, and (4) could result in lower effort/efficiency as the CEO has to juggle other financial-fitness activities.
If CEO salary is important to you, there is tons of data out there to help you pick a similar charity with more agreeable administrative compensation. I hope that there aren't people out there who just don't donate because of this.
Not all of us have any relationship to Y-Combinator and/or the companies incubated by Y-Combinator (beyond perhaps using this site). I sure as hell don't.
> I hope that there aren't people out there who just don't donate because of this.
Sorry to shatter your hopes, but this is the exact reason why I'm averse to supporting the Susan G. Komen foundation in any way (well, that and them suing other charity organizations for running fundraisers that sound vaguely like "for the cure"; also, for continuing to shovel money into "awareness" instead of actual research).
If for-profit organizations find it beneficial to grow and expand using dedicated administrative staff, the assumption is that there would be benefits to growing a non-profit organization to a similar level. And while I'm sure there are ways to make it work, if we want them to run as well as for-profit companies are run, it stands to reason that dedicated administrative staff would provide greater returns to the organization (and their cause) over the cost of employing them.
If growing like that is an overall good thing is up for debate, but the idea that growing an organization requires dedicated and competent staff isn't really that shocking to me.
Sure you can, by volunteering on the board of directors of said charity. Like my wife does, helping organize a charity large enough that it runs a free hospital, a dental clinic and home for otherwise homeless people in a major US city.
In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them.
By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours.
With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time.
What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy.
Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission.
(I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)
