*Alternate title: dolla dolla bill y’all /C.R.E.A.M. (thank you, WuTang)

I used to think our field needed to be more business-like. But traditional capitalist business incentives are of course just as misguided.

It cannot be said enough: the pandemic laid bare inequities we all knew were there, and made them less possible (although for many still not impossible) to ignore.

We need to re-vamp capitalism and stale stakeholder primacy in favor of shared value.

Obviously.

Hell yes!

And yet..every time I sit down to write about this I am seized with imposter syndrome. How dare I casually pontificate about something to which so many other, more (econ) savvy folks have dedicated real time, energy and research?

So in the name of reconciling with my own perfectionist demons and not botching the argument, how about I just share some of the articles I’ve read recently? This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some of the more compellingly framed and thoughtfully passionate pieces that resonated. Hopefully they’re intriguing enough for you to click and read more. If not, maybe the excerpts ignite a little flame.

Privilege, power, and personal conflicts: The forces preventing change in nonprofit and philanthropy

“…the strategies we have used to try to solve these and myriad other issues have not worked. Just like trying to reform the racist police system has not worked, or nicely asking for racist statues to come down has not worked. We have to understand that people and institutions with privilege have all the formal power, and formal power does not yield without being challenged. But to effectively challenge power, we must examine the personal conflicts we each have and wrestle with what we are each willing to give up to realize a world we know is possible.”

Is There a Foreign Aid Industrial Complex?

“…Given the stakes in money and jobs, given the academic pipeline that continues to feed new people into those jobs, given the co-dependent habits that have evolved, and the mythology of limited local capacity, it seems highly unlikely that the aid industrial complex will voluntarily work itself out of a job and promote country ownership any time soon…”

Transform or die? Existential questions and ways forward for INGOs

INGOs have three options: transform, die well, or die badly.

Exposing the Faults of Shareholder Primacy

“…serving a broader set of stakeholders is not only consistent with how capitalism was practiced for most of its history, but is in fact more sustainable and resilient…the current system focuses corporate leaders on the short term, prioritizing quarterly and annual returns for shareholders (my note: just like NGOs!)….not just about a company being more socially responsible, but that attending to all stakeholders is a fundamentally better way to run your business…”

Taking a New View of the ‘Social Responsibility of Business’

“…unfettered profit-seeking leads to untenable inequality, climate damage, and other harms to all of us, which in turn negatively affect our economy and livelihoods…But that does not mean we abandon market forces. Instead, we must expand our conception of where markets can operate to put a value on important systems, and recognize that the power that investors wield over private capital creates a corresponding responsibility for stewardship. With this recognition, we can create mechanisms to hold companies accountable for the costs they impose on society and the environment, and require companies to pursue profits earned through efficiency and innovation rather than extraction and exploitation…”