The parody newspaper The Onion has a great mock article that should strike a chord with us all:
Urban Planner Stuck In Traffic Of Own Design
PITTSBURGH, PA‹Bernard Rothstein, an urban planner and traffic-flow modulation specialist with the Urban Redevelopment Authority, found himself stuck in rush-hour traffic of his own design for more than an hour Monday.
The parody sounded like most of the major meetings I’ve been to over the past years, focusing on the dysfunction of the nonprofit cultural ecology, and the steps that might be taken to correct it. Which leads me to another quote from the article:
The gridlock-bound Rothstein, who has worked in urban planning for 24 years, passed the time by devising possible modifications to his original design.
If a large number of nonprofits are, indeed, increasingly top-heavy, disconnected from their missions and their audiences, distorted by funding constraints, and sapped of the energy that brought them into being, we should all claim a bit of the responsibility (including me). We got here through thousands of individual choices, despite the best intentions. We can only find our way out in the very same, distributed way.
