The Plethora Of Non Profits: An Ego Battle?
Part of me wanting to create the social network Ocean Minds was to offer a platform for people and organizations to communicate and promote a sustainable and healthy lifestyle around the worlds oceans: our playground. I also had in mind for it to be a place where non profits can coordinate on joint efforts. This past week end, I joined shark minded Brendal Davis of Sharksavers and Felix Leander of Oceanic Dreams to participate in what was suppose to be a protest against the “Are You Man Enough” Shark fishing tournament to be held in Fort Myers,Florida June 6 &7th. Thanks to several individuals and organizations including the Shark foundation, Shark safe, and Sharksavers the protest ended up to be a nice meeting. They succeeded by uniting their efforts to get public attention on the matter and have the tournament become a catch and release only before the day of the protest. For a more in depth summary of the day, check out Felix Leander blog entry.
I am now getting into the matter at hand “The Plethora of non profits”. Collaborations of non profits on events like the one I had the chance to partake in this past week end are the living proof that uniting is the way to win. Now that said, 1,020,000 entries (where probably half of them are referring to individual websites) show up when googling the words “Shark Preservation”. Why on earth (pun intended) do we need that many non profit doing very similar work. I am very much aware that certain organizations have a very clear and very specific mission. But it seems to me that some non profits are doing more or less the same thing . All these non profits are raising their own money, and have overheads and employees. Many of whom are doing work that has probably been done by others before them, defeating the purpose. This money raised is not used efficiently as it never makes it to the cause and in the current state of our economy we cannot afford this. Why not regroup and conquer under a single umbrella (hey hey…). I have always thought that effectiveness relies in good communication and uniting rather than dividing people . I am sure critics will propose the “divide and conquer” approach but I am not convinced it works in the non profit world. Uniting and letting go of the ego is the way to go. I somewhat understand the “me,myself and I” mentality in the for profit world, we are only human one could argue, but in the non profit world really? I always had the candid vision that non profits were devoted to help others, starving children in Africa or the slaughtering of sharks worldwide. I understand that the ego centered humans we are need some time to change, but the way the planet ecosystem is threaten (by our own doings) does not leave us with much time for this process to happen.
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
-A. Einsten
