Scenes from the Nonprofit Life

This has been a busy week at work, and so was last week, the week before, and most of the weeks between February 2015 and the present day. It’s hard to avoid busy, emotionally-draining weeks in the nonprofit world.

To complicate matters, last week my foot slipped off some slightly-uneven sidewalk and I fell down flat. I landed on my right elbow and knee, in the middle of a busy pedestrian corridor. In the aftermath of this incident I a) met a very nice passerby who picked up the things I’d dropped, b) put a Sunkist can on my elbow because it was the only cold thing in the office I was headed for, c) cursed my balance issues, and d) wrapped up a phone call with my uncle by saying “I need to go find an instant icepack somewhere in this city.” Anyway, after a Good-Friday road trip to visit my mother’s side of the family, a Holy-Saturday massage, and a lovely Easter dinner, I finally am feeling mostly better. (“Better” here means “back to baseline, plus I enjoyed a really fancy Easter meal, so I’ll buck up.”)

Meanwhile, being absent on Easter Monday meant getting slammed at work Tuesday, Wednesday, today, and (I predict) tomorrow and Saturday, as well. In honor of the continuous stream of contradictory emotions I experience in my job, I present to you:

Five Annoying Things and One Amazing Thing about Life in a Nonprofit

The Annoying:

• A nonprofit’s work is never done. There are 1.8 million people in New York City who don’t speak English proficiently, and a whole lot more who can’t read and write with confidence. If I shepherd 30 people through one of my programs, great – only 1,799,970 to go! Same thing with citizenship, or high school equivalency. I’m up to running 53 programs per week (and there’s none on Sundays, so that’s 9 per day) – and I’m still trying to grow.
• That means you’ll always feel pressure to keep working, working, working long past the point of reason. My boss asked me today why I haven’t taken a lunch break in two weeks. I explained the reasons. She then reminded me that New York State requires breaks for every 7 hours worked. I’d straight-up forgotten that was a law.
• Sometimes there’s too few of you for the number of tasks. This is partly tied to #1, and partly tied to #4 below. In my experience, most local nonprofits have a pretty small staff, and high turnover. There have been months where my 8-person department only had 5 employees. Spoiler alert: the workload didn’t decrease by 30%.
• Nonprofit salaries tend to be lower than for-profit salaries. Although there are some cool benefits (vacation time!), the fact is that the increase in customers for free services = a decrease in the money available to provide them. So unlike my for-profit counterparts, I can’t get a bonus by increasing our popularity or productivity.
• The schedules can be completely insane. Recently I was trying to choose a grad school program, and one of the options only offered classes during the hours of 9 – 5. After looking at the course catalog, I suggested to my supervisors that I could work 9 or 10 hours three days a week to earn two half-days for taking courses. Upper management said that sounded reasonable.

(It wasn’t, and I’ve picked a different program.)

The Amazing:

• You’re going to witness love and generosity every day. Maybe it’ll be a twelve-year-old asking when she can start volunteering by herself, without a school group. Maybe it’ll be a former Chicago Bulls player helping you set up for a brunch party at a senior center. Maybe it’ll be watching a middle-aged executive perform a rap song about the Cabinet Secretaries for high school students. It might be a retiree agreeing to lead projects three days a week, every week, for the next six months, because they have the time and the knowledge that struggling students need. It might be discovering that your English conversation practice group has grown too large for the room it meets in. Students keep bringing all their friends along. It might be a volunteer who barely understands email deciding to get website training so that he can be a better leader. More than once, it’s been the experience of explaining that a project takes place half a mile from the nearest bus stop, which is two miles from the nearest subway, which is over an hour’s ride from home, and having the volunteer say, “OK! I’ll get there somehow!”

And then you’ll think, eh, I can do one more month of this.