Nonprofits Have Been Right All Along: Community Benefit Models Can Solve Our Toughest Environmental Challenges
Article In Brief:
- The Problem: Nonprofits have long known the value of building community, but our voices have been ignored or devalued. Now we are learning that valuing private profit over community has brought us to the edge of extinction.
- Why it Happens: Our existing economic structure is designed to reward profit-seeking and to devalue community-building. Power has become too concentrated with a few whose interests are opposed to the many.
- The Solution: Nonprofits have been leaders in building sustainability for generations. Nonprofits can be the catalysts for the systemic change in consciousness we so desperately need by advocating for a community-benefit approach in our economic system.
The nonprofit sector has had the solution to what ails our environment for decades.
If you support the mission of a nonprofit as an employee, volunteer, or donor, something in you already understands this truth.
In many ways, the nonprofit sector exists to fill the needs of those who have fallen out of an economic system that was never intended to care for the whole community. Nonprofits endeavor desperately to fill the gaping holes through which so many fall due to our society’s inadequacy in caring for all people, regardless of their economic means. Most nonprofits clearly see economic enablement as part of our missions.