Paradise Lost: Can We Keep Nonprofits From Failing?
Richard Dare, CEO and Managing Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, writes at Huffington Post:
What nerve. What gall. Here were my instructions, the day I arrived: “You are to pursue a group of well-heeled funders — patrons as they're called in the art world — and hope they give us bundles of cash so we can do our thing.” That was pretty much it. That was, in essence, the sum total of the business plan with which I was presented. And this little arrangement presumably would remain hunky-dory so long as we took pains never to alienate our sugar daddies. But under this regime, I speculated, one is not really in the art business anymore, is one? No, the beggar ultimately acts primarily upon the impulse to satisfy his patrons — or better yet, has a staff to do that for him. And so, I wondered, what are we all going to do when we eventually recognize we've constructed a gilded trap for ourselves by this practice?