I have heard it suggested that I should start fundraising and form a formal organization to guide and expand the Saners movement. Our group seeks to prevent climate collapse and establish a better, more humane society—worldwide.
I’ve worked for several nonprofits. From my experience on the inside, I can tell you truly that some are quite good, and others are (to put it mildly) not so good. They are often admirable organizations. And they have specific functions and pressures built into their very structure.
The form of a nonprofit organization is unsuitable for any movement with goals and strategies as expansive and as urgent as what the Saners seek to achieve. We would be hampered by a board always trying to rein us in and we’d end up like any nonprofit—compromising our mission to advance fundraising.
Our group, The Saners, seeks genuine and significant change in the world, and we need it quickly. Nonprofits are structurely conservative and administratively plodding. Their actual mission soon becomes to survive as a fundraising organization and, ideally, get bigger. The actual cause that spearheaded the founding of the organization quickly becomes a footnote.
Nonprofits are, more often than not, performative and not real forces for change. This is not a dig at the people who work for them—most nonprofit…
