Welcome to No Good Deeds. I’m here to break your heart.
Earlier this year, I left a job that I’d held for nearly a decade, a job that looked really good on paper, and in many ways was a job I loved at a global nonprofit organization. Like so many others, I was severely burnt out after a year of increasing demands and decreasing support from leadership. The thing that pushed me over the edge was that it was no longer able to protect my team. The demands became so unreasonable that I no longer had the ability to protect my team from them. All of the walls that I had built up to manage our workflow were failing, because, as so often happens when you are in the business of doing “good work”, reality is not welcome.
For profit corporations are also often similarly divorced from reality, and I realize that many people in upper management feel the same way. There are many great pieces written on the subject recently, as we all reckon with our new reality in 2021. I argue, though, that there is a particular type of mindfuckery that happens when one is working for ideals instead of money (but also money, we’ll get to that later).
The recent blow-up at Time’s Up is a great example of this. This is not surprising to anyone who has ever done real advocacy work. This is not the first org that has thrown a bunch of rich and famous people at media instead of actually justifying their existence and been rewarded with glowing press coverage until they have a major fuck-up. We all enjoy a good train wreck when the famous are involved, but what’s lost in this conversation is the real damage that these bullshit org do, to their cause and to the other, real orgs that have been doing this work for decades.
Let’s get into it.
In the meantime, tell your friends!