Birth of a Dark Nation Read Online Free Page B

looked
out the window and saw that Dante was on his regular spot directly
across the street.
    "Lawd," he said. I shrugged. Ernie, our
bumbling executive director, sat down and began the meeting.
    Magdalene House was the kind of organization
that attracted two types of employees. First, you had the ones who
were claimed to be passionate about the cause itself-women living
with HIV. My boss Ernie fit in that category, as did the majority
of case managers. While their passion was admirable, it didn't
always translate into best practices. I learned that one couldn't
govern or manage a nonprofit based on emotion. It takes a delicate
balance of knowledge, skills, policy, and good, sound business
practices. They were hired based on passion years ago. Now? They
were just taking up space.
    Magdalene House was known for none of that.
That made it challenging for the second, business-savvy group of
people, employees like Steve, Cissy, and me to excel in our fields.
Although Steve was a case manager and did have a passion for
helping people, he held a master's degree in social work and often
had a hard time understanding why our data collection and case
management practices were so archaic. It was almost criminal how
poorly records were kept. And that affected Cissy's job in
development, too. Whenever a grant proposal had to be written which
specifically asked for hard numbers, she had no choice but to guess
the figures.
    So the day-to-day work got done because of a
love for the clients and their plight, but important work like
grant proposals, operations, and leadership got short shrift
because, really, nobody was in charge. Nobody worth a damn.
    Ernie had been executive director for years,
hired by friends on the board of directors who just needed somebody
to keep the organization running day-to-day. By the time I got
there, Magdalene House was already in the middle of a very slow
decline.
    Steve was the first to notice. Even though
the formal records were spotty, he saw that the caseloads for all
the case managers were slowly dropping off. The clients weren't
dying. They were just finding other places to receive housing and
the other services we provided. Younger, shinier nonprofits were
opening up their doors across town, and even though they did the
same things we did, the clients were wooed away by the newness and
the incentives of the other organizations. I couldn't be mad at
them, either. With the private foundation money the new
organizations were receiving, they were able to give their clients
cool things for loyalty, like an Amazon gift card for six months of
keeping appointments. Steve tried to introduce a similar incentive
program, but Ernie wasn't having it. Magdalene couldn't afford
that, he said.
    Cissy then began to see that Ernie wasn't
giving her as much to do, and that he hired contractors to handle
the government grants. It was obvious to everyone that Ernie was
giving his own cronies work to do while slowly, but surely, taking
away Cissy's responsibilities. She was basically relegated to
writing appeal letters and trying to plan special events.
    Finally, I realized that all the external
projects that I used to assist on had been cut. No more volunteer
recruitment, no more supervising interns. Just running virus scans,
downloading software, and ordering new equipment. The salary was
adequate, but it was clear that Ernie was controlling us by taking
away responsibilities.
    "I've got some bad news," Ernie began at our
regular staff meeting. "We were denied funding for capital
improvements on the house. We've got to wait another year before we
can improve the HVAC system."
    The room grumbled.
    "I know, I know… It's tough."
    He always said, "It's tough," as though that
were an actual answer to any questions we had.
    "But we've got to keep moving forward as a
team."
    "I have a question…" I began. "It seems like
we haven't been winning these major grants lately. Is there
anything we can do to fortify this process? You