‘A Star in This Dark, Dark Sky’?
Writing on the Getting Attention Blog, nonprofit marketing guru Nancy Schwartz speculates that the Chinese government’s atypically active response to last week’s Sichuan earthquake could lead to the development, for the first time, of "a real nonprofit sector" in the country:
There are already thousands of grassroots nonprofits in China, but they are fighting just to survive without the necessary support and infrastructure, much less to provide services to this huge population (estimated at 1.4 billion). Weak management skills and lack of operating resources are among the key barriers to Chinese nonprofit impact, as cited in a recent McKinsey & Company report.
However, dramatic events are the most common harbinger of major change, and there’s little more dramatic than the events of the last days in China. There may be a star in this dark, dark sky. …
This is a society aching for nonprofits to fill the gaps the government has been content to hide for so long. This is a people no longer willing to live without rights, or in poverty. This is a country where nonprofit organizations can bring their issue and functional expertise to complement what the government can provide.
Watch, look and listen. With over 50,000 dead and 5 million homeless quake survivors, there’s no better time than now for China to birth a robust nonprofit sector.
How awful that it would take such a numbingly tragic event to give rise to a collection of aid organizations the likes of which we completely take for granted here. Regardless, here’s hoping that the world’s larger nonprofits see this as a chance to lend a hand in China, and that the government there sees it for the opportunity it is, and not the threat it isn’t. | 501(c)
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POSTED IN: Musings
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