Nonprofits must adapt to times

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein.

According to our recent report, 32 percent of families in Fairfield County are struggling to make ends meet. Layer on that the COVID crisis, which is wreaking havoc on people across Fairfield County. But that’s not the only crisis we face — the other is more invisible, equally destructive and one that demands radical changes in the way nonprofits operate.

The manufacturing boom that drove economic expansion in our region after World War II has been replaced by low-wage jobs, abandoned buildings and a thriving outpost of Wall Street, and therein you have key ingredients fueling Fairfield County’s Opportunity Gap — the largest in the country. We now live in a county where large swaths of our population are working harder to make less, living with illness, battling systemic racism, gender inequality and other significant obstacles. The looming artificial intelligence economy promises to exacerbate this construct, creating impenetrable clusters of wealth and information.

While COVID threatens the short term, we need to be more prepared for the tectonic shift that’s happening, right now, beneath our feet: the shift to the AI age. So, how do we make our way through this crisis and rebuild stronger?

If we could turn back the clock to the 1940s when my grandmother opened her diner on Main Street in Bridgeport, we could argue that the lack of actions taken then, when times were good, are a great contributor to the problems we now face. The last era of disruption brought wage stagnation, incubated a dysfunctional health insurance system, a looming affordable housing crisis and bred generational poverty. We couldn’t see beyond the manufacturing boom that was beginning to wane.

The disruption we’re likely to endure in the AI era has the potential to exponentially accelerate gaps, unless we meet it with a new vision for our region, one that allows us to reimagine what the next 50 years will bring. To paraphrase Einstein, it’s time to think different.

Our works starts by shoring up the four pillars that drive opportunity in the AI age:

Education, including investments in early literacy, kindergarten readiness, STEM, ethics, interpersonal communication and logic;

Health and wellness, addressing disparities in gaining access to health care, eliminating the stigma attached to mental illness, furthering our understanding of sustainable nutrition and addressing issues early so that children grow up healthy;

Financial stability, including investments in child care; a civic architecture that turns abandoned warehouses into data factories; secure, ubiquitous connectivity, the creation of community-based incubators fostering the development of green and minority-owned small businesses backed with tax credits for those who invest in them, and higher-paying jobs done by highskilled labor; Racial and gender equity, which will require structural reforms to address generational poverty and eradicate ion inequality.

Integration of services will be the expectation in the AI age. There are over 9,700 nonprofits operating in Fairfield County, most working on single issues, more competitively than cooperatively. The day will soon be here when we will no longer be able to operate in silos and expect a person to find multiple sources of help for the myriad problems they face. We need to find people where they are, and work more seamlessly to help them make progress. And we need to consolidate.

The typical nonprofit model, rooted in perpetual fundraising, is making suffering transactional. We need more long cycle donations, where we establish trust through radical transparency. We need to stop using tired metrics like “number of people served,” and look more at how people are making progress along with the integrity of our process. The nonprofit version of teaching to the test often provides little long-term value.

We can empower people to solve problems in the short term and position ourselves for the AI age. It is time for those who are struggling, who have been fighting the odds for generations, to have a shot at realizing their enormous potential. We’ll all be better off for it.

It’s time to re-imagine and rebuild stronger.