Chapter ThirteenThe Structure of a Donor-Focused Nonprofit
When your interpreter is weeping too much to tell you what was just said, you know you're being told a sad story.
Only people who work in fundraising have experiences like this: I interviewed a caregiver at an orphanage in Omsk, a run-down Detroit of a city in Siberia. (Dostoevsky was sent there as a punishment for revolutionary activity, which tells you something about the place.) The caregiver had brought a little boy named Kirill (pronounced Key-REAL) because she wanted me to know his story.
Kirill was asleep on my lap, as limp as a ribbon of seaweed.
The Soviet Union collapsed a few weeks after my visit. While I was there, the once inescapable apparatus of the Soviet State was going up in smoke. It left breathtaking new freedoms, but also rising poverty, lawlessness, decay, and alcoholism. There was widespread fear that the coming winter would bring a famine and starve millions.
The orphanage was ill-lit and dirty. Clearly, it had never been a pleasant or child-friendly place. But as the State and the Communist Party crumbled, the structures that supported places like orphanages dissolved, too. The workers were struggling to feed and care for the swelling population of children without parents—many of them handicapped ...
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