When we knew we were moving back to NC at the start of the year, I decided to get serious about my job hunting. I had been volunteering with a new nonprofit, but as the person applying for grant funding, I knew getting a salary in that role was very far into the future. So for 4.5 months, I checked LinkedIn, Idealist, and Indeed every single day looking for a remote nonprofit manager job. Last month I thought I found the perfect fit, so I waited patiently a month for things to get started. After all, my goal was to be an income earner by June and this role started the first week in June. There were four of us on this new team. I became friendly with another team member right out of the gate. We had similar personality styles and were ready to take on this new role, giving 110%.
Right away, as early as the Orientation meeting, we started having some questions. The organization boasted that it was active in 15 countries, had over 500 student leader volunteers, and active chapters world wide. The founder would not give us an organizational email to use to reach out to partners, which should have been the first signal something was not right. But as I reviewed the contract, my new friend and I had several concerns about the pay structure. We were supposed to receive half of every donation made to the organization, but we had no legal affiliation with the organization. We questioned this arrangement, and the BOD changed it from a donation model to fee for service model but could not explain the numbers used in the fee for structure model. It literally felt like a Multi-Level Marketing scam under the guise of a nonprofit. I posted questions about the fee for service model and contract wording in our Slack group. My post was immediately taken down so the other team members could not see my concerns. What the founder did not know was that we were all communicating with each other outside of Slack, so taking down my post did not mean they did not see it. A nonprofit manager friend put the revised fee for service model contract into Chat GPT and TONS of red flags were generated. So my new friend and I were not being paranoid with our concerns. We both agreed not to sign the new contract and move on. But what a waste of a month of time. And back to the drawing board with job hunting.
Another friend asked how I ended up finding all the weird nonprofits…. I explained it wasn’t me, it is just the nature of the nonprofit world. If your nonprofit generates less than $50,000/yr (or makes it so you report less than that), there are no governing systems in place. You do not have to document what you do with that $50,000, and you can pretty much do whatever you want to do with that money. Add in the volunteering dynamic, the need for control, and strong personality types, and it can get complicated super fast.
So as much as I despise Linkedin, I am back on it daily, along with Idealist and Indeed. We have some savings in place to fill in the pay cut my husband took with his new job until he can buy into the private practice in year three, so we will be fine. And I am a firm believer in the right role being out there for me, and that I will find it eventually. I just wish the nonprofit world was less weird and we didn’t live in a world where this type of work is extremely hard to find with our current political administration. But it is what it is, and I am good at doing hard things. Here’s looking at you LinkedIn. Let’s be pals again but hopefully not for too long.