As I might have mentioned in previous posts, I come from a
performing arts background. The more theatres I intern with the more I develop an
inner grading system about how effective I think each organization is in
meeting its goal. While profitability is certainly a necessary and welcome
trait for a theatre to have, it ultimately should not define a theatre’s
existence. In my mind, any theatre, like any nonprofit, that strives to
complete an important mission and can prove its effectiveness with the
audiences it serves deserves and should receive all the necessary support it
needs to be sustained. However, if efficient structures of funding are not in
place to serve these organizations, then such nonprofits will be able to
effectively carry out their missions because their energies will constantly be
exhausted figuring out how to cut costs and get by.
As evidenced by the Presidential debate
last night, in this country there is an ongoing conversation about how much of
a role government can and should play in supporting the nonprofit (or “third”)
sector. I believe that, in a
sense, the 2008 recession was a hidden blessing for innovators and forward-thinking
nonprofits because the tightening of purse strings created a need for the
development of tools and standards that measure the effectiveness of a method
or program in correlation to the social need it addresses. I definitely think
that certain nonprofits that cannot provide these deliverables should be weeded
out by natural competition in our society. Since the President is currently
being scrutinized for our country’s trillion-dollar debt, his administration
needs to support programs and initiatives that truly can have profound benefits
on our society. However, it is becoming harder and harder to discern black from
white, especially in the medical field.
I
have been thinking about this topic in relation to my group project, which
involves finding revenue streams to fund the effort to eradicate polio in
Pakistan. Throughout this process, I have learned that politics can be as
detrimental to an innovative cause as money. Ultimately, with these
constraints, it is impossible to devise a perfectly infallible method for
analyzing the effectiveness of nonprofits and, more so, worthy social causes
that deserve priority treatment. For example, The New York Times article on grants awarded to innovators mentions
that “patents reward innovators with a period of monopoly control over their
invention. This means that there is very little incentive to pursue innovations
that don’t promise to be lucrative.”[i] The article
goes on to mention that innovations for various rare diseases are put on the
back burner mostly because there isn’t enough profit to be made in curing them.
Thus,
in my mind I am struggling over what separates polio (a disease nearly
eradicated across the globe) from Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, a rare inherited
disorder that affects about one in 380,000 live births all across the world.[ii]
Both diseases have devastating effects on the human body (both physically and
neurologically). I suppose that polio epidemics over one hundred years ago put
the disease in the limelight, while Lesch-Nyhan is not contagious. I am not
claiming that one disease is worse than the other. I have met many people with
Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome and knew one person who suffered from polio while an infant
(my great aunt). I wish innovation do more to help both causes, but I suppose
if politicians are not well informed about such issue and get tied up in
partisan battles, they ultimately are not able to enact legislation that would support
the efforts to cure these horrible diseases.
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