The uncertainty around funding and the ever-changing rules of the funders force so many community based organizations to play from a place of scarcity.
You end up reinforcing the issues you seek to prevent and fix. You can’t hire and pay as well as you’d like because you don’t know if you’ll have enough funds to make ends meet as an organization.
In no other industry can an outside entity forcibly change your business model. But when a funder suddenly says that next year you won’t get money to run a program, you will only get money if you achieve certain outcomes, there is nothing you can do about it. They will race to the bottom and find another organization promising the same metrics at a lower cost.
But as Seth Godin once said: “The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.“