There are more than a million and a half nonprofit organizations in the United States, and more are being born every day. But for all the writing about how nonprofits can be founded and scaled, almost no one publicly interrogates the other end of the life cycle: What happens when a nonprofit dies?
The Nonprofit Quarterly reports that, although data on nonprofit closings are notoriously difficult to confirm through the Internal Revenue Service, the most likely age of organizational death is between six and 15 years. Tens of thousands of nonprofits close their doors every year, but we rarely harvest the lessons of their failures.
In August 2015 I wrote a Fixes article about a model of how humans might die less expensively and better. According to the National Institutes of Health, the 5 percent most seriously ill Americans cost 50 percent of health care spending, with most costs incurred in the last year of life in hospitals. Enter Zen Hospice Project, a small nonprofit experiment in helping people in San Francisco die with less medical intervention, surrounded by beauty and care.
[For more on this story by Courtney E. Martin, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...n-place-to-die.html?]
Comments (0)