I love the place I work. I am always reminding myself of how lucky I am, to be doing exactly what I want to be doing as a profession and still managing to eat at the same time. Nonprofit middle management is seldom terribly lucrative and I have a sneaking suspicion that mid-sized arts organizations, at least the ones in my general vicinity, teeter on the edge of extinction more often than could ever be reasonably considered healthy. Nonprofits are businesses and they run like a business– but there are a myriad of odd things about them that sometimes make it seem that the business part of the deal was merely an afterthought. That this particular nonprofit that I work at is still in business today is nothing short of extraordinary– the number of decisions that rightly should have closed the place down in the past two years alone boggles my mind. The more I learn about our history, and the more I dig into our present the more of a mystery it is to me that some great disaster hasn’t already come along. So it makes me wonder just how unique our “sensitive” (as NewBoss puts it) situation is, and how many other organizations out there are actually one misstep away from closing their doors entirely.
I can’t fix everything. If I could I really would. It’s frustrating not to be able to work my magic against the dark clouds that have appeared– the way that I work my magic in resolving my family’s conflicts or come to the rescue in some way by volunteering for a 12-hour workday. So I work as hard as I can until the adrenaline wears thin and then sleep off the discomfort as best I can, when I can. I feel I owe this place my best and I’ve been giving it, as much I’ve been able. But there is a fear this all could fail, and it resides deep in a lot of my experience here lately. I am not alone, and there is a short list now of people who GET IT and have the energy for the moment to make some major changes. Can it last? I stay up late at night wondering about it all the time…
I guess it would be easier to work for a business who’s mission I was indifferent to. It is one thing to worry about a job f alling apart for all the ways such a circumstance could impact one’s own self. It is quite another to feel responsible for making all that is important in an organization, all that impacts individual lives by virtue OF its existence– for making THAT continue to happen. I don’t think I would ever want to be an Executive Director really. The pressures of my seniority as it is are intense enough, I can’t imagine also being responsible for putting in a payroll that allows people to pay their mortgages. OldBoss always used to say that E.D.’s were the most emotionally wrecked people you could ever come across– he had his own little peer group of other E.D.’s and as far as I’d been able to ascertain it was basically a monthly gathering of teary eyed professionals, draining their anxieties with each other just enough to make getting out bed the next morning a possibility. Maybe I need a group like that.
I hold onto my hope that things will get better. It’s nice to see certain initiatives being taken these days. My wish is that my days of being “on my own” at my workplace are behind me. I could definitely use a break.
