You Can Outsource Services. You Can’t Outsource Responsibility.
An Essay by Tawnia Wise
Over the past several years, we've watched major established nonprofits in Dallas face multi-million dollar shortfalls. As a nonprofit strategy firm, we've been close to several organizations confronting closure. The public conversation about their crises follows a familiar script. Did they expand too quickly? Did leadership mismanage funds? Were poor financial decisions to blame?
These are reasonable questions to ask about a financial crisis that could threaten vital community services. But there’s much more to examine here.
Why do we hold nonprofits responsible for solving public problems when the government still holds the authority, and much of the power, to change the system creating those problems?
While every nonprofit should be accountable for how it stewards public resources, we need to have a conversation about governance, power and responsibility –– and who ultimately holds it.
Part of the government’s job is to keep its citizens safe and healthy. However, when the government chooses to deliver essential public services required to meet its goals through nonprofit partnerships, it doesn’t transfer ownership of its responsibility toward those goals.
The Government Should Partner with Nonprofits
Communities benefit when the government partners with nonprofits. In many cases, nonprofits are better equipped to deliver services because they have deep relationships in the communities they serve, as well as specialized expertise and the flexibility to meet people’s changing needs more quickly than government agencies. Nonprofits become trusted partners, and this connection cannot be easily replicated by large public institutions. So, why else are nonprofits the right partners to support healthy and safe communities?
Nonprofits are closer to the problem. They are embedded in communities. They understand local culture, build long-term relationships and can earn trust from people who may be reluctant to engage with government.
Nonprofits are innovators. They can pilot new approaches, test ideas and adapt quickly. The government often adopts practices that nonprofits pioneered.
Nonprofits are advocates. Nonprofits don’t just deliver services. They elevate community voices, identify emerging needs and provide policymakers with firsthand insight into how public policies affect the people they are intended to serve.
Nonprofits provide capacity. The government doesn’t need to employ every therapist, case manager or housing navigator. Leveraging nonprofit expertise is often an efficient and effective way to deliver services.
Delegation Does Not Abdicate Responsibility
Partnership should expand the government’s capacity to serve the public. It should never diminish the government’s responsibility to do so. Every healthy organization understands a simple leadership principle: Services can be outsourced; responsibility for the outcome cannot.
As the CEO of a consulting firm, I hire experts to perform work every day. If I hire a consultant, they become responsible for producing services that meet our standards of quality. They do take over responsibility for whether my company has a sustainable revenue strategy. That responsibility remains mine. The same is true for boards that hire an executive. Despite what that executive may do, the board maintains its fiduciary responsibility. A general contractor delegates work to subcontractors. The contractor is still accountable for the finished project.
When it comes to the government partnering with nonprofits, we must not confuse delegating service delivery with transferring responsibility. If we do, we’ll continue asking nonprofits to solve problems they didn’t create, with tools they don’t control, inside systems they don’t have the authority to change. And every time one of them struggles under that weight, we’ll blame the organization instead of examining the system itself.
To understand why that matters, we have to zoom out beyond any single organization and look at the system in which it operates.
The System has Design Flaws
Dallas is part of one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. It is also one of its most unequal. That isn’t simply the result of individual choices or market forces. Many of the conditions that shape opportunity today were created through decades of public policy decisions made deliberately by the city's power structures. In The Accommodation, journalist Jim Schutze documented how Dallas's political and business leaders, through the city’s most powerful institution, the Citizen’s Council, made calculated policy choices to reinforce segregation. Those decisions about highways, housing, lending, school funding, transportation and public investment didn't happen by accident. They were designed to determine which neighborhoods accumulated opportunity and which were left behind.
Consider Bonton, one of Dallas’ oldest Black neighborhoods. When Interstate 45 was routed through the community, it physically separated residents from jobs, businesses and investment occurring elsewhere in the city. Over time, that isolation contributed to persistent disinvestment, fewer economic opportunities and higher concentrations of poverty. The highway wasn’t simply a transportation project. It became part of a system that shaped opportunity for generations.
Redlining offers another example. Beginning in the 1930s, federal housing policies labeled many Black neighborhoods as high-risk for mortgage lending, making it extraordinarily difficult for families to buy homes or build wealth. While those maps no longer determine lending decisions, their effects remain visible today. Neighborhoods that were denied investment for decades continue to experience lower property values, fewer businesses, under-resourced schools and higher rates of poverty. Those outcomes didn't simply disappear when the policy ended. They became embedded in the communities themselves.
Disinvestment is often less visible, but its effects are just as profound. There are neighborhoods in southern Dallas where reliable cell service and broadband internet remain inconsistent because private companies have determined the return on investment isn't high enough to justify expanding infrastructure. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that meant children struggled to participate in online learning while parents were cut off from opportunities to work remotely. In today’s economy, internet access is a basic need and essential infrastructure. When entire communities are excluded from it, the consequences ripple through education, employment, healthcare and economic mobility.
Transportation tells a similar story. Public transit systems are often designed around existing patterns of employment and population rather than the needs of residents with the fewest transportation options. For many people living in southern Dallas, jobs, healthcare and other essential resources remain difficult to reach without a personal vehicle.
These are examples of how infrastructure shapes access to opportunity. And they illustrate a larger principle. Systems are not neutral. They reflect the decisions that created them, and once those decisions become embedded in infrastructure, neighborhoods and institutions, they continue shaping opportunity for generations. Over time, those decisions influence the social challenges nonprofits are expected to solve.
These systems also produce predictable outcomes. When opportunity is concentrated in some places and disadvantage in others, we shouldn’t be surprised when those patterns persist.
Substituting Services for Structural Change
In her book Nonprofit Neighborhoods, historian Claire Dunning argues that one of the defining shifts of the War on Poverty in the 1960s was the expansion of nonprofit organizations as the primary vehicle for delivering social programs. This observation aligns with Vu Le's critique in Reimagining Nonprofits, where he challenges how the nonprofit sector has become the mechanism through which government avoids rather than addresses structural inequality. As communities demanded structural reforms to housing, education, employment and political power during the Civil Rights Movement, government increasingly invested in nonprofit organizations to provide services within those communities. Those organizations performed essential work and continue to do so today.
But while services expanded, many of the systems producing those needs remained largely unchanged. Government had a choice. It could invest in changing the systems producing inequality, or it could invest in helping people survive those systems. As Dunning argues, the second approach became the dominant response. Over time, we began confusing the existence of services with the solution to the problem.
The nonprofit sector grew dramatically, not to solve the underlying causes of poverty but to respond to its consequences. Food banks help families facing hunger, but they cannot raise wages. Tutoring programs help children succeed in school, but they cannot redesign inequitable school funding systems. Workforce development organizations prepare people for employment, but they cannot determine where jobs are located or whether public transportation connects people to them. Housing nonprofits build and preserve affordable housing, but they cannot rewrite zoning laws or reshape housing policy. Mental health providers offer critical care, but they cannot address the structural conditions that drive trauma, poverty and stigmatized mental illness.
Nonprofits perform extraordinary work every day. The problem is that we ask them to solve problems whose root causes lie outside their control. The systems producing those needs remain intact while nonprofits become responsible for helping people navigate them.
The Funding Model as Control
If nonprofit organizations have become the primary vehicle for delivering public services, who decides how those services are delivered?
Whoever controls the funding.
Funding shapes priorities, defines success, influences language, rewards certain approaches and discourages others. Every grant application, contract and funding opportunity communicates what problems matter, which solutions are acceptable and how success will be measured. In other words, funding wields power beyond just keeping an organization’s doors open.
For instance, government determines which services qualify for public funding. One of the most persistent narratives in recent years is that nonprofits are wasteful, inefficient or misusing taxpayer dollars. Because of this narrative, the public often imagines government funding as a blank check. In reality, it is more accurately described as a reimbursement system wrapped in compliance requirements, performance metrics, procurement rules, audits and reporting obligations.
Public grants are among the most competitive and heavily regulated funding sources available. Organizations spend months preparing applications and compete against hundreds of other applicants for limited funding. Those that receive awards must comply with detailed contracts. Every expenditure must be justified. Every outcome must be measured. Every dollar must be accounted for.
Ironically, government grants rarely provide enough funding to fully operate the programs they support. Most reimburse only a portion of the true cost of delivering services, leaving nonprofits to fill the gap through fundraising. Organizations are expected to deliver public services while simultaneously piecing together the funding needed to sustain them. Success depends not only on serving communities well, but on successfully navigating an increasingly complex web of funding requirements.
This reflects a system that asks nonprofits to accomplish extraordinarily difficult work under extraordinary constraints. The restrictions don’t stop at budgets and reporting. Increasingly, they shape how organizations describe problems, what solutions they propose and even the language they use. As I was writing this essay, a colleague shared guidance a client had just received about a grant application from the granting agency. The feedback focused entirely on aligning program terminology with the priorities of the current administration. Certain words were discouraged; others were preferred. The funding requirements now define the narrative itself.
In many ways, private philanthropy has followed suit. Foundations determine which ideas are worthy of investment. Donors influence which stories capture attention. Grant guidelines signal what approaches are considered innovative, what outcomes matter most and increasingly, what language organizations should use to describe their work. Like government funding, private funding shapes behavior as much as it provides resources.
Because funding is scarce, nonprofits adapt. They design programs around grant priorities, develop new initiatives to match foundation interests and invest countless hours responding to increasingly complex applications, reports, surveys and requests for input. Every hour spent proving an organization’s worth is an hour that cannot be spent serving its mission.
Listening sessions are convened. Surveys are distributed. Nonprofits are invited to share what their communities need. Yet too often, the funding priorities have already been established before those conversations begin. Organizations closest to the work are asked for their expertise but are rarely invited to share decision-making authority.
Healthy partnerships require trust. Nonprofits should absolutely be accountable for results and responsible stewards of philanthropic investments. But accountability should not be confused with control. When organizations must constantly reshape their programs, language and priorities to fit the preferences of those holding the resources, funders risk subordinating community expertise instead of empowering it.
The irony is hard to miss. We routinely say we trust nonprofits to solve complex social problems, yet we often don’t trust them to determine the best way to use the resources provided to solve them. In Empowering Charity, Dr. Froswa Booker examines this exact contradiction in the ways that funding processes themselves undermine the very empowerment and community expertise we claim to value. The consequences extend beyond individual grants. Every proposal, every report and every site visit becomes another opportunity to justify why a particular organization or community is worthy of investment.
Meanwhile, a different question is rarely asked: Is the funding system itself producing the outcomes we actually want? Nonprofits compete to prove they are the most deserving. Communities compete to prove they are needy enough. Everyone below the funder must justify themselves. But is the funder asked to justify the funding system itself?
The result is a remarkable inversion where those with the greatest proximity to injustice have the least power to address it. Edgar Villanueva describes this dynamic in his book Decolonizing Wealth. The institutions furthest removed from the day-to-day consequences retain the greatest influence over what gets funded, how success is defined and which approaches are considered worthy of investment.
It isn’t simply a funding model. It's a governance model. And power is the mechanism.
The Story That Makes the System Work
Every system depends on a story that explains why it is fair. In America, that story is the bootstrap myth. We celebrate people who “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and conclude that those who continue to struggle simply didn’t work hard enough. It’s an appealing narrative because it places success and failure squarely on individuals rather than asking whether the systems around them created unequal opportunities in the first place.
At its core, the bootstrap myth isn’t simply about hard work. It’s about deservedness. It tells us that people who succeed deserve what they have, while those who struggle simply haven’t earned something better. Success becomes evidence of virtue. Hardship becomes evidence of personal failure.
The irony is that no one succeeds alone. Every successful person has benefited from systems they did not build, including public education, transportation infrastructure, legal protections, financial institutions, family support, professional networks or simply living in a community with opportunity. Those systems are often invisible. We rarely notice them when they create opportunity, and we rarely recognize them when they constrain it.
We tell a remarkably similar story about nonprofit organizations. If one organization secures funding and another doesn’t, we often assume the funded organization was simply better. Better managed. Better led. More innovative. More deserving. We rarely stop to ask whether the funding process itself favors certain organizations, certain communities, certain narratives or certain definitions of success.
The bootstrap myth teaches us that resources should be earned rather than guaranteed. Once deservedness becomes the standard, funding stops being about meeting public need and becomes a competition for worthiness. The result is that nonprofits spend enormous amounts of time proving they deserve resources instead of asking why the resources necessary to meet public needs are treated as something that must be earned in the first place.
The bootstrap myth legitimizes inequality. It provides the moral justification for scarcity. If resources are limited, then someone must deserve them more than someone else. Once we accept that premise, the conversation shifts away from whether scarcity itself is the product of policy choices and toward who has earned the right to receive what little is available.
Competitive funding suddenly feels fair. Nonprofits compete to prove they deserve funding. Communities compete to prove they deserve investment. Individuals compete to prove they deserve services. Instead of asking whether the system is producing enough resources to meet public needs, we spend our energy deciding who is most worthy of receiving them.
Mistaking the Pressure Valve for the Problem
One of the most troubling developments in recent years has been the growing narrative that nonprofits are wasteful, inefficient or somehow responsible for the persistence of social problems. That criticism doesn’t simply misrepresent how the sector operates. It shifts attention away from the systems producing those problems in the first place.
We've spent decades building a governance model that asks nonprofits to manage the consequences of systemic inequities while the institutions with the authority to redesign those systems retain control over the policies, funding and rules that shape them.
Ironically, nonprofits are among the few institutions working to reduce the harm created by systems they didn't design. They didn’t create the housing shortage. They didn’t design transportation networks. They didn’t write zoning laws. They didn’t establish Medicaid reimbursement rates. They didn’t create concentrated poverty. Yet they're expected to manage the consequences of these system failures with limited resources and unstable funding.
That leads us to a paradox. When we expect nonprofits to continually compensate for systemic failures, we make those failures easier to ignore. And then the better nonprofits become at helping communities survive broken systems, the less pressure there is to redesign those systems in the first place.
Shared Work, Shared Ownership
Governments should absolutely partner with nonprofits. It should contract for services, invest in community expertise and leverage the innovation, trust and flexibility that nonprofit organizations bring to the work. Those partnerships strengthen our communities.
But partnership is not the same as displacement. Government can outsource service delivery. It cannot outsource its obligation to create healthy, safe and equitable communities. Contracting for services does not transfer responsibility for public outcomes.
Until we recognize that distinction, we will continue asking nonprofits to solve problems they did not create. The question was never whether nonprofits are doing enough. The question is whether we have mistaken service delivery for systems change, partnership for public responsibility, and charity for justice. Until we confront those distinctions, we won’t solve the problems we’re asking nonprofits to manage. We’ll simply continue managing them.
A society’s success is better measured by its commitment to eliminating injustice than by how well it manages its consequences. Truly strengthening nonprofit partnerships means pairing community expertise with public systems that are willing to examine and redesign the conditions creating the need for those services. Nonprofits exist to help governments fulfill their responsibility, not to replace it.