From the "Charity Industrial Complex" to Thinking Outside the Silo, Chapter 5, Part 2
From the "Charity Industrial Complex" to Thinking Outside the Silo, Chapter 5, Part 2
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
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You are in Chapter 5, Part 2, From the Charity Industrial Complex to Thinking Outside the Silo
Chapter 5 posts:
Joining the Charity Industrial Complex and Fractal Community Empowerment
From the Charity Industrial Complex to Thinking Outside the Silo
Global Oligarchy or Community Self-Governance? and Bringing Heaven to Earth
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy, which embodies the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Voice-overs are now at the top of my posts for anyone who doesn’t have the time to sit and read! Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
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Previously from Chapter 5, Part 1
So, there I was, standing between two cultures in stark contrast.
On one hand, there was the heady, glamorous world of professional do-gooding. On the other, there was a symbiotic structure that helped those with few resources collaborate to do good and do well. As for the buyers’ club, it was never implemented because, ultimately, my mission and the Food Bank’s mission were not a match.
They were content to go about caring for the collateral damage of the global economic system rather than addressing the problem at the cause level.
When the glory of that huge fundraising campaign wore off, I saw I was up against insurmountable odds — the formidable challenge of reforming the system from within —
so I left.
Chapter 5: From the “Charity Industrial Complex”
to Thinking Outside the Silo Part 2
From the Charity Industrial Complex to Micro-Enterprise
I decided to take a year off. With my severance package, I took my family to travel in Mexico for a year. My wife at the time was from Mexico, and we had a daughter and a young boy in tow. We home-schooled my daughter as we traveled, away from the rat race and work responsibilities. So, it was a shock when we returned to “civilization” in 1999.
For one thing, it seemed like five new malls had popped up in San Diego while we were gone. Traffic was horrendous. It took forty-five minutes to drive five miles. My wife and I discussed finding a smaller, friendlier community to raise our children.
With my severance spent, I now truly needed a job, so I began looking for an executive position in an organization promoting for-profit businesses, including social enterprises.
I thought maybe I could have an impact in the area of business development. I ultimately landed in Carson City, Nevada, leading the statewide Nevada Micro-Enterprise Initiative, where they made loans of up to $25,000 to low-income people to start or grow their small businesses.
I moved my family to North Lake Tahoe and commuted to Carson City. I was optimistic about making a difference in the field of entrepreneurial business, rather than the charity world, by helping talented and ambitious individuals launch their own businesses.
The Nevada Micro-Enterprise Initiative (NMI) was designed to fill a niche that resonated with my own experience and ideas — helping entrepreneurial-minded individuals lift themselves out of poverty by creating businesses that prospered while providing value to the community at large.
For those serious about starting a business, this program was a boon and a blessing. One of the most amazing stories was a woman who had previously been living in her car who became a successful caterer. In fact, she ended up landing an ongoing gig working at the Governor of Nevada’s residence.
As part of the loan application, there was a 10-week class to help applicants determine whether they had the personality and disposition to be successful entrepreneurs. Then, after the loan was approved, there was another technical assistance program to help them get through the start-up phase.
From where I stood, the program seemed to be an unqualified success. The NMI had a fund of $1 million in Small Business Administration (SBA) funds as an investment pool at a small interest rate. The loan repayment rate from the borrowers was very high — 96%.
While this program was a valuable kickstart for small local businesses, there was no follow-up once the loan was dispersed and the technical assistance period ended. I wondered how we could use the symbiotic networking principles to support these budding businesses in their growth phase and later. As with the Food Bank, however, I ran into challenges relating to the organization's culture.
I quickly discovered that the Board of Directors came mostly from large national banks, like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and US Bank. I found out part of the reason the program existed was as a “penalty” for the practice of “redlining”—refusing a loan to someone because they live in an area deemed to be a poor financial risk.
So, because poor people had been discriminated against, the government established the Community Reinvestment Act, and the micro-loan project was a way for national banks to “pay back” local communities for past discriminatory policies against high-risk customers.
Even though this was a local program, and there were a few local businesspeople involved, there were no local banks on the board. As with so many other silo-based approaches, there was no relationship between these micro-loans and other agencies looking to develop local businesses in under-represented communities. There was no collaboration and no coordination!
Once again, the invisible Culture of Separation — “the way it is” — prevented genuine progress and sustainable success.
I saw other agencies funding rural development and Native American tribes, as well as banks making more traditional loans, as allies working in parallel.
I envisioned a symbiotic network that would truly impact poverty in the region. I presented the board with a vision of how we could end poverty in northern Nevada.
They weren’t interested. “That’s not your job,” they said.
Then, I had another idea that I was sure they would agree to. Why don’t we support the hundreds of businesses we have helped fund and the ones we are currently funding by encouraging the established businesses and government institutions in northern Nevada to “buy locally” in a region-wide “purchasing network”?
I wanted to approach very successful businesses and local institutions — like the large casinos, the University of Nevada, the city governments in Sparks and Reno, Washoe County, and the Truckee Meadows Water Authority — to see how we could facilitate buying goods and services from local sources. I already knew that money spent locally has a multiplier effect, as opposed to money that leaves the community. Of course, this would be purely voluntary, with no quotas — simply an intention to source locally.
To me, it seemed simple, easy, and obvious. It wasn’t in the least “political” and would provide a great boost to local businesses and the local economy. I thought it would be a home run — except my board was vehemently opposed to my plan.
Why?
First, the board consisted primarily of national bankers. Their interests went far beyond Northern Nevada, and they didn’t want to turn off or exclude national vendors. Not only did they not particularly care about the local economy, but the idea of ending poverty in Northern Nevada seemed beyond their capacity even to understand.
I lasted a year there and raised a lot of money for the organization, but once again, it was not a match. The stress of holding a vision that could not be fulfilled finally caused a physical condition that ended my tenure.
I threw my neck out.
People on the board thought I was faking the injury, although the MRI showed compressed vertebrae and a 5-millimeter protrusion. I was out for a month. One of my close associates on the board didn’t speak to me for years until he realized I hadn’t fabricated the story. The metaphor, “the job was a pain in the neck,” was not lost on me. I am convinced the pressure of the job, combined with the frustration of having an unfulfilled mission, led to an injury that got my attention and caused me to take stock.
The frustration came from dealing with the leaders of this silo-based organization, which, like most nonprofits, has the shortsighted mission of raising funds, period. In our materialistic society, an organization’s accomplishments are measured by how much it raises and how big it grows. The problem was that a bigger organization doesn’t solve the problem because you can’t solve the problem by doing more of what doesn’t work.
It also did not solve the problem of the Culture of Separation. That’s when I entered a new phase.
Thinking Outside the Silo
My experience in nonprofits taught me that I was a lot more entrepreneurial than most others working in those organizations. Paradoxically, I was more entrepreneurial than the non-profit organization promoting entrepreneurship!
So, I started my own business with the hope that I could change “the system” through small business. With my brother and dad as partners, I opened the first hyperbaric oxygen therapy center in Reno in October of 2000. That set the stage for creating a true symbiotic network, but that’s a story for Section 2, in Chapter 6 of the book.
The period covering pretty much the first forty years of my life — what I call “formation” — that prepared me for the next phase of my life’s work had ended.
I had spent most of the past ten years working in the ultimate service sector, nonprofits, and I recognized that despite their best intentions, these tended to sustain the status quo by trying to alleviate the worst symptoms of society’s problems (externalities)
instead of addressing the root causes.
While this inability of my colleagues to “think outside the silo” was exasperating for me at the time, I see now it is totally understandable. They, like most others in our society, were immersed in the Culture of Separation and, like a fish in water, didn’t know it. Given the biological/cultural imperative for self-preservation and tribalism, each organization typically stayed inside its silo, even though collaboration would have gone a lot further toward addressing the problems at hand.
At that time, most leaders still had hope that our systems could be reformed from within — and if money flowed, their attitude seemed to be, let’s try to make the best of it by helping those we could.
It is a belief, held together on a tiny thread of hope, that if we raise trillions more dollars globally and accelerate the number of good works that come from nonprofits, faith-based charities, or social enterprises, we can really change the system.
I no longer saw things this way at all.
I have come to believe that within all of these well-meaning endeavors, there has been a missing link that most people didn’t realize was missing — a commonly sensed foundation in the Transcendent. The Ancient Blueprint, ever-present and ever-available, was something we were supposed to keep locked within our private, interior life — vacuumed out of the public square.
This was true even of faith-based organizations whose good works were confined to their individual silos. As I’ve said earlier, this is a “feature,” not a “bug” of the Culture of Separation. Inside that immersive culture, the mission may be self-giving, but the structures tend to be self-serving.
So, how do we think — and act — outside the silo?
As we saw in the previous chapter, the Virtues are the interface between Heaven and Earth. To put our human systems into alignment with the Ancient Blueprint, we have to awaken from the trance of siloed reality, consciously practice the Virtues in our daily lives, and together build a parallel culture and economic system based on Cosmic Love — where all the silos are freely connected and voluntarily coordinated.
This involves awakening first to an inconvenient truth — that the wisdom, knowledge, and true power of the Ancient Blueprint has been inverted within the Culture of Separation.
Instead of Virtues being cherished, encouraged, and honored, our prevailing Culture of Separation, with its “Everything Industrial Complex,”
promotes what could be called Anti-Virtues!
Instead of sharing, we are encouraged to take
Instead of serving, to dominate
Instead of humility, pride/arrogance
Instead of truthfulness, deceit
Instead of generosity, avarice — and so on.
The good news is that we human beings also long for authentic connection. We instinctively recognize these Virtues, as we know goodness when we see it. However, when there is no Transcendent Ground of Being to ground us, the Anti-Virtues run the show and set the rules in this Secular Age.
Here’s the paradox.
In daily life, Gandhi’s Law of Love tends to rule at the individual level. People are kind to one another, they cooperate, they love, and that love makes a difference. As Gandhi said, society would have already fallen apart without this fundamental expression of human kindness.
Yet now, as we see the breakdown of community and care on a societal basis, we have to move beyond individual acts of kindness and love to activate the collective capacity of Love — from the person to the family unit to the neighborhood, to the local community, to the world — and Connect the Good through Symbiotic Networks at all scales.
“We do not aim at doing mere acts of kindness, but at creating a Kingdom of Kindness.”
— Acharya Vinoba Bhave, colleague and follower of Mahatma Gandhi and another inspiration for Dr. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya Shramadan movement.
Most importantly, if we are to heal the brokenness of the human spirit, we have to align our organizational systems with the highest goodness of the Transcendent that we can conceive.
We need to confront the fact that the divisive Anti-Virtues of the global economic system are antithetical to the virtues of love and mutual benefit—to our very interior lives, to our souls, if you will. They are even antithetical to what has been universally taught by the religious faiths of mankind (Eastern, Western, and Indigenous) over the past 3,000 years.
And … without a Culture of Connection to weave together the individual leaders and organizations into a coherent power to amplify the good work they are doing inside their “beautiful” silos, we keep putting band-aids on symptoms rather than addressing the root causes that are endemic to the system itself.
The silo culture misses another cultural blind spot — so much of our well-intentioned energy and resources go towards trying to reform and fix a global system that is not fixable, certainly not by addressing singular symptoms.
Our systems, global and local, are so complex and so intertwined that there is no way a silo-based approach can handle these interlocking problems comprehensively. Still, we continue working away inside our silos, strung out on “Hopium” — thinking, “Maybe if we take what isn’t working and do MORE OF IT, that will change things.”
Meanwhile, each of these problems, in each separate and yet related domain, is becoming worse, not better. This is creating a perfect storm of multiple, multiplying, interrelated crises that seem to be headed for a system-wide breakdown.
Now, more than twenty years later, having to deal with the global Supply Chain issues that have accelerated with COVID and the War in Ukraine and now Israel (shipping disruption), the very stability of the international world order established seventy years ago is heading toward a systemic breakdown.
Even the CEO of Blackrock Capital, the world’s largest asset manager, said:
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades,” in his 2022 letter to shareholders.
“It has left many communities and people feeling isolated and looking inward. I believe this has exacerbated the polarization and extremist behavior we are seeing across society today.”
Add to this the devastation to main street businesses worldwide because of
COVID-19 lockdowns, especially in the food sector, with local and global food insecurity at peak levels — the need for new strategies is now a matter of survival.
Today, there seem to be two main responses happening simultaneously: global corporate and national governments are strengthening the existing global “order,” and at the same time, local regions around the world are looking for community-based alternative development strategies.
At the moment, it seems that the top-down global authority—run by and for the very few—has momentum and financial resources behind it. And, as I’ve pointed out numerous times, what is ultimately a “dominator” approach cannot lift us off the lose-lose battlefield onto a win-win playing field.
We seem to be at a crossroads. Follow the well-worn path to more of the same, only worse, or take a new path we choose together.
I know this may be hard to imagine — but we seem to be in a singular evolutionary moment, a pivot point of rapid human cultural evolution — where humanity voluntarily and collectively begins operating at a higher order, similar to the biological process of symbiogenesis I’ve referred to in Chapter 2.
That’s where single-cell organisms combined into multi-cellular communities. Now 3.5 billion years later, we humans – ourselves communities of some 30 trillion cells – can evolve from “single-cell” organizational siloes voluntarily into a multi-siloed network-centric civilization, a truly new “organism” where each and all can thrive.
The truly “new” world order will not be achieved through any typical “new” social, political, economic, or ecological movements or ideology, regardless of how well-intentioned they seem.
Real change will come when the emerging “countercultural” threads of EXISTING community-based movements (silos) embed a new “weaving and bridging function” (Symbiotic Culture DNA) into their operations that will connect and amplify the good already happening into a new Power for Change — where all these good intentions are gathered under “one big intent” — with a unifying worldview, purpose, and action plan.
A true grassroots and bottom-up global transformation starts in each local community and with every single one of us.
So …what will it be – a global oligarchy or a new global commonwealth that empowers community self-governance?
Find out in the NEXT POST — Chapter 5, Part 3: Global Oligarchy or Community Self-Governance? and Bringing Heaven to Earth
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