I was planning to donate the couple bucks I had left over from the year to the charity called “San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance”, I was doing a background check on CharityNavigator and they gave the charity full ratings so it seemed good.
Then I stumbled upon the salary section. What the fuck? I earn <20k a year and was planning to contribute to someone’s million dollar salary? WHAT.
Okay, so think about it like this:
Suppose your job is making wooden chairs. It’s takes you the exact same skills to make a wooden chair to sell for profit, as it does to make a wooden chair to donate to a chairless children’s charity, right? So why would you spend all your time and skills doing a job that’s eventually going to bankrupt you? While you might do a few chairs because you feel like it’s morally right, the bulk of your work is going to be selling chairs because that’s how you sustain yourself.
CEOs are in the same situation. A 500-person for-profit company takes the exact same skill set to run as a 500-person non-profit. So the reality is that non-profits need to either be competitive in pay with for-profits, or they have to be attractive in ways other than compensation so they can entice CEOs to work for them.
Now, none of that is to say that the scale of CEO compensation is appropriate, because it’s not. But that’s the calculus a non-profit has to make.
If the only reason a ceo wants to work for a charity is the huge paycheck, they have the wrong set of values to run a charity.
Being a CEO of a charity is not about prestige. This is why a lot of american charities come across as grifts in my opinion.
You should ask why a person would accept that much money to do that kind of job, they could ask for an appropriate amount but instead take what they can get.