Thank you for visiting our nonprofit organization’s website. The first thing you’ll see are some inspiring photographs—young people planting a tree, a diverse group of folks chatting on a street corner, and an unhoused person being handed a meal. You might imagine this means we plant trees, help young people, or serve food to the unhoused. But honestly, do you think we’d make it that easy for you?
If you want to know what our nonprofit does, start with a deep dive on our website. Visit our About, History, Mission, Programs, Milestones, and News pages. They won’t tell you anything specific, but they will prolong your visit, boosting user traffic that justifies the money we spent on our website.
Still think you can find out what we do? Give it your best shot. Read our Mission Statement, Goals Statement, Vision Statement, Issues Statement, and Statement of Values Statement. Download our reports. Subscribe to our newsletters. Study our executive director’s old blogs. After conducting this exhaustive research, you will know exactly what we do: produce indecipherable accounts of what we do.
You would think we could convey our purpose in plain human language, but that isn’t the case. Our initiatives exist in a realm beyond comprehension. Our activities can be understood only by using a particle accelerator, an AI supercomputer, and a fifth-century Benedictine codex. Even the description you’re reading now should only be viewed with special glasses, like an eclipse.
So, how does our staff spend its time? We can describe it in three simple words: we drive change. There, we told you. You want to know more? Fine, here you go. We leverage resources to build capacity. We align partners for impactful solutions. We address needs, embolden stakeholders, empower the powerless, and give voice to the voiceless.
Got it? No? Guess we’ll have to dumb it down for you. How about this: we center things. Because “center” is a verb that people like us use to impress other people who impress us by using it. What do we center? Justice, fairness, compassion, community, love, kindness, gratitude, family, happiness, health, and other irrefutably beneficial concepts that won’t tell you what our programs accomplish.
Bottom line? We tell a story of innovation that raises awareness of critical issues. Then we drown that story in jargon no one understands.
We claim to work with the most vulnerable and underserved populations, but like everyone else, they won’t understand a word of our opaque messaging. It’s not really for them, though, is it? It’s for people who use buzzwords to raise their in-group status. It’s for our peers in conference breakout sessions. It’s for making our old classmates at Wesleyan jealous.
The point is, our organization is uniquely passionate and purpose-driven, with a profound commitment to making the world a better place. What more do you need to know?
It doesn’t matter, because we won’t tell you.
This article was originally published on McSweeney’s.
