This ecological framework should give us pause as we consider notions of “human resource” and “human capital” in nonprofit organizations. In traditional business terms, a “resource” may be fully extractable, as Berry described, and “capital” may be under the full control of the corporation to expand its resource extraction as much as possible. These terms and their underlying belief systems, if left unchallenged, can lead us into dangerous waters if we are committed to the social sector modeling inclusive and regenerative ways of being. In “Are humans resources?,” Kerr Inkson writes: “In common usage of the term, therefore, resources are passive objects to be utilized by superior agents.”2 He counters by arguing, “It is not that individuals are resources, more that they possess resources, which they may or may not choose to share with the organization and develop within it.”3
In fact, many of us in the nonprofit sector aspire to make our organizations more human, more personally sustainable, and more conscious of the full humanity of the people with whom we work. For many of us this means revisiting, if not entirely revising, our approaches to “human resource management.” Moreover, many nonprofit organizations are interrogating their legacy theories of change, including programmatic assumptions and methodologies. This is taking a myriad of forms: exploring the real and perceived boundaries between social service and social change work; confronting the intersectional forces at play in traditionally siloed areas of expertise (e.g., environmentalism and racial justice); and unearthing the ways in which internal management practices do and do not reflect the vision of equity and justice we espouse externally, to name several.
These complementary aspirations—more-human organizations, and organizations whose work reflects an acute and strategic collective intelligence coupled with a rigorous social change analysis—should inform how we think about developing social, intellectual, and cultural capital in our organizations. Rather than conceiving of these forms of capital as something our organizations extract, we should think of them as precious resources to be shared and amplified across all of the organization’s relationships. We can think of this as shifting from an extraction to a reciprocity frame.
In hiring and staff development, the starting premise is that all staff positions have capacity to contribute to these forms of capital development, and that each potential candidate brings a unique existing set of relationships and competencies. Moreover, these relationships and competencies may derive from well beyond a staff member’s employment history to his or her lived experience and past and current volunteerism, board service, or activism. Further, staff will continue to nurture their forms of capital while working with a given organization and, obviously, beyond their tenure there, as well.
To read more of Jeanne Bell's article,
Comments (0)