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"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." — Ed Abbey
Today's work culture demands speed, scale, and exponential returns. For some industries, this makes sense—no one faults Apple for revolutionizing telecommunications or Tesla for disrupting automotive manufacturing. But somewhere along the way, this growth-at-all-costs mentality escaped the boundaries of Silicon Valley and metastasized throughout every sector of American life. Investors demand year-over-year growth. Consumers chase lower prices regardless of the moral cost. And increasingly, America has come to evaluate all work, all organizations, all missions, through the same narrow lens: Does it grow? Does it scale? Does it produce returns?
Lost in this endless pursuit of profit is a fundamental recognition: not every sector can, or should, operate like Google or Meta. Some organizations exist not to grow but to sustain, to maintain, to care. The nonprofit sector has always understood this. Yet in recent years, even these mission-driven organizations have found themselves judged by metrics designed for venture capital, not social impact. The result is not just financial strain, it is systemic collapse.
Nonprofits cannot operate like tech companies because they were never designed to. Their purpose is not to maximize shareholder value but to serve communities that the market has failed or forgotten. They measure success not in quarterly earnings but in lives changed, students educated, families housed, addictions overcome. These outcomes do not scale exponentially. They do not disrupt industries. They simply matter.
Yet we have built a system that treats this mission-driven work as somehow less legitimate than profit-seeking ventures. Nonprofits must constantly justify their existence, not through the depth of their impact, but through their "efficiency," their "sustainability," their ability to "do more with less." Grant applications read like business plans. Donors want to see overhead percentages as if running a youth mentorship program should have the same cost structure as a software startup. Even government contracts now demand the kind of measurable outcomes that reduce complex human services to data points on a spreadsheet.
My conversations with nonprofits throughout the summer revealed a sector in freefall. Themes of fear and uncertainty dominated. Organizations that had operated for decades found themselves unable to weather further decline in their financial reserves. Some closed their doors permanently. Others limped forward in survival mode, cutting programs, freezing hiring, desperately seeking new funding sources in an increasingly barren landscape.
The post-COVID environment created an unprecedented crisis point that has only accelerated. While nonprofits have always been underfunded and underappreciated, the past few years have pushed the entire sector past its breaking point. Government budgets contracted. Individual giving declined as inflation squeezed household budgets. Foundation grants could not fill the gap. The already-fragile support system that held everything precariously in place began to crumble.
What many people do not realize is how government budget cuts ripple through this ecosystem. Most think of federal budget cuts as only affecting government agencies themselves, such as fewer staff at the Parks Department, longer waits at the DMV. But these cuts have cascading effects on the surrounding nonprofits and organizations that depend on government contracts and grants for their revenue. The Department of Education cuts did not just impact federal employees; they obliterated planned revenue for research organizations, tutoring programs, literacy initiatives, and education advocacy groups across the country. Organizations that had built their operations around multi-year contracts suddenly found those agreements cancelled mid-stream.
This is what happens when even politicians adopt a business school philosophy of government operation: cut costs, maximize "efficiency," justify every expenditure through immediate financial returns. Traditional support structures, already strained, finally collapse. And with them fall the services that vulnerable communities depend on.
When a nonprofit closes, it is not just an organization that disappears, it is the infrastructure of care itself.
A youth mentorship program shuts down, and the teenagers who found stability there are left adrift. A mental health clinic closes, and people in crisis have nowhere to turn except emergency rooms ill-equipped to help them. An education research firm cannot retain talent, and the knowledge needed to improve our schools walks away to better-paying corporate jobs. A homeless shelter loses funding, and families sleep in cars.
The communities served by these organizations rarely have alternatives. That is why the nonprofit existed in the first place because the market does not serve these populations profitably, and government services do not fully reach them. When that middle layer of mission-driven organizations collapses, people simply fall through the cracks. The problems do not disappear; they worsen, fester, and eventually metastasize into larger crises that cost far more to address.
There is a bitter irony here: the "efficiency" mindset that defunds nonprofits as wasteful spending creates far more expensive problems down the line. An after-school program costs thousands per year per child; juvenile detention costs tens of thousands. Preventive mental health services cost a fraction of emergency psychiatric care. Job training programs are cheap compared to the social costs of long-term unemployment.
But these long-term calculations do not appear on quarterly reports. They do not fit the growth model. So we cut them, declare victory over "government waste," and wonder why our social fabric continues to tear.
We have reached a troubling moment in American culture: we have internalized the logic of the market so completely that we have forgotten some things are not meant to be markets. We have adopted growth as the only legitimate metric of value, efficiency as the only virtue, and profit as the only justification for existence.
The nonprofit sector is collapsing not because these organizations are failing at their missions, but because we have decided to judge them by metrics designed for entirely different purposes. We are asking the wrong questions. Instead of "Did you grow?" we should ask "Did you serve?" Instead of "Were you efficient?" we should ask "Were you effective?" Instead of "Can you sustain yourself?" we should ask "Is this work worth sustaining?"
Ed Abbey was right: growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. And like cancer, this ideology does not recognize that it is killing its host. We are cannibalizing the social infrastructure that holds communities together, the organizations that catch people when they fall, the programs that invest in human potential rather than financial returns.
The cancer cell does not understand that when the body dies, it dies too.
Perhaps it is time we remembered that not everything valuable produces growth. Some things maintain, sustain, protect, and care. Some organizations exist not to scale but to serve, not to disrupt but to support, not to maximize returns but to maximize human dignity and potential.
That is not a failure of the nonprofit sector. That is the point of it.
The question is not whether nonprofits can learn to operate more like businesses. The question is whether we can remember that not everything should.
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