when you can’t help the people you’re dedicated to.

Today, a Reddit post has cracked open my heart and scrambled it on the hot cement. I’ll let it speak for itself, because everything it says encapsulates everything we’re going to discuss.

I’ve been building my non-profit since I was 16, and have been developing software that aims to help people since I was 13. Genuinely, what has my entire heart is taking an issue and developing apps, websites, or other digital doo-hickies to just help with that in the most pure and straightforward way I possibly can.

You can see the first app I’ve ever developed here, and you can see the flesh of a new long-term disability managment / caregiver burnout app I worked on for 30 minutes on a terrible plane ride I just got off of.

That looks ugly, but I promise I design better software than that (maybe).

Early on, I really struggled as an Executive Director to fund Astra. Primarily (and because I was 16), the main way you get donations is by

a) letting others use your non-profit as PR and advertising through donor sponsorships, although some companies are very dedicated to causes genuinely

b) because the people who donate have a lot of causes, and gen-z (who my non-profit primarily appeals to) is some of the least $$$ giving donors.

I always felt there was a constant tension between ‘I need these resources so badly to help people and I can’t afford to pay myself’ and also ‘I don’t want to take money that I feel is hollow and for PR reasons’. The criticism of the ‘non-profit industrial complex’ hit me deeply, and I wanted to not contribute to a reason why many are losing faith in the industry.

I never did fundraise enough to cover my own salary, and we shut down our donation program because our programs and models were complicated enough to drive away donors.

I used to look down on people who took donations from corporations that obviously worked against the mission of the people who non-profits were serving, and I still sometimes do. But I ask myself the hard question of “is it worse to have underfunded or not funded programs at all? Or to be used as a PR palette cleansing advertising tool?”

I don’t know the answer.

I used to, and I still do, think that money is the root of all evil. But money is the root of all evil because it’s the root of all power, in other ways. And without money, you don’t get the power to help the people who genuinely need it.

Often, I cry because I failed to give my organization and myself the resources I need to succeed, even though any non-profit (especially newer startup ones with unproven models) will tell you that it’s hard.

Because ultimately, even though I feel some sense of moral grace that I didn’t ask $evilTechCompany for money, the people we serve probably just feel the impact of the lack of bandwidth and services.

In between jobs over the summer and before I started my CTO job, I worked briefly as a data entry person for Multnomah County’s Joint Office Of Homelessness. Through the county, the government provided money to nonprofit programs who would pay the outstanding balance of people who were about to get evicted to prevent homelessness.

You would read the application filled out by the case worker, and then the actual reasons given for why they couldn’t make rent. Most of it was just life brutally beating the shit out of people. Terrible, hard, grittily human things.

The main income provider worked for Amazon or a construction company and got hurt, and couldn’t bring in income. Someone becomes a widow or faces medical emergencies, and loses their ability to pay rent. Someone else is fleeing domestic violence and is confronted with immediately needing to find a job after leaving the hardest situations of their lives because their TANF or emergency money from DHS is gone.

Everywhere, people go into and completely fall out of the system. They get disqualified from help because there’s no money, they make maybe $100 above the income limit, and so on.

Not only in the content of the applications, but in the fast way they were written and handed off to someone else to finish, I saw the unbearable weight that’s placed on those who work in the non-profit field. The caseworkers, social workers, CMH providers, and many other amazing workers who help those in hard situations while being paid wages that put them in poverty themselves. If you don’t get out from the shackles of the job, you become one of the people who need the help you give others.

It’s brutalizing. I burned out hard running my non-profit, and now I’m trying to slowly revive myself and the organization.

I wanted to solve everything for everyone. I wanted to prove that the world could be kind by scooping my heart and my life out on a plate to present to them. Like, “I’m sorry things have been terrible but this is all I have and I hope it’s enough to keep you going for another day.”

I’ve thought about shutting down Astra because of the emotional and financial toll it’s taken on me, but I can’t leave. Why? Because other non-profits do. Last year, I paid for my friends to stay in their home after receiving an eviction notice because the rent assistance they were promised got lost in bureaucratic hell, and a $10k payment to their landlord was nowhere to be found.

The buck had been passed from local non-profit to local non-profit, and I drove around with them as they tried to find people who could help them. No one helped them. Not because they didn’t want to, but because there was no one. Everyone who knew the answers had left the organizations.

I’ve wrote previously about messages I get, and the people I’ve spoken to. People on the edge of suicide, who’ve been raped, who’ve been abandoned by the mental health system and are becoming homeless. And I have nothing to give them. The two-way mirror reverses, and it cuts deeply.

Not because I am obligated to help all of those people, but because it’s reflective of a system so deeply broken that everyone who touches it gets cut.

I’m trying to learn everything I can about how to be a better leader, how to be more productive, and it still doesn’t feel enough. When people are going to be hurt, denied shelter, not being able to access treatment, there is no enough. People are freezing on the streets of America because we don’t have enough shelter beds, or we don’t protect the people enough who sleep in the shelters for them to trust us. Our systems fail, people die. When the non-profit industry is broken and our staff is underpaid and burned out, our communities are the ones who fall through the cracks.

Somewhere in the middle, I’ve settled on developing money generating products that go back into the organization and careful sponsorship coupled with trying for grants (along with the 0.005% chance I have of becoming a millionaire from my other company and donating it all), but those choices have come at the cost of years of velocity because we’ve had to operate in limp mode.

I have failed, I will fail, I will never have the resources I need to solve the problem, and yet I need to ignore the pain that drives me to do the work so it doesn’t devour me. If I don’t become attuned to the pain, I lose my sense of devotion to the mission and operate in blind apathy. If I listen to the pain too long, it possesses me and tells me it is the only thing.

There is only a gaping wound that you must constantly tend to, and hope you’re good enough at doing it. Something, something, that line from Veronica Mars: “the hero is the one who stays”. I hope I learn how to stay, without losing myself.