We have been talking about the Overhead Myth and the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle for many years, but there has been only modest progress on donor demands that result in underinvestment in nonprofit infrastructure, and malnourished organizations. But if the Overhead Myth keeps us all hungry, the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle is not all the donors’ fault. Equally important, and less considered, are our organizations’ unchecked appetites for growth, which combine with structural factors that make such growth haphazard.

To be sure, not all organizations are on a nonstop growth trajectory. But many treat year-over-year budgetary increases as normal, even as a sign of health. At times, it feels a bit like we have imbibed the “grow or die” myth[1] from the private sector.

Pressures on leadership often push in the direction of constant growth. Perhaps because of the comparison to their for-profit peers, nonprofit CEOs can feel like they are expected to grow the organization. And professional fundraisers, typically following a zig-zag trajectory from one organization to another, get ahead in part by demonstrating their “numbers”—the degree to which they contributed to increasing funding in prior roles.

More than this, there is the seemingly limitless scale of need. Ours is a world where injustices are endemic, and human deprivation always outstrips the resources we can marshal. In these circumstances, it can seem morally wrong not to expand services and improve life for those we serve.

Driven by these pressures, many nonprofits grow in unplanned increments. Program budget requests inch up yearly, sometimes adding up to a huge expansion of the organizational budget. Justified by the imperatives of mission-based work, these budgets are often adopted despite the reservations of finance and development. Over time, “stretch budgets” become the norm, and soon, successful organizations are 30-40 percent larger, all without really having mapped out what is required to maintain that scale.

Read the full article about nonprofit growth by Devon Kearney at Blue Avocado.