If there is a nonprofit organization that you believe is doing really good work, and you are seriously considering making a substantial donation to it, you have got to find out one fact above all other facts. You have to find out exactly what the organization is doing to raise up successors.
I have been associated with a number of good organizations. But the fact that they have been good organizations in the past in no way guaranteed that they would be good organizations in the future.
I always come back to the classic example: the Foundation for Economic Education. Leonard E. Read was the founder in 1946. In the early days, he hired a number of competent free market people. Eventually, most of them quit. In some cases, they were fired. Some of them later achieved significant things. The most notable, and then notorious, example was George Roche of Hillsdale College. He immediately hired Lew Rockwell, who edited Imprimis, the free newsletter, which raised over $500 million. Roche surely knew how to raise money. I replaced him at FEE in 1971.
Others who worked at FEE pretty much faded away. Read kept a few good people on the staff who had decided that they never wanted to move on. These were the best people he had: immobile by choice. They had one thing in common. They kept getting older. There were no replacements.
RECRUITING AND TRAINING
The most important single factor in the survival of any organization is the quality of its future employees, and the quality of the training of these future employees. This usually means that the organization has to train a lot more people than it can ever hire. In other words, it has to be committed to producing top-flight people with the best possible training, and sending them out into the world. The goal institutionally is to get out the message. Secondarily, there is this goal: somebody has to replace the existing leadership. If there is no systematic training of the future leadership, the organization is going to hit a brick wall when the founder dies or retires.
There has to be a program of recruitment. It must go after the best and the brightest. Then it must devote resources, especially time, to bring these people along by giving them training for a period of time. I think the minimum required is one summer. This is why it's good to get students who are in transition. They are either undergraduates who may be going to grad school, or they are graduate students who are either working on their doctoral dissertations or else have just finished their doctoral dissertations. They finish at the end of the term, probably in May. They will not take a teaching job until September. You have from June through late August to bring these people in and train them.
The libertarian organization that does this best is the Mises Institute. It always has summer trainees. This week, it has brought in over a dozen of these people. It does this every summer about this time. Then it puts them on projects. They get counseling from Ph.D.'s on the staff. The small faculty can be brought in for a summer. They need not stay the whole year. This cuts the cost of financing the faculty. The faculty is essentially a summer school faculty. It is expensive to hire them, but at least it is marginal. Mises does not pay a full-year's salary.
This has to be a systematic program. It must not be haphazard. It has to be seen as the heart, mind, and soul of the organization. If the best and the brightest are not recruited, and if they are not trained, the organization will lose them. It will lose the leverage that they would have provided. The organization will not stake a claim in the future.
I received this kind of training when I was 21 years old. I was brought in for three months by what was briefly known as the Center for American Studies, but which was basically an extension, which did not survive, of the old William Volker Fund. When it didn't work out, the money was turned over to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. It was a lot of money -- something like $20 million, which was a ot of money in the mid-1970s. I was there 1963.
I was the only person who was ever brought in to receive this kind of training. They had all that money, and I was the only person ever brought in. They got a very good return on their money.
Sometime in early 2000's, I received an email from the man who had officially been in charge of that organization. He had been at FEE for a time, but had moved out long before I arrived in 1971.
In his email to me, he said that he would like to meet me at some point. I never bothered to remind them that he had brought me in 40 years before, and we had lunch, along with several other senior staff members, several times a week. He had no recollection that he had ever met me, employed me, or talked with me. I was an afterthought in 1963. He hadn't hired me, and I was simply noise. He never contacted me after I left the organization. He had no idea of my career after I left. It was as if I had never existed. That was how committed he was to developing future talent. That is to say, he had no interest in it at all. He died unknown, never having written a major book. He was completely forgotten. He was forgotten because he never did anything systematically to stake a claim in the future.
It takes a lot of money and time to train people. Most of the money will not pay off directly. Most of the people you bring in as the best and brightest will turn out to be a little above average. They will not write a lot of books. They will not make a lot of difference. The Pareto rule operates all the way up the hierarchy. Even when you bring in what you regard as the best and the brightest, 80% of them will be unmemorable. But you have to make the investment in order to get the 20% who will be memorable, and the 4% who will make a significant difference.
Any organization that does not systematically recruit very good young people, and then devote resources to training them for at least one summer year, is not worth making a large donation to. That organization is not committed to the future, and your money will eventually be absorbed by the present-oriented people who run the organization.
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