Editor’s note: This commentary is by Edward McMahon, of Shelburne, who is chair of the Vermont Council on World Affairs and an adjunct associate professor of International Development at the University of Vermont.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, all Vermonters are living in an unprecedented and very difficult period. The challenges inherent in this situation are, of course, directed to us individually; we all feel targeted, in the bull’s-eye. The threat, however, is also aimed at us collectively.
A mark of how civilized we are as a society is how well we, together, take care of ourselves in a crisis. An important element of this is whether we support and nurture the nonprofit organizations that we have formed to make our community special, and to promote our common interests. Many of these groups now find themselves extremely vulnerable, these include organizations that hold the fabric of society together, but which tend to get left behind when a crisis such the pandemic, hits.
Such groups include nonprofits, which help ensure that our fellow citizens are able to meet their basic human needs. To cite just two such groups, the Vermont Community Foundation is stepping up to the plate and expanding opportunities for organizations in the front line of the pandemic to receive financial support. The United Way of Northwest Vermont has established a website offering an impressive array of services and connections to support those in need of immediate help.
We are rightly called to focus on this immediate health crisis and all the aftershocks it has caused. The fact is, however, in the current environment many of Vermont’s small nonprofits – whatever their particular mission — are facing existential crises. There are, after all, nonprofits which respond to other types of human needs.
In the 1940s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow articulated a pyramid concept of human needs, with basic survival at the base, with higher layers responding to the fulfillment of emotional and intellectual needs. Especially at this difficult time, we must not be blind to the importance of addressing these other human need elements, which play a more subtle but equally important role in the human condition. Many Vermont nonprofits function in this space. Such organizations include groups which, for example, support the arts and various creative endeavors meeting the human need for self-expression.
Other organizations, such as the Vermont Council on World Affairs, help to nourish our human need to connect with each other, and build bridges across peoples in these polarized times. Sadly, the way we all think about the world right now is in terms of maps that locate where the hotspots of infection are worst. The crisis has fueled undercurrents of xenophobia and a narrative that we are best if we are walled off, even as the true and inescapable lesson of the pandemic is that humanity is invariably interconnected. VCWA’s mission at this time is to remind us that no person is an island.
In normal years, VCWA brings hundreds of foreign visitors to learn from our business leaders, academics and nonprofit experience. Now they can’t come, but we must not abandon our long-term need to be part of the global community. And one day we will be able to ramp up our work again but we need to continue to exist and function now. The candle has to remain lit. And a group such as VCWA can’t simply stop and start again; there is valuable operational experience and knowledge that can be lost all too easily.
If there is a silver lining it is that organizations like VCWA are learning, in real time, new ways to deliver their services virtually, so that Vermonters can continue to interact and learn from counterparts from around the world. We have moved to online programming, promoting previously in-person community-oriented initiatives. Isn’t inter-cultural communication needed now, more than ever? We must collectively meet this challenge so that both nonprofits and we as a people can come out of this experience stronger and healthier, rather than isolated and diminished.
This is just the perspective of one Vermont nonprofit; no doubt many other share similar concerns. There has never been a time in the life of our country when we need the connective tissue that the nonprofit sector provides us, Vermonters and the outside world alike, more than at present.
