Ladling Soup, Raising Hell: Nonprofit insider Robert Egger is out to reform charities from within

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You’ve suggested that the baby boomers have a chance to redeem themselves by doing good works. Tell me more about this.

There’s probably a 70 percent chance that the vast majority of boomers are going to reach old age and say, “Hey, where’s my Social Security, where’s my retirement? I want to sit back and relax.”

They’re going to expect a lot from government, but we can’t just let people consume. They need to produce something, so the boomers must be actively engaged in the community. Already you can see a wave of people coming who are looking in the mirror and not liking the reflection too much. They’re thinking, I heard John Lennon and Marvin Gaye and Martin Luther King with my own ears. How did I stray so far from the garden? How did I think that if I just bought more junk, I’d be happy?

This is a once-in-a-millennium shot, to have potentially 80 million baby boomers, and a large hunk of them looking for a way to redeem themselves, be involved, or make a difference. And at the same time, you have people coming out of universities, the millennials, people who were born between 1980 and 2001, and there’s 80 million of them, and we’ve raised them doing community service. So you’ve got 160 million people who could potentially be looking for some way to make a difference in their community. That’s energy. Let’s view it as a new form of energy in America. To me, that’s the kind of thinking that takes us one step beyond this charity model.

If you study American history, you can see over the past 75 years that so many things—music, fashion, science, dance—have shifted a million times over. Yet in so many cases, charity has stayed the same. We still genuflect to the notion that people make money in life and somewhere near the end of it they decide to give some back, oftentimes trying to offset the damage they did making a bunch of money. I’m intensely curious about whether this is the only way to do this. This is one of the most exciting times that we’ve had in the nonprofit sector in the past 25 years because it’s going to force many of us to evolve.

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