A Conundrum

So yesterday, I met up with my friend Renee'. Renee' wants to start a career in volunteer coordination, and she and I started chatting about some ethical dilemmas that may come up when volunteering for an organization and how a volunteer should deal with that. For instance, what if you were volunteering (and highly invested) in an organization and you found out that said organization was involved in activities that were contrary to your beliefs. How do you, as a volunteer, deal with that? Conversely, what if an organization has a rock-star volunteer and then finds out that the volunteer is involved in some shady activities, etc. I think that this situation (or really either situation) would be the .00001% of the time, but it was interesting to think about nonetheless.

This involved into a conversation about corporate sponsorships for an organization....If an corporation approaches a nonprofit for a sponsorship, or vice versa, there is a courting process, but I think that so many times the donations or the prospect for joining forces with a nonprofit clouds some decision making. Whose decision making wouldn't be clouded though? Anyway, with the Internet making everything transparent, any corporation or nonprofit can't hide anything. For instance, a huge corporation may choose to join forces with a nonprofit who is focused on public health. The parent company of said huge corporation may manufacture food that is horrible for the public. How can the nonprofit accept a sponsorship knowing that the roots of this corporation works against the nonprofit's mission? Surely, this information will become known by some web-sleuths...but how can the organization pass up this huge sponsorship?

Just some food for thought...


***Update*** I just saw this article on the NPQ about a similar issue...and with some solid advice about turning something like this into a positive for the organization.