It seems that over time any sufficiently well funded non-profit will eventually hire a financial engineer as CEO and transform into a Hedge Fund with some sort of charitable appendage.
My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another.
Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return.
Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop.
Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
Nonprofits still have to "make a profit" on the services they provide if they want to be a going concern. Unless you've got some big project to dump it into, it goes into an endowment for "a rainy day". Which then starts looking for places to park that money.
Some of the biggest nonprofits also have the biggest endowments and/or asset holdings - colleges/universities, hospital systems, religious leadership, etc etc.
Fundamentally, most non-profits are still run like a for-profit corporation and provide services in exchange for money, they just don't have publicly traded shares, dividends, etc. Think Harvard or hospital systems, not ACLU or Red Cross.
"Our organization does good work with the money we have."
"We could do more good work, or better work, with more money."
"Therefore investments/endowments we receive should be invested inwards, to increase the amount of money we have available with which to do good work."
You can see, of course, how this kind of cycle could become more about the money than the good work.
"This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission. "
Other than managing .org no one can say what ISOC’s so-called mission is nor point to any evidence of them doing it. The salaries they pay themselves however are substantial.
America's well-endowed universities seem like a perfect example of human greed. They have amassed so much money that they could seriously invest in furthering their ostensible mission — education — yet they'd rather just obsess over making sure the big pile of money only grows bigger.
Should they though? In the current climate that seems risky, if your donation to the university wasn't used for education but instead spent building infrastructure on Africa then some folks would likely decry that investment as being self-serving (trying to build good PR to cover up some perceived bad event that recently happened), or it might be decried as being injust (sure, they invested into that village, but the neighboring village was so much worse off), or it might be controversial (did you know that the village you gave money to was the home of the mother of the former dictator that raised a child army over here)... or it might just be decried as being wasteful (if the university has so much money to spare why should I donate to it - they're just lighting money on fire trying to fight causes that have no relation to education).
I think there isn't an easy answer to this question and just letting the ball of cash grow bigger honestly might be the only "safe" decision we've left open to universities... that said pumping it into mutual funds managed by the president's husband or giving steep raises to administrators also looks terrible from the outside.
I’m not sure you understand the purpose of an endowment. It’s supposed to be such a large pile of money that the institution can exist purely off of low risk gains without draining the principle.
