Comment by themarkn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themarkn | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a manager at a nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities. We do a really good job, we work in supported employment, residential, getting out the community, helping with diet, groceries, supervising medications, etc. BUT what we pay our employees is hilariously low relative to the high quality of service we provide, and the standards we hold each other to. They could make the same money at any other entry level job, and often they come to us with 4-year degrees in psychology or something, work with diligence and care, and start at $10/hour. It makes no sense. They end up taking second jobs and putting stuff together to make everything work. Talented, smart, energetic people don't last in the nonprofit world unless they somehow have another source of wealth. They get pulled out into something more lucrative. It's really tough to generate innovation unless you can get the right people to spend years developing domain expertise and then pay them enough to keep pushing in that area. Many nonprofits are already doing the impossible just by existing. I don't know what the most practical way to help this is: everybody always needs more money. How can we pay our employees enough that working full-time for us is a reasonable life choice without them needing to find 20hrs a week elsewhere on top of it and have a shitty life? It's not just a little extra that’s needed. It’s a lot.

Caring work like this is vastly underpaid and very critical to people's well being. Maybe if someone could lobby for a specific tax credit for people formally working in caregiving for the elderly and disabled to make up for the lower income. Too often these jobs become jobs of last resort and unlike you, not everyone has high standards.

As long as dollars are created at interest, the only jobs that will be paid well are those that make more money. Any kind of social work will always be living off those scraps in terms of ability to pay a living wage.

One way to make life easier for underpaid people doing work that helps individuals but doesn't 'make' more money would be to let nonprofits issue a complementary currency and do the legwork to get it accepted for lifestyle-enhancing services that might not otherwise be available to those volunteers/employees. Wouldn't pay rent, but would let them save money on yoga classes or house cleaning or the like. Barter networks exist, as do non-profit service-based time-denominated currencies. Nobody's doing it in a clean, unified way, but that might be more likely to happen than a tax credit, given the current political environment. :-/

Wow, if the receiving businesses could write off those services provided as donations to that nonprofit, there could be some incentive on their side too to make some kind of credit/voucher system for social-good professions work out. I wonder if anything like that already exists (teacher/military discounts are close, maybe). But yeah there could really be something there if done right.

The overall benefits are huge: we also generate thousands of hours of volunteer service a year by helping people stay active by putting in time at foodbanks, cleaning thrift stores, what have you. Keeps everybody healthier, reduces cost to Medicaid on the back end taking care of these folks' medical needs.

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