Nonprofit Conflicts of Interest – Six Degrees of Separation

"It's not what you know – it's who you know."  The responsibilities, privileges, advantages, and obligations that we have as family members, workers, friends, citizens, volunteers, neighbors, and human beings do not come to us by accident.  Everything that we experience happens because we know someone, or someone knows us.  At its core then, a "conflict of interest" is simply a condition of our existence – it is the dual admission that we are related to others and that we are who we are because of those relationships.

In recent years, the words "conflict of interest" immediately evoke images of unfairness, favoritism, and wrongdoing – stock and loan manipulations at Enron and WorldCom, luxury travel by fundraising and museum executives and their relatives, the "fox watching the henhouse" of ecclesiastical abuses in religious institutions.  But we cannot separate ourselves from the people we know or the different roles that we play.  In fact, it is more often than not because of those people and roles that we are given newer and better opportunities in life.

This paper attempts to bring sharper focus to the concept of "conflict of interest" in the context of service to nonprofit organizations.  We examine...(read full publication here)