Overcoming Scarcity Mindset is About Liberation, Not Resilience
This piece is written by Esther Saehyun Lee.
I wrote an article about scarcity for the CCF hub as a personal reflection of how my lived experience had taught me - in both good ways and bad - how to survive. After the piece was published, I was surprised by how much it resonated with people.
People reached out to me seeking advice as if I was an expert on scarcity. They would ask, “how do you battle a scarcity mindset?”, “how do you look a deficit in the face and remain positive and overcome it?”, “how do you go into work with a mindset of abundance although you are chronically underpaid and terribly overworked?”.
These questions made me devastatingly sad.
A scarcity mindset and true scarcity are very different things. A scarcity mindset is when you operate from the idea that you don’t have enough and never will have enough- whether you do or not. You’re constantly on the hamster wheel of an unattainable goal. No amount of revenue will suffice, there’s always more work to be done. True scarcity, in a nonprofit setting, is when you actually don’t have enough. When you’re operating in a deficit and having to think about what staff to cut, when you’re precariously employed, when you are actually facing the issue of “not enough”. The idea that you can overcome true scarcity at a nonprofit with a can-do attitude and simply adopt an abundance mindset was not the point of my reflection. This distinction must be made very clear.
A scarcity mindset is a phenomenon in the nonprofit sector that affects us all.
Our sector is constantly experiencing, and perpetuating, challenges stemming from scarcity challenges: constantly vying for the same sources of funding, pushing and overworking staff to wear “multiple hats” and applauding them for taking on duties outside of the scope of their role, not investing in organizational capacity, or having a high staff turnover because organizations can’t afford to promote their staff or pay them adequately.
For me, overcoming a scarcity mindset is not simply about being “positive" or “shifting my mindset”, it’s about liberating myself from the teachings of capitalism and white supremacy. It’s about relinquishing the notion that the only way we can advance is if we exploit one another. Overcoming a scarcity mindset is seeking collaboration, fostering trust with others, and going against the instincts capitalist culture has taught us.
Scarcity mindset in our sector isn’t something we can shift as individuals. It’s a shared vision for us to effect as a community.
So to answer those initial questions, we need to think about how we can uplift each other, how we can collaborate with each other, and how we can advocate for each other: for better fundraising practices, for better compensation, and for a shared vision of mutual liberation over individual success.
I don’t want us to overcome a scarcity mindset only within ourselves; I want us to eradicate scarcity as organizations, as sectors, and as communities. Overcoming a scarcity mindset is not about becoming resilient in impossible conditions, it’s about freeing ourselves from the idea that for us to succeed someone else must be exploited. The work of overcoming scarcity or its mindset is one of mutual liberation and we need to start recognizing it as such.
