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In 2012, Soho House faced a problem: too many people wanted in. Applications for membership were flooding in from bankers, lawyers, consultants i.e. people who could pay consistently.
But the founder said no. Soho House had been built for people in the creative industries, and he understood that if you change the composition of people in the room, the product changes. And once the room changes, it’s hard to get it back.
Nonprofits face a similar pressure — and sometimes make the opposite call.
Take food banks.
Foodbanks that were built for households in acute, short-term crisis — a job loss, or a medical bill, for example —find that their population shifts over time. College students stretch their meal budgets between semesters. Elderly residents on fixed incomes come every week, year after year. Undocumented families with no access to other safety net programs become regulars.
Every one of these people deserves support. But the food bank wasn't designed for chronic need, it was designed for crisis.
The pantry layout, the intake process, the referral pathways, the volunteer training don’t clearly map onto what these new groups need. And the families in acute crisis - i.e. the ones the model was built around, find themselves in a longer queue, with thinner resources, inside a program that no longer quite fits them.
Workforce development programs are susceptible to something similar. A program built for adults with the highest barriers to employment, for example justice-involved people, or adults without high school diplomas, doesn't announce one day that it's changing its intake criteria.
What happens is subtler: a candidate with a two-year gap on their résumé applies, and it feels arbitrary to turn them away. Then another. Then a cohort coordinator notices that these candidates are easier to support and the placement numbers look better, and nobody says anything because nobody made a policy.
Within two cohorts, the training room has a different culture. The people who needed that room most are still technically being served; it’s just more competitive for them to get in. And unlike the easier-to-place candidates who would have found their way into other programs, they have nowhere else to go.
In both cases, nobody decided to change who the organization was for, and that's the problem.
The moment to make this decision isn't when your waitlist is long or your staff is stretched — by then the room has already changed.
It's earlier: the first time you notice that a new group is arriving, with needs your model wasn't built to meet, and your instinct is to just absorb them because turning anyone away feels wrong.
That instinct is worth examining. Everyone deserves help, but serving people badly, inside a model designed for someone else, is ultimately detrimental to your mission.
When you encounter a new group of clients, be proactive in asking: are you the right organization to serve them?
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