If hunger, poverty, clean air and water, climate change, AIDS, and sheltering refugees are pressing needs of our global society, then why are the nonprofit organizations committed to resolving these problems relegated to charitable status, and severely criticized if they behave as true businesses?

I am intrigued by these and similar questions since reading Uncharitable, by Dan Pallotta. I see nonprofits addressing local and global needs yet unable to compete for the best available talent, increase marketing and advertising expenditures, engage in research and development, or generate profits from their good work. In a New York Times piece entitled The Sin in Doing Good Deeds, Nicholas D. Kristof similarly asks, “If a businessman rakes in a hefty profit while doing good works, is that charity or greed? Do we applaud or hiss?” Kristof goes on to write that Pallotta’s book, “seethes with indignation at public expectations that charities be prudent, nonprofit and saintly … and argues that those expectations make them less effective, and he has a point.”

Outside of the agency, SUS is known for providing housing and supportive services to meet the complex needs of New York’s most challenged individuals. Inside of SUS, we also focus on how to be an effective service organization while building a model service business that employs SUS consumers. Consider a potential landscaping company born from a Vietnam Veteran now an SUS consumer and he discovers his expertise in gardening by tackling a bare plot of land adjacent to an SUS residence in Brooklyn (Bushwick). Our attention is now drawn to potential businesses that range from building a peer-to-peer counseling network to the development of a workforce trained to deliver energy efficient and green solutions to the communities in which SUS resides. It seems that we may save more people, raise more funding, serve our neighborhoods, and lower our costs with revenue generating business models like these, and overcome the biases towards non-profits generating profits. While we still need a conclusion or maybe more of a direction, we do know that we must be dynamic, fluid and relevant in getting there.

Non-profit leaders, board members, and philanthropists should jump into the fray of this dialogue – read Uncharitable, and check out Pallota’s new blog, “Free the Nonprofits” , for the Harvard Business Review. And then, with new and sharpened opinions, share your reactions with readers of The Signal.