I get a sense that the org is probably between 15 and 50 years old
Yep, close to the top end of that.
It’s probably been through a bunch of CEOs, or whatever equivalent it has, in that time. Those CEOs probably weren’t selected on the basis of “who will pick the best successor to themselves”. Why has no one decided “we can help people better like this, even if that means breaking some (implicit?) promises we’ve made” and then oops, no one really trusts them any more?
That’s a really great observation. Samaritans has chosen to elide this problem simply by having no change in leadership throughout the entire run of the organization so far. They’ll have to deal with a transition soon as the founders are nearing retirement age, but I think they’ll be okay; there are lots of well aligned people in the org who have worked there for decades.
Have they had any major fuck ups? If so, did that cost them reputationally? How did they regain trust?
If not, how did they avoid them? Luck? Tending to hire the sorts of people who don’t gamble with reputation? (Which might be easier because that sort of person will instead play the power game in a for-profit company?) Just not being old enough yet for that to be a serious concern?
They haven’t had any major fuck ups, and there’s two main reasons for that imo:
The culture is very, very hufflepuff, and it shows. When you talk to people from Samaritans it’s very obvious that the thing they want to do the most is to do as much good as possible, in the most direct way as possible, and they are not interested in any sort of moral compromise. They’ve turned down funding from organizations that they didn’t find up to snuff. Collaborating orgs either collaborate on Samaritan’s stringent terms, or not at all. Doing the work this way has become increasingly easier as working with Samaritans has gotten to be an increasingly stronger and valuable signal of goodness, but they didn’t make compromises even as a very young and cash strapped organization.
They have a very very slow acculturation process for staff. It’s very much one of those organizations where you have to be in it for over a decade before they start trusting you to make significant decisions, and no one who is unaligned would find working there for a decade tolerable, lol. So basically there are no unaligned rogue actors inside it at all.
Yep, close to the top end of that.
That’s a really great observation. Samaritans has chosen to elide this problem simply by having no change in leadership throughout the entire run of the organization so far. They’ll have to deal with a transition soon as the founders are nearing retirement age, but I think they’ll be okay; there are lots of well aligned people in the org who have worked there for decades.
They haven’t had any major fuck ups, and there’s two main reasons for that imo:
The culture is very, very hufflepuff, and it shows. When you talk to people from Samaritans it’s very obvious that the thing they want to do the most is to do as much good as possible, in the most direct way as possible, and they are not interested in any sort of moral compromise. They’ve turned down funding from organizations that they didn’t find up to snuff. Collaborating orgs either collaborate on Samaritan’s stringent terms, or not at all.
Doing the work this way has become increasingly easier as working with Samaritans has gotten to be an increasingly stronger and valuable signal of goodness, but they didn’t make compromises even as a very young and cash strapped organization.
They have a very very slow acculturation process for staff. It’s very much one of those organizations where you have to be in it for over a decade before they start trusting you to make significant decisions, and no one who is unaligned would find working there for a decade tolerable, lol. So basically there are no unaligned rogue actors inside it at all.