I work for an organization that supports and aides nonprofits in the area. It’s a great job, and I get to be introduced to a lot of really cool organizations that are doing really cool things.

Yesterday, we brought in a speaker for some local nonprofits to help them with figuring out all the outs and ins of staying right with the law as a nonprofit.

She was from Guernsey County. Guernsey County is one of the ten least populated counties in the state with a population of 40,000. But Guernsey County has 600 nonprofit organizations. That means there is a nonprofit organization for every 70 people. That’s shocking.

At first, the idea of this many nonprofits just stressed me out. There are 30,000 nonprofits in West Virginia, a state with just under 1.9 million people. That’s a nonprofit for every 60 people. There is no way that each of those nonprofits is contributing something unique to the world. Wouldn’t it be better to combine some of those?

But then I realized that wasn’t really the problem. A couple of leaders of a local nonprofit started asking questions about insurance. They wanted to have volunteers drive senior citizens around. But they couldn’t do it because insurance for it would be through the roof.

That’s when it hit me. We need so many nonprofits because we fail each other as human beings about a hundred times a day. If we thought about people, if we took care of our neighbor, if we drove our elderly friends places, we wouldn’t need a billion nonprofits and we would change the world.

How do you help others?