The Mount

The Mount, Edith Wharton's home in Lenox, MA, is facing foreclosure. This makes me sad and angry. Sad because this home represents something that most women of the 19th century (and a lot of the 20th century) didn't have: a home of their own. I don't mean to sound trite, but The Mount was the ideal space for Wharton that Virginia Woolf called for all women (ok, not all women; Woolf is fairly limited) to have in order to develop an independent identity. And Wharton had it some 20 years before Woolf wrote about it. This article in the NY Times discusses the foreclosure in detail. This makes me angry from the perspective of someone who worked for a non-profit for three years. Let me first say that I know nothing about the way The Mount has been managed, its donors, its board, or the details of its debt. From my own experience, I do know that this sort of debt for a non-profit generally comes from mismanagement--at not necessarily only by those who run the day to day operations, but from the board. I think Edith Wharton Restoration made a good decision when it began restructuring its board a few years ago to include people who had experience in the business world, although perhaps that decision was made to late. It seems to me that non-profits are too often run by good meaning people who don't actually have much business sense or experience, which can often cause these good meaning people to make poor and uninformed decisions about the financial future of the organization they support.

Regardless of my feelings on the mismanagement of non-profits, The Mount is a place worth saving.