July 25, 2002 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Q. I am a nonprofit strategic-planning specialist and former development director. I moved to Paris last year and have been volunteering at various charities. I’ve secured my work permit, I know how to obtain lists of nonprofit groups, and I’m planning to send out résumés. Do you have any specific advice on seeking employment here?
A. You’re definitely off to the right start, says Kenneth T. Hoffman, a fund-raising and grant-making consultant in Lexington, Mass., who has clients overseas. When you’re seeking work in the nonprofit field in another country, the most important task is to absorb the major and subtle differences in the culture and day-to-day operations of a nonprofit organization — which, Mr. Hoffman says, you may be able to do by volunteering.
You’ve probably already discovered that charities are regarded differently in Europe than in the United States, says Jeff Hurwit, a lawyer in Newton, Mass., who specializes in nonprofit law and has clients in Europe and Israel. “In other countries, nonprofits are seen as tangential. It’s not the same kind of culture of giving” as in the United States, Mr. Hurwit says. “Here it’s built into the tax code, and we recognize the whole notion of charitable giving. In most of the other places I’ve worked it’s much more restricted and regulated, and the range of nonprofit organization is much more limited.” As a result, he says, certain nonprofit jobs that are common to U.S. charities may be harder to find abroad.
Therefore, your task will be to show that you can apply your U.S.-gained experience to French nonprofit groups, says Mr. Hoffman. “When Americans go to work anywhere in Europe, they have to signal both the competence from home, and the willingness to learn and to adapt to the niceties to the other cultures,” he says. “It has to be approached very delicately, without the sense that I have all the answers, but rather that I have some answers that work very well in some other country and let’s see what I can apply here.”
France is an especially tough place to maintain that balance, says Thomas Harris, founder of the Virtual Consulting Firm, a nonprofit consulting company that operates around the world and is headquartered in France. Mr. Harris, who works with French clients, has a word of caution for you: “You will see that the French market is hard if not impossible to crack.” French organizations approach fund raising differently than U.S. charities, he says — few French nonprofit groups, for example, approach donors through direct-mail campaigns. “To work in their milieu,” he says, “you have to speak perfect French and think like a Frenchman.” To learn more about the cultural ins and outs of nonprofit organizations in France, and in the rest of the world, you might want to see a reference book that Mr. Harris edited, International Fund Raising for Not-For-Profits: A Country by Country Profile (John Wiley & Sons, 1999, $160). You also might want to go to About.com’s selection of Web links for international job seekers — it can direct you to employment sites, guides to etiquette, and more.
