What Professional Associations Don't Pay For

A colleague pulls up the webpage and finds something they created years ago, still live and is promoted as a member resource. They remember the work that went into it, the thinking that shaped it, how important it felt to be contributing something larger than themselves.

The organization called it a member benefit.

Seeing it there again shifts something. The material is current and being used. The organization is making money from it, woven into the value proposition they sell members on, and the material generates value that simply doesn’t flow back to the person who made it.

This happens across professional associations routinely enough that most people never register it as extraction. A member creates something, and the association holds it up as proof of community, calls it a benefit, and uses it to show members what they get for their dues. The member feels part of something larger, while the association gets intellectual property it can leverage indefinitely without paying anyone or maintaining what they’ve taken. When material gets outdated, the association asks for updates, and members often provide them because the request comes wrapped in language about need and help.

If someone stated plainly what’s actually happening, the organization wants the work, will use it to make money, won’t pay anyone, and will ask for repairs when things break. No one would accept that arrangement. But wrapped in language about serving the profession and building community, it becomes so normal that it simply disappears into how things work.

What’s remarkable is how completely this embeds into organizational culture. The staff who work there inherit a model where unpaid member labor is just an operational procedure, not something anyone consciously decides, but something that’s always worked this way and therefore should continue. The volunteer pool becomes a resource to tap and use while calling it community engagement. Everyone around you operates the same way, so it never registers as unusual or worth questioning.

The volunteer leaders perpetuate it with equal unawareness, many of them having been extracted from themselves over years of creating things for the association and serving on committees in their spare time. They’ve internalized the narrative that this is what service looks like, so when they move into leadership and face the choice between hiring someone or asking volunteers, they choose the path they know. They ask the volunteers and call it community, and because they’ve lived inside this system long enough, they don’t experience it as extraction but as how professional associations naturally function.

The culture sustains itself because people inside it have accepted the frame completely. The member creating something isn’t being exploited in their own mind, but serving. The volunteer leader asking for contributions isn’t extracting but building community. The staff person managing the system isn’t running an extraction mechanism but doing their job. Everyone is sincere and believes in the work, yet everyone remains locked into a system that takes from members while calling it a benefit.

There’s a real difference between genuine service culture and this. Real service culture has reciprocity built in, even when it’s not financial. An organization that asks people to serve invests in them, recognizes their contributions, and creates space for development. People give, and something comes back, and the organization has to make the relationship work because it needs those people engaged. This is different. The member gives, and the organization takes. The member is told this is service to the profession, and the organization has internalized this arrangement so deeply through its leaders and staff that it looks normal and right.

The volunteer leader asking for free content doesn’t experience themselves as taking but as calling for help. The staff member managing the resource doesn’t experience themselves as extractive but as doing their job. The system has created enough distance between action and consequence that extraction becomes invisible, and what keeps it invisible is that the people perpetuating it are often exhausted from unpaid labor themselves. The volunteer leader who asks members to create content for free spent ten years serving on committees for no compensation and knows what that feels like. But because they’ve been taught to call it service, they don’t see the connection between their exhaustion and the system, seeing instead only the price of professional commitment. When they’re in a position to change the system, they don’t. They reproduce it, asking the next generation to give what they gave and calling it community building.

What’s invisible is what this costs the profession. An organization built on extracted labor has no incentive to build sustainable systems because why invest in hiring people to develop content properly, maintain it, update it as practice changes, when you have members doing it for free? The organization stays lean and avoids capital investments that require decisions and justification, relying instead on whatever members contribute, usually at the end of a career when they have the knowledge to create something valuable and often when they’re burned out from their own practice. So the material representing institutional knowledge comes from people running on fumes, created in their spare time, updated sporadically if at all, maintained by whoever cares enough to fix it next, while the organization making money from it takes no responsibility for keeping it good.

The culture becomes so embedded that staff and leaders can’t see an alternative because hiring someone to do what volunteers do feels wrong to them, like you don’t trust members or you’re prioritizing money over community. The frame is complete enough that the rational business decision, investing in sustainable content development, becomes the betrayal in their minds, and the extraction becomes loyalty.

Members eventually see what’s happening and realize the exchange was never what they thought. The organization wasn’t building a reciprocal community but using community language to justify extraction, monetizing unpaid labor indefinitely, and asking volunteer leaders to perpetuate the system they’d been victimized by. The apathy that follows isn’t about losing care for the work but about realizing the work was never mutual, that the organization was structurally incapable of reciprocating because the model depends on not reciprocating. The only rational choice is to redirect energy elsewhere.

The association wonders why engagement drops and good people won’t step into leadership, and everything feels exhausted. They built it this way and structured it to extract labor while avoiding capital investment in what the profession needs. The culture embedded it so deeply into staff and volunteer thinking that most don’t see it as a choice anymore. It’s just how associations work.

Dr. Glenn Jaffe is a practicing chiropractor with more than twenty years in the profession. He served as president of the North Carolina Chiropractic Association and has worked at the national and legislative level on the profession's governance priorities. He is the founder of BoldAzure, a leadership platform for chiropractors. He writes about where the profession is, how it got there, and what maturation actually requires.

Learn more at boldazure.com