up:: Content
author:: Devon Price
full title:: How Nonprofits Stifle Meaningful Change, and Why
url: Link
Highlights
- The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
- picked up a copy of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex expecting to read about how nonprofit organizations exploit the passion of their employees and volunteers, and push them to work far harder than is healthy or sustainable for them.
- As government funding for welfare, disability benefits, food stamps, and education have been slashed repeatedly since the 1980s, many foundations have risen up in their stead, taking a role that the state or the community used to carry.
- That’s only after the nonprofits prove their work is worthy of support with lengthy grant applications, evaluation reports, and public, feel-good demonstrations of their “value.” If a group’s cause is too radical, or it does work that can’t be easily documented in a spreadsheet and shared with stakeholders, it’s unlikely to receive financial support.
- The more an organization must capitulate to large foundations for money, the more likely it is run by relatively wealthy, highly educated, privileged white people — people who can speak the language of funders and boards of directors, in other words.
- As Alisa Bierra writes, in a chapter about her work with Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA):
- Early in the antiviolence movement, women made intimate connections between their own experience of violence and violence that survivors who sought support in their organizations and groups experienced…As the movement developed and became increasingly professionalized, workers were expected to be not “battered women” but experts with a master’s degree in social work.
- As Adoja Florencia Jones de Elmeida writes:
- In theory, foundation funding provides us with the ability to do the work-it is supposed to facilitate what we do. But funding also shapes and dictates our work by forcing us to conceptualize our communities as victims.