From an essay called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded; a later draft of this essay appears, I believe, in the book of the same name.
The corporate nonprofit structure encouraged by tax law doesn’t just promote financial short-sightedness through its focus on grants. This corporate structure is an intrinsic part of existing oppression, so it also inhibits the most radical aspects of our work. Suzanne Pharr, longtime Southern activist working against racism, sexism, homophobia and economic inequality, recites a straightforward list of losses that social justice movements have suffered as a result of common nonprofit fundraising strategies: The nonprofit sector, she asserts, has given us more government and corporate money, less autonomy from those sources of money, less community membership and involvement in organizations, more corporate mimicry, and more professionalization of roles within grassroots movements.
The effects of all this? Organizations are no longer places where money and leadership are controlled by their constituents. Instead, leadership jobs go to those from the outside: people with degrees in social work, accounting and nonprofit management. With fewer people involved in organizations and with money coming from the nation’s financially powerful, the direction of nonprofit work veers away from the struggles of the people in whose name those organizations often operate. The money covers financial reports, professional grantwriters’ salaries and strategies for meeting funders’—not organizations’, let alone movements’—goals. As a result, organizations that began as radical grassroots associations of individuals become corporations that largely copy the mainstream economy. They are professional, though not educated on the ground about the actual issues; organized, but not effective; compliant with tax laws, but not responsive or accountable to community needs.
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is the argument that this makes charities less effective? (haven’t followed the link yet) Or is this just a dislike of large organizations?
I’ve read most of the book and the argument is that the 501c3 structure impedes the work of gropus organizing for social change; ie, that such groups shouldnt be charities becuase the structure undermindes the political intent of the group.
Imo, its a fine point but can be overdrawn. Foundations etc can only change your program if you let then. Sure, if you dont you wont get as many grants, but thats what grassroots fundraising is for. groups should be mostly grassroots funded, but I dont think they need to eschew grants 100% or that doing so would be desirable.
I think it’s the line between leverage and direct action.
Leveraging money can be good. Donating $1 billion to help the poor will help a lot of poor people. But the U.S. budget is at least 532.8 Billion, probably closer to 700 billion. If you can influence only 0.5% of spending with your billion dollars then you can accomplish much more (since you’ll have over 2.5 billion) for your target audience.
Similarly, leveraging can occur on a lower level. Spending time to get grants can be well worth it, so long as the grants give you a net gain to use in your goals. Money can’t buy you love, but it can get you many of the things that groups generally lobby for.
What many organizations fail to do is to perform a frequent objective assessment of whether the grants are a net gain. They are trapped in a “fund raising through grant” mentality which may not produce an overall benefit.
Of course, there’s a catch-22: assessing the worth of grants (which you would probably support) takes skilled people doing the kind of work that you don’t seem to like.
I’ve done grantwriting for religious nonprofits. The trap that some organizations fall into is asking for a grant, and then doing what they said they would do with the grant – instead of doing what they WANT to do, and asking for grant support of that, but doing it regardless.
You get more money the first way. You keep control of your agenda the second way.
One major problem with 100% grant funded programs/organizations is that they absolutely can not plan long term. There is high turnover in staffing/personell/resources because of the nature of grant funding. Lots of places provide maybe one year of funding with specific budgets in specific categories that are (depending on teh granting instution) a real bitch to adjust (which really sucks because the work grant funded organizations do often change over time and budgets done 6 months to 5 years previously is educated guesswork at it’s best), thus if it takes you 2 months to hire someone (because you can’t actually do a hire until you have an award notice AND an executed contract) then you are 2 months into a 10 month project period and have “wasted” 2 months of budgeted salary dollars.
Without some sort of no strings attached cushion fund that an organization can draw on in times of funding gaps, or even just gaps because a contract hasn’t been fully executed (a SERIOUS problem with lots of state awarded money – dealing with the Feds is a DREAM compared to dealing with the state), any work you are doing is seriously compromised. grant funding does often move organizations more mainstream in goals and outcomes and I think that’s ok, as long as newer grassroots groups crop up to keep up the more radical end.
AND, if you are dealing with state and federal grants and contracts a lot, it DOES require a significant amount of administrative support, which lots of grassroots orgs just don’t have. Writing and getting grants is hard enough, but post award administration is a full time job and large non profit institutions have entire Grant Award departments with specially trained accountants and administrators. Smaller orgs don’t have that benefit, which means the people doing the programmatic aspect are ALSO doing administrative crap they aren’t trained to do and takes away from their ability to focus on the work at hand.
It’s a rough system. But I think there are benefits too.
exactly, Robert. (!)
Poor article that contradicts itself – it really twists itself into knots complaining about corporatism, then explaining away the actual corporate realities of some organizations, like Sisters in Action for Power in Portland.
Oftentimes, the social justice organization takes corporate structure to allow the organization to be more than an ad hoc response to some social problem – that’s how the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center formed after the settlement of lawsuits against the City of Portland for attacking protesters. (I am a board member there.)
The article complains that
The “bourgeois” “stable work environment” at organizations like the NWCRC allows people to *actually get things done* and keep on working for change, rather than fade away once the founders get burnt out or find something new to get radical about.
The author would rather posture as a radical than actually effect change. Fine. Be more punk than thou while we try to rein in the police in this town.
Also – please change the blockquotes….they really screw around with my eyes.
Is this better?
(Can’t speak for Aaron, but both of the new ways kind of hurt my eyes. I was a big fan of “solid.” Sorry. :( )
Well, I was bored with the old way. :-P
Okay, I’ve changed it again. How is this on your eyes?
(It looks better in Firefox than IE. But then, what doesn’t?)
This structure has allowed some organizers a stable work environment complete with the corporate benefits of salaries, health care and retirement plans. But at what cost? For those of us seeking fundamental, revolutionary change, the nonprofit glut has cost us our broad-based social movements.
I’m in agreement with Aaron. Is the author seriously contending that the kind of people who would even be vaguely interested in “fundamental, revolutionary change” are the same people who yearn for a 401(k) and a guaranteed 9-5 sinecure as the frame for their activism?
I’m kind of thinking, not. And if it’s a different set of people, then the people doing the good work in their button-down office aren’t doing squat that would negatively impact the people fighting their street war for the Revolution, or whatever – other than making them look more radical, which you’d think they’d appreciate. Ungrateful wretches.
Sorry to distract from your blockquote formatting conversation, Amp. :-)
I like the thinner red lines better for blockquotes…..maybe a closely-dotted one with small dots “……….” if you want to get fancy.
The large dashes hurt my eyes.
Your blog, your blockquotes :)
But I confess I liked the old ones better too–though these are WAY better than the head-splitting dashes.
These are in no way mutually exclusive. Wanting to effect revolutionary social change doesn’t limit you to strategies of selling papers and ranting on street corners–for instance if you may think, as many do, that building community organization is the best step towards increasing the power of communities whom you think must become more powerful if revolutionary change is ever going to happen. In the process of that you will certainly confront the question of whether or not your project is best established as a 501C3 or not.
This I think is the perspective that may of the various groups whove written for this book are coming from.
That is also not the only situation in which someone who is a revolutionary might want a stable job. Most people, as far as I can tell, want a stable job. Revolutionaries can object to that, but we still have to live in a world in which a stable job, in the absence of a trust fund, is the main route to lots of life’s basic necessitites.
I still dont like the block quotes :)
Also, one thing i didn’t get from the book ( I didnt read it incredibly closely, though) is what the other choices are. I mean I get the grant funding vs cesar chavez’ grassroots method, but what besides risking tax fraud or depending or depending on an outside C3 or C4 is a strategy for handling the money of ongoing political projects. I’ve done all of those, but at some point if your project is big enough, stuffing it in the mattress is a bad idea in a lot of ways.
It kind of depends on what you want to do. If you are drawn to a mission of actually helping poor people right now, you will probably be drawn to a stable non-profit structure that can reliably help people. If you want to speculatively help people with a radical shift at some undefined point in the future, you might be less interested in that. People who are interested in the former don’t have massive overlap with people who are drawn to the latter. The author seems to think that the very same people would join her if they weren’t being sucked into non-profits. I’m not sure that is true.
My mother for instance, was very interested in helping a specific community near where she lived. Her particular focus was in helping the kids in that community learn to read, help their parents learn English and get good jobs, and discourage gangs from getting a strong foothold in the community. She was greatly aided by having a simple corporate non-profit structure. It provided a stability which was very useful. It is very unlikely that she would join a more ‘radical’ organization with more speculative future goals.
Robert makes a good point; “he who pays the piper calls the tune”.
What you run into is that you ask for money to do what you want to do and the grantor says, “Well, we can’t/won’t fund that, but if you make this change we will.” Then you have to decide how far said change takes you away from your mission. Do it a few times and all of a sudden you find that you are no longer doing your mission.
You have to remember that the grantors have their own mission as well, which they used to market their funding drives to begin with. If there’s a conflict between your mission and their mission, they will exert an effort to make you fit them. This need not be malevolent or even overt; “sorry, we’re not set up to do that”. They have a world view. If you fit it, great. If not, sorry.
And sometimes the worldview of the grantor changes, which leads you to real trouble. An example I am intimately familar with is the Boy Scouts of America and the United Way. While both organizations have a national structure, both of them do their work at a more local level; chapters in the case of the UW and local Councils in the case of the BSA. Local Councils apply to local UW chapters to get funding for BSA programs.
Many Councils used to get 1/3 of their funding (or more!) from their local UW chapters. But in some urban areas (mostly on the East and West coasts) the UW changed their world view – they decided not to fund their local Councils because of the BSA’s membership standards. And even in areas where this was not an issue the amount of funding granted to Councils dropped because of a hefty ramp-up in demand from other agencies (which is what the UW calls the organizations that they give grants to). So overall the BSA has had problems with their funding from the UW.
Since the sponsoring organizations of the BSA will not support changing its membership standards any time soon, it had to develop new means of funding. In some cases this was by applying for grants for those areas of their programming that do not have the same membership criteria as their traditional programs. But overall, the big problem was met by emphasizing marketing their fundraising directly to the community, using more and different creative means to do so and by getting more of the volunteer base directly involved. There are more than 1 million adults involved in the BSA on a volunteer basis. Using new means of directly communicating the BSA’s mission and their successes in accomplishing it and getting a bigger percentage of the volunteers involved has made a difference.
Now, I’m not expecting anyone here to support the BSA’s membership criteria. But it’s an excellent example of how a not-for-profit organization that is overly dependent on a single grantor can fall into a trap when it’s mission and that of it’s grantor falls into conflict, and how that can be resolved while still maintaining a focus on the original mission.
“he who pays the piper calls the tune” has been made absolutely clear this week as the Prolacta/International Breastmilk Project story has hit the blogosphere. I’ve blogged it here, and also at Hoyden About Town (which is currently experiencing technical errors.) The Lactivist is on the job also.
In essence, it appears that the IBMP brings in milk donors who wish to help poster-children sick black African AIDS orphans, and hands them over to Prolacta, a for-profit milk bank and patenting company. Prolacta then collect the milk and ship some of it to Africa (targets reflect enough to feed one or two babies), and have plans to keep the rest to sell off and/or perform lucrative IP/pharma research on.
What potential sanctions are in place for organisations that collect altruistic donations, then sell them off?
I dont think the authors think that all people working in non-profits are otherwise radicals, the question is, for radicals, how useful is the non-profit structure in advancing radical goals and organization.
What potential sanctions are in place for organisations that collect altruistic donations, then sell them off?
Hm. Fraud? False advertising?
Figure that the objective of 501(c)(3) and other such organizations is to provide a way for donors to give money and get a tax deduction; after all, if you want to support any cause, you can go ahead and give them money. The only reason you need a 501(c)(3) is to get your tax deduction. Now, consider what kind of givers have enough money that they need a tax deduction. Probably not radicals. Probably not people who support radical changes in the society that affords them such an income. A 501(c)(3) inherently is not, I figure, going to be a radical organization, or be comfortable working with radical causes. I’m sure there are individual exceptions; I’m talking as a group.
Ron;
The issue is not whether most 501c3’s are potentially radical or how they might be or could they be, the question is about how radicals should arrange thier organizations and whether the 501 is ever an appropriate method. Then that is combined with a related but different argument about grant funding. Lots of people who profess radical aims and consider themselves radicals do organize their groups this way an solicit grant funding, admittedly from a small sympathetic minority of grant funders.