How Nonprofits Stifle Meaningful Change, and Why
A review & discussion of the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
This piece was originally published to Medium on Jul 3, 2021.
Initially, I 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.
In my own writing, I am obsessed with how organizations feed off our culture’s hatred of “laziness” and manipulate workers’ emotions in order to keep them grinding to the point of exhaustion. And as an academic with a partner who has worked for numerous nonprofits, I know that labor exploitation doesn’t begin or end in the for-profit world. I have witnessed in my own activist work how compassion can be used against you, to erode your boundaries and keep you agreeable and compliant even when the group loses sight of its original cause.
I did not find the validation I was seeking in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Instead, I found something far more important: a multidisciplinary, well-researched explanation of how nonprofits and the foundations that fund them often ground political progress to a halt, stifle revolutionary movements, and warp compassion from a lifelong cause, into a self-serving career.
Throughout the 20th century, a variety of changes to tax law and cuts to social welfare programs in the U.S. gradually pushed nonprofits away from empowering disenfranchised groups from the ground up, and toward dispensing temporary “services" to marginalized “customers" instead, typically under the financial support (and control) of foundation and government grants.
If you hold a lot of capital, it makes sense to start your own foundation, and use it to pick and choose which kinds of social causes you want to support. The tax breaks you get on money filtered through a foundation are enormous. It can reduce your income tax, and lower or eliminate your estate tax. Money put into a foundation can still be invested and compounded over time. And as The Revolution Will Not Be Funded explains, only a small percentage of a foundation’s money actually needs to go toward nonprofits or programs. 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.
While some genuinely well-intentioned foundations spend themselves out of existence on purpose, most choose instead to offer up a modest cut of their funds to nonprofits they politically approve of. 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 editors of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded open the book by explaining how financial support from The Ford Foundation threatened the work of their own nonprofit, the Black and brown feminist collective Incite!. Eventually, organizers had to part with the foundation in order to stay true to the radical principles that Incite! stood for. The book features essays by organizers who have worked in everything from domestic violence prevention, to Palestinian liberation, to Indigenous and Black power movements, to harm reduction for drug users, all about how the rise of the nonprofit industrial complex has hampered their work. While the authors don’t agree on everything, they all observe a few key trends:
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. This can lead a once-egalitarian nonprofit to become increasingly hierarchical, with high-status individuals controlling it from the top. The marginalized people who have a real political stake in the nonprofit’s causes wind up pushed to the bottom, and treated as symbols and victims rather than leaders. In some cases, having personal involvement in a topic — being a former drug user, let’s say — may lead to a member being discredited, instead of valued for their firsthand knowledge.
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.
In other words, CARA initially functioned as a collective of women helping one another. There was no line dividing “victims” of domestic violence from “service providers” who helped them. But as grant funding and hierarchical organization overtook the landscape, suddenly being a woman with a domestic violence history was a liability, rather than an asset.
Throughout the book, various organizers describe how foundation and government grant funding slowly took the power away from communities affected by injustices such as white supremacy, ableism, sexism, and imperialism, and granted it to career activist with more moderate views and a vested interest in keeping the organization running, rather than invoking political change.
A nonprofit that once was invested in Palestinian liberation and self-determination, for instance, might gradually become focused on transporting individual Palestinians to the United States for education and jobs training. In this way a systemic, pervasive issue is papered over with a small intervention that reinforces capitalism and imperialism rather than resisting it. A few lucky Palestinians get to participate in the American economy, and may even financially benefit from doing so, but the nation itself remains colonized and its community remains oppressed.
With funders and executive directors pulling the strings, potentially controversial protests and disruptive actions are snuffed out, in favor of dispensing inoffensive, small-scale treatments. Rather than asking why men in impoverished communities have a higher likelihood of being arrested for domestic violence, for instance, a nonprofit might provide “anger management” courses to male perpetrators. Instead of fighting to improve the material circumstances of women and children in poverty who have survived abuse, temporary access to a shelter is provided instead. At no point in the process do the families affected by such issues hold much sway, and in no way is the capitalism or white supremacy that drives their suffering challenged.
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.
Once an organization becomes reliant on grants in order to pay for their day-to-day operations, administrative duties explode in size and scope. Applying for grants requires a lot of writing and record keeping. Managing a grant once you’ve secured it can be even more labor intensive. Often, grants don’t fit an organization’s goals perfectly, and come with many strings attached. Nearly every organizer in the book laments how countless hours and a great deal of labor was lost to meeting eligibility requirements for granting organizations . As Amara H. Perez writes:
Often applying for grants from foundations resulted in our taking on additional work as required by guidelines that were not always reflective of our own internal priorities…Unfortunately, it also required us to overextend ourselves to do both the work we had envisioned and the work we had assumed now as grantees.
As several writers in the book note, many worthwhile activist goals are hard to document or establish the efficacy of. How do you measure the value of a protest? What is the return on investment for a decades-long campaign to release incarcerated people? You can measure your impact easily if you’re handing out meals every day, or providing workshops at universities. But if your work is more abstract or far-reaching (or more challenging of the status quo), you’ll have a harder time proving you’re making a difference. You’ll also be pitted against organizations that may share your values, but generate more showy, easy-to-recognize results. This can slow political progress by turning would-be collaborators into competitors. As Perez writes:
In the “movement market,” organizations competing for limited funding are, most commonly, similar groups doing similar work across the country. Not only does the movement market encourage organizations to focus solely on building and funding their own work, it can create uncomfortable and competitive relationships between groups most alike-chipping away at any semblance of a movement-building culture.
This is yet another way that the nonprofit funding structure pushes people to focus on their own careers within the industry (and on the financial bottom-line) instead of keeping their eye on the over-arching, shared goals they initially cared about. You can’t join forces with the other nonprofits working to expand youth literacy, and launch a city-wide campaign for school funding to be put in community hands; you have to devote your time to writing a better grant than anyone else, so you can snap up the largest crumbs of grant support, and keep your job.
Each chapter of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded reflects a specific organizer’s experiences and perspective, and not all writers agree with one another on all issues. Some chapters advocate for entirely grassroots funding, for example, arguing that advocacy work shouldn’t be a career path at all. Instead, community members should fuel their own movements by giving as much time and money to the cause as they can. Others in the book take a more moderate view, saying that foundation and government funding has its place, but that nonprofits must learn to “play the game” and mask their more revolutionary work behind politically safe language. Though survivors of police violence might drive the agenda of your nonprofit, for example, you might need to tell funders that they are mere “clients” you are providing with “support.”
On the whole, though, each author agrees that reliance upon massive foundations stifles political organizing, and that it’s easier for a nonprofit to remain relatively pure if its funding and goals are driven from the grassroots. This perspective challenged my own anti-workaholism stance, and my tendency to be suspicious of entities that rely on volunteer labor. I’ve been openly critical of activist organizations that I viewed as exploiting its unpaid labor in the past. Having read this book, I can see how financial compensation for activist work taints things in its own way. This seems to be especially true when an organization compensates those with advanced degrees and fancy credentials, but not those whose lived experiences make them experts on a social issue.
Personally, I don’t believe that activism is the “rent” a person must pay in return for inhabiting the planet, as Alice Walker once wrote. I think no human life requires any justification for its existence, that we are the universe (and are society) more than we are “of” it. However, this book has convinced me that some goals simply cannot operate within a capitalist framework, and that paying for certain kinds of labor does, in fact, corrupt it. If an oppressed group is really going to build up the power to take on the forces that have oppressed them, collective sharing of resources and power is necessary. Some degree of selflessness has to figure into it. I’m really thankful that I stumbled upon this book at this time, because that’s an important distinction for me to ponder.
I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the preface to the book and a chapter near the end are written by Andrea Smith, an academic and activist whom many Indigenous women scholars have called out for faking her connection to the Cherokee Nation. Though Smith’s chapter offers up a really helpful, concise primer on the Palestinian liberation movement, her dishonesty about her own background discredits her work qualitatively, in my view. Originally published in 2007, several passages of the book are out of date, particularly concerning geopolitics. Generally though, most of the language and analysis holds up. The problems these writers outline have been vexing nonprofits since at least the 1960s, and they remain very much an issue today.
If you work in the nonprofit industrial complex, or for a university or foundation, I highly recommend that you pick this book up. If you’re critical of capitalism and trying to sort out your own views on what a post-capitalist world ought to look like, I also think you’ll get a lot of value from reading it. Activists of all stripes should give it a read as well, but particularly if your organization is rapidly growing and is contemplating that coveted 501(c)3 status. Grant support may sound enticing, and may unlock a lot of opportunities, but as The Revolution Will Not Be Funded demonstrates, when it comes to appealing to the ruling class for support, there is no such thing as a free lunch.