INCITE! -Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. What was wrong with the “Affirmative Opportunity” rally against the youth jail? By: Adam JacksonCEO, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle Despite the claims made by some mainstream press, the Occupy Baltimore movement was not the biggest force around the resistance to the youth jail.
Mass mobilizations, like Youth Justice Sunday in 2010, were the major engines of the resistance to construction of the youth jail. These mass demonstrations were organized and carried out by Black organizations. Hathaway Ferebee However, Hathaway Ferebee, the Executive Director of The Safe and Sound Campaign, was at the forefront of the “Affirmative Opportunity” event held last week at the War Memorial in downtown Baltimore featuring Rev.
This dynamic posed a problem to my colleagues and I. I can only conclude that this is an attempt to co-opt the genuine movement around improving the quality of life for Black youth in Baltimore. Hathaway orchestrated a meeting with Governor O’Malley last week and didn’t invite or mention the organizations who have been fighting against the youth jail. The Nonprofit Industrial Complex. As if the United States doesn't stand out enough these days, yet another trend is making us more and more distinct in the world: the massive growth of our nonprofit sector.
Some people hope, and others fear, that this might change the very nature of American society. Western countries have already been transformed by industrialization, the rise of the service sector, and the growth of big government. The result has been wealthy economies, middle-class societies, and vast bureaucracies. Our country might now be transformed again by the spread of what Richard Cornuelle dubbed the "independent sector. " The growth of nonprofits--from the Getty Museum to Seattle's Children's Hospital, Emory University, and your aunt's country club--has created the world's largest sector that is neither business fish nor government fowl. The sheer scale and rapid growth of America's nonprofit sector make it difficult to ignore.
Life in The Non-Profit Industrial Complex. I’m an organizer, but when you tell people that, they either think you’re a party hack or you re-arrange people’s closets.
“Activist” is in most people’s vocabularies, so professional activist is an easy way to explain that on and off for the last six years my job has been to build a movement to the end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve organized protests, marches, sit-ins in Congress, dance riots in the streets, giant public art projects, speaking tours and student activist trainings. I’ve chained myself to an oil barrel, built a blockade out of school desks in an intersection in downtown DC, and danced in a war profiteer’s lobby with a few hundred other kids. Sometimes I was being paid, sometimes I wasn’t. This is my work, and most of the time it’s my job. I always had an instinct that capitalism was a dirty word and that my destiny did not involve working for a corporation.
Advocacy non-profits and activist non-profits part ways at the border of “the system.” The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. This article is part of a package on rethinking charity in the economic crisis.
For more, read Giving When It Hurts; Ladling Soup, Raising Hell: Nonprofit Insider Robert Egger Is Out to Reform Charities from Within; and Tips for Practical Giving: Where to Give, What to Ask, and the Lowdown on Emerging Philanthropic Trends. The nonprofit system has tamed a generation of activists. They’ve traded in grand visions of social change for salaries and stationery; given up recruiting people to the cause in favor of writing grant proposals and wooing foundations; and ceded control of their movements to business executives in boardrooms. This argument—that reformers have morphed into cogs in the nonprofit industrial complex—is explained and explored in the fiery anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective (South End, 2007).
Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida And what are our priorities? The Nonprofit Industrial Complex: How the Politics of Funding can Hijack a Movement. October 13, 2007 I am one of the many radical, idealist youths, who, fresh out of college, trekked my way to the Washington, DC progressive world, to get a job at a nonprofit that could, hopefully, reconcile my desire to improve the world with my desire to make a living.
When I got there, I thought I was unbelievably lucky to actually get paid to do work that falls within throwing distance of my political beliefs. Now that I have finished my one and only year in the DC nonprofit world, I must say I am a bit disillusioned. During my time in that city, I learned that the DC nonprofit system is a tangled mess of good intentions, damaging compromises, and political contradictions. In a capitalist society, DC nonprofits must do what it takes to survive – often by making their goals, agendas, and cultures palatable to funders, and by narrowing in on niche social change markets – a distinction that is always somewhat arbitrary.
But there are other models for funding radical projects. Like this: Dan Pallotta: The way we think about charity is dead wrong.