26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this book, October 8, 2007
This review is from: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Paperback)
As an organizer working in and out of the confines of non-profit organizations, I give my highest recommendations for this extremely important collection of essays. I often wonder how I've gotten to a point where I spend less time in the community, and more time sitting in front of my computer writing grant proposals, calculating budgets and writing final reports for foundations and government agencies. As many of the authors in the book suggest, shouldn't we be accountable to our constituents rather than foundations, which serve as little more than tax shelters through which "white capital is circulated among white people and works to maintain systems of white supremacy"? Through the proliferation of non-profits and foundations, radical social movements in the US have been co-opted to a point where the movement eerily resembles the oppressive capitalist social order we claim to be challenging, giving rise to the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
Collaboration is stifled when fierce competition for funding and stringent, narrow grant guidelines divide groups that are working towards the same goal. Perhaps most disheartening is the NPIC's power to shape our approaches and tactics for social change. As Dylan Rodriguez points out, "[m]ore insidious than the...constraints exerted by the foundation/state/non-profit nexus is the way in which [it]...grounds an epistemology--literally, a way of knowing social change and resistance praxis--that is difficult to escape or rupture." This epistemology is responsible for the belief that activists must conform to 501(c)(3) status for legitimacy and funding and that social services serve a greater need and purpose than the arduous task of social change.
Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande warn that "philanthropy never intends to fund revolutionary struggle that demands the just seizure of wealth, resources, and power that has been gained by exploiting the bodies, lives and land of people of color worldwide." The NPIC's tentacles reach far beyond the US. Movements in the Global South are already under the threat of becoming non-profitized and co-opted. As activists in the US, we have an obligation to continue this discourse, learn from one another's mistakes and organize beyond the NPIC.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential reading for those struggling in the non profits, April 14, 2009
This review is from: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Paperback)
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is lucid book composed of writings by various left activists and grassroots organizers - edited by INCITE! a Women of Color collective and written mostly people of color. It is one of the best sources of analysis of why activism and organizing in a non profit group or organization is fraught with contradictions and may even be a dead-end for your political aims.
It takes aim at the "Non Profit Industrial Complex", which like the Military Industrial Complex or the Prison Industrial Complex, is a penetrating system designed to benefit the needs of status-quo at the expense of the dis-empowered - precisely the people we are concerned about.
The opening chapter explains how 501(c)3 non profits are a relatively new US phenomenon, established to both provide tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations, and also to control the radical energies of people who threaten to upset the power structure.
In short, while most non profits deal with non political issues like libraries, cultural events or Red Cross-type activities -- it is the progressive political nonprofits that concerns us. Typically, there is money, and sometimes a seductively large amount, to fund projects like a health outreach program, a battered woman's shelter, a poor people's food program, a march on Washington for racial equality, etc.. Almost never, is there money to fund global projects that mobilize people to CHANGE the system that results in racism, people without guaranteed health care, battered women, starving people, etc..
Soon, the activists in the non-profits are occupied with hob-nobbing with and filling in forms for their foundation sponsors. Those that are the most successful, are remarkably like their sponsors - educated, middle & upper class, and yes, white. Like perpetrates like. They will alter their program and aims to lure in more money or respond to the demands of their funders. Unfortunately, the aim soon becomes keeping your paid job, not your political goals. The radical becomes the paid bureaucrat.
What are the solutions? One that sticks in my mind is to refuse funding from sources that compromise your program. If foundations are turning your organization away from your goals, fund-raise among the people you serve or mobilize. If possible, run your group with volunteers.
So let me confess why this book so impressed me. I helped start a free community health clinic run by volunteers in the ruins of New Orleans after Katrina. I became one of those non profit bureaucrats who wasted a lot of time chasing money to build the clinic. The State 'loved' us because we provided health care on the cheap that they didn't want to spend money on by re-opening their free hospital and clinics with real paid jobs. The non-profit foundations thought we were a great way to show their donors that they were active in New Orleans. We thought at the beginning, we were radical, but I concluded that free health care clinics are a safety valve in a capitalist system that wants to keep the poor riff-raff out of the fancy waiting rooms of private clinics and hospitals. What is needed is universal single-payer health care for all, and of course, there is no funding for that.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent text, November 2, 2007
This review is from: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Paperback)
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding an "alternative" perspective to non-profits. It is engaging and really makes you critically think about everything you have ever been "taught" about the "purpose" of non-profit organizations.
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