Product Description

A $1.3 trillion industry, the US nonprofit sector is the world's seventh largest economy. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the "nonprofit industrial complex" and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model? How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt politi-cal movements? Activists or -careerists? How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden exposé of the "nonprofit industrial complex" and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124511 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780896087668
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Among the largest feminist organizations in the world, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing.

Customer Reviews

Read this book
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.

Essential reading for those struggling in the non profits
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.

Mixed bag
This book is a highly polemical look at the relation between nonprofits and revolutionary social change. I did not find most of the essays to be useful - too many were angry and their analysis shallow. It is true that large public foundations have short attention spans and are unlikely to fund truly revolutionary work - because they are embedded in and part of the social structure that benefits from the oppressions that revolutionary changes would seek to eliminate. I don't find this surprising or interesting - just obvious. However, all of essays in the book lump all foundations together - when in reality, private foundations are a different animal, and many small public foundations are helpful in supporting social change work.

If you are interested in understanding the ways large public foundations influence their grantees and the movements they are part of, I think American Foundations: An Investigative History by Mark Dowie is a much better book.