The revolution will not be funded

Lip Magazine's Andrea del Moral critiques the nonprofit sector this week.

"At $1.3 trillion, the US nonprofit sector is the seventh largest economy in the world. Employing 10% of the US workforce, the NPS—aka the NP Industrial Complex, as it is coming to be known by a growing number of critics positioned both within and outside the sector—spans private hospitals, city symphonies, environmental groups, human rights organizations, professional associations, theater companies and churches. Their goals are in no way unified. Some of them drive fundamentalist social policy and other right-wing agendas like demolishing public education and defunding welfare. Others, in the words of longtime social justice fundraiser Kim Klein, are involved in "everything that is decent and humane."

What these 1.5 million organizations DO share is their state-assigned tax status as 501©(3) institutions—and, consequently, the way they effect social change in the US. Named for the section of the tax code that regulates their existence, this uneasy band of organizations do not pay income tax—all individual donations are tax-deductible—and they have access to grants from foundations, corporations and the government.

Social justice organizers and activists have spent decades learning this lesson, and they are beginning to raise an audible voice of dissent. I first heard this voice at The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, a May 2004 conference sponsored by the women of color, anti-domestic violence network, INCITE! Hour after hour, movement builders from within the NPS spoke of the paralysis, disempowerment and ineffectiveness of the nonprofit world. They presented visions of a different strategy. Rooted in grassroots organizing of the the 20th century and with a priority on democratic process, popular education and development from below, a post-nonprofit world is now emerging.

Charities first gained tax-exempt status because Congress determined that they provided services that the government would otherwise have provided. Since these organizations were saving the government money, it seemed logical to give them a tax break. As this system evolved, however, the work of nonprofits replaced government services to the point that we consider it normal that a hospital depend on..."
Read the rest at LiP Magazine.