03.03.09

the Revolution will not be funded..

Posted in culture, justice, leadership at 5:30 am by len

One of the magazines I have subscribed to off and on over the years is the UTNE Reader – a journal of the alternative press. Nearly every issue has one or two great articles – articles that peel away the veneer, the slogans, the hidden assumptions and hidden agendas of Empire. And occasionally, one of these articles hits very close to home, showing just how close the ties of our faith and the Empire here at the end of Christendom.

The March-April magazine contains one of these illuminating.. and uncomfortable.. pieces. It’s an article about how funding structures have nearly destroyed a generation of activists. The title of the article is as above, and the subtitle is “Its time to liberate activists from the nonprofit industrial complex.” The article is an excerpt from the book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. I’ll share a few quotes from the first part of the article and then a longer slice from the final third.

“Social justice groups and organizations have become limited as they’ve been incorporated into the nonprofit model. We as activists are no longer accountable to our constituents or members because we don’t depend on them for our existence. Instead, we’ve become primarily accountable to public and private foundations as we try to prove to them that we are still relevant and efficient and worthy of continued funding…

“And what are our priorities? Perhaps the real problem is that we don’t spend enough time imagining what we want and then doing the work to sustain that vision… the corporate-capitalist system tames us by robbing us of our time and flooding us in a sea of bureaucratic red tape, .. a necessary evil for guaranteeing our organization’s existence. We are too busy being told to market ourselves by pimping our communities’ poverty in proposals, selling “results” in reports and accounting for our finances in reviews.

In essence, our organizations have become mini-corporations, because on some level, we have internalized the idea that power — the ability to create change — equals money.

Over time, funding trends actually come to influence our work, priorities, and direction as we struggle to remain competitive and funded in the movement market. For many activists, this has shifted the focus from strategies for radical change to charts and tables that demonstrate how successfully the work has satisfied foundation-determined benchmarks.

* * *

“Women of All Red Nations (WARN) had tax-exempt status once, but we let it lapse. It was too complicated. No one wanted to sit in the office and write reports with time and energy that could be used to advance our movement.

“How we organized was different from how activists tend to respond now. We didn’t wait for permission from anyone. We didn’t have people tell us, this is too big of a project for you to do — you should contact the state of some other governing power first. Nowadays, an organization might want to do something more creative, but its board of directors will tell them no. We did not worry if our work would upset funders; we just worried about whether the work would help our communities.

“Before, we focused on how to organize to make change, but now most people will only work within funding parameters. People work for a salary rather than because they are passionate about an issue. When you state paying people to do activism, you can start to attract people to the work who are not primarily motivated by or dedicated to the struggle. In addition, getting paid to do the work can also change those of us who are dedicated. Before we know it, we start to expect to be paid and do less unpaid work that we would have before. This way of organizing benefits the system, of course, because people start seeing organizing as a career rather than involvement in a social movement that requires sacrifice.”

Activism is tough. It is not for people interested in building a career.

Madonna Thunder Hawk, Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, South Dakota

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