Nonprofits: Beware The Hand That Feeds
Can we really depend on big money to fund change?
Above Photo: Money comes with strings that can undermine a revolutionary’s mission. | Reuters
Injustice is not happenstance. It’s systemic. Police shoot more unarmed black men than white because the slave system put a target on their backs centuries ago that has never been erased. Racism is in America’s DNA. It is a systemic problem built into the American culture ever since black people were counted as chattel and fed from a pig’s trough. Every American institution from prisons to politics, from Yale to Mizzou is laced with the inextricable venom of the slave system. The American system is so infected with racial injustice that even programs funded to mitigate systemic social and economic problems become fruit of the poisonous tree. The Nonprofit Quarterly said it best: The Nonprofit Industry has a Ferguson problem.
People are familiar with the Military Industrial Complex, war for profit, a term coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Michelle Alexander in her groundbreaking book, “The New Jim Crow,” gave voice to the Prison Industrial Complex: prison for profit and the incarceration of more black people than were enslaved. Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle CEO Adam Jackson in a recent interview had this to say about the Nonprofit Industrial Complex as outlined in the book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” It is a compilation of essays from activists around the world:
“In the United States there is a structured system set up for white people to profiteer off of the oppression of black folks,” he said. “We call it the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. White corporations make sure that their profits are not taxed because they put profits into nonprofits and foundations and typically they are just extensions of that corporation’s social and political agenda… it’s about systemic inequality and oppression because it insures that you can’t institution build.”
Adam Jackson is native to West Baltimore and leads an independent, community-based organization that accepts no funding from political entities, nonprofits or foundation. They target legislative policy to bring about change. According to Jackson, black people have to build their own institutions so that they can map an agenda accountable to the community they serve. Although the racism in the Prison Industrial Complex is a familiar target for change, the NPIC gets little attention.
The U.S. nonprofit sector of 501c(3) tax-exempt organizations is a 1.3 trillion dollar industry. It is the world’s seventh largest economy funding 1.5 million organizations that range from art museums to think tanks and social justice groups on the right and the left side of the fence.
At least 60 percent of non-profits serve people of color, however 30% of board members are without a single minority representative although minorities are 36 percent of the US population. Eight percent of boards have minority representatives. Chief executives are only seven percent minority and 9.5 of 10 philanthropic agencies are dominated by whites.
According to a Boardsource survey, “63 percent of organizations say that diversity is a coreNonprofits: Beware The Hand That Feeds | PopularResistance.Org: