The Revolution Will Not Be Funded & Rad Magpie
If there was one thing that changed the future course of Rad Magpie, it was this book of essays compiled and edited by Incite!
INCITE! is a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities.
INCITE! organized the conference: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex in 2004, alongside the Women of Color Collective of the University of California, Santa Barbara. This conference drew in hundreds of organizers and activists searching for a space to address the ways in which the non-profit/NGO structure often obstructs radical movement building. This conference and the conversations it hosted were turned into an anthology of essays called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded; Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
* “The industrial complex is a socioeconomic concept wherein businesses become entwined in social or political systems or institutions, creating or bolstering a profit economy from these systems.” (Wikipedia)
“Although The Revolution Will Not Be Funded presents no easy answers for those of us struggling both to make a living and to create social change, it exhorts us to put the consideration of our movements’ missions, and the way we fulfill them, before considerations of organizational and job security - and to regularly revisit within our organizations the question of whether the form and content of our work are essentially compatible”
Rad Magpie has seen firsthand that the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) has no interest in dismantling the structural systems of capitalism and white supremacy. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! backs this claim with a collection of essays that offer powerful critiques on how the NPIC exists to benefit the people in power, not the masses it claims to serve. Our team found the essays critiquing social justice work within a careerist model to be striking and relatable. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded helped us see that it’s not us, but the structure we’re trying to operate within, that is the inhibitor to our success. We intend for this blog post to reiterate our important take-aways from this anthology so our community can better understand the changes we’re looking at for our future. Said changes will be discussed further in the History of Rad Magpie blog post and a forthcoming (as of 2/18/22) letter from the Executive Director.
the History of the Non-profit system (Abriged)
*Unless otherwise stated, all of the information in this section is sourced from The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE!, 2007
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded highlights that the non-profit sector functionally exists because of state-level neglect of a government’s responsibility to the health and well-being of its population. The extremely wealthy can claim responsibility for providing crucial funding of ‘solutions’ to problems largely caused by the inequity and inaccessibility of adequate living conditions within a country - often caused by the same corporations run by the wealthy donors and foundations sustaining non-profit existence. As a result of this, private corporate interests and business models dominate a sector that is supposed to be focused on positive change. (INCITE!, foreword, xvi)
1800s
“Prior to the Civil War, individuals, not organizations, did most charity work. However, in the face of accelerating industrialization and accompanying social ills, such as increased poverty, community breakdown to facilitate the flow of labor, and violence, local organizations (generally headed by community elites) developed to assist those seen to be "deserving" of assistance, such as widows and children. These charities focused on individual poverty rather than poverty on the systemic level. Charities did not campaign for higher wages, for instance, but worked to ameliorate the impact of low wages on communities.” (INCITE!, 3)
Early 1900s
“When the ruling class created foundations, they were exempt from paying taxes on their wealth. Thus foundations essentially robbed the public of monies that should be owed to them and gave back very little of what was taken in lost taxes. In addition, their funds were derived from profits resulting from the exploitation of labor. During the late 1960s, radical movements for social change were transforming the shape of the United States while Third World liberation movements were challenging Western Imperialism. Foundations began to take a role in shaping this organizing so that social protest would not challenge the capitalist status quo.” (INCITE!, 7)
Mid 1950s - Late 1990s
Donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations grew from $7.7 billion to $175 billion from the mid 1950s to the late 1990s, according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel Trust for Philanthropy. Charities were largely unregulated at this time, causing a huge swell in the number of non-profit organizations, many of which existed as tax shelters so descendants of the extremely wealthy could receive their inheritance without paying estate taxes.
“The rise of foundation support accompanied the rise of groups that organized as formal 50l(c)(3) non-profit organizations because foundations could make tax-deductible donations to non-profits, particularly after the federal government began to regulate foundation giving more strictly in 1969. According to the IRS, non-profits are "religious, charitable, scientific, or educational" organizations whose receipts are tax-exempt, and whose contributions are tax-deductible for the donors. This tax-exempt status was created by Congress as part of the Revenue Act of 1913, passed after ratification of the 16th Amendment, which instituted the income tax. Generally, organizations must secure 50l(c)(3) status to receive foundation grants, and they are prohibited from direct involvement in political advocacy.” (INCITE!, 7)
“During the late 1960s … Foundations began to take a role in shaping this organizing so that social protest would not challenge the capitalist status quo. Robert L. Allen, as early as 1969, warned of the co-optation of the Black Power movement by foundations. In his germinal work, Black Awakening in Capitalist America… Allen documents how the Ford Foundation's support of certain Black civil rights and Black Power organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) actually helped shift the movement's emphasis — through the recruitment of key movement leaders — from liberation to Black capitalism.” (INCITE!, 7)
‘What’s the problem if folks aren’t paying taxes but their dollars are going to charities that are fighting for social change? It seems like a non-issue to me!’
Real, positive change does not always happen as a result of foundation involvement. For one, foundations can retract their funding on a whim, which puts the non-profit getting the donation in a precarious position. Furthermore, as stated before, when private business models and motivations dominate a sector that should be focused on social change, change doesn’t happen. We explore this more in the following section.
The Problem with a careerist model for social justice work
Charitable giving generated charitable organizations. Charitable organizations created jobs within those organizations, and now some folks dedicate their entire working lives to careers in social change. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded discusses how this caused a subtle psychological shift in our interactions with social justice work…
“Through the NPIC we have started to view social justice organizing more as a career; that is, you do the work if you can get paid for it. However, a mass movement requires the involvement of millions of people, most of whom cannot get paid. By trying to do grassroots organizing through this careerist model, we are essentially asking a few people to work more than full-time to make up for the work that needs to be done by millions.”— (INCITE!, 93)
Learned lesson of a small non-profit: Business culture and social change are like oil and water
Reading the essay BETWEEN RADICAL THEORY & COMMUNITY PRAXIS; REFLECTIONS ON ORGANIZING AND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX >>> AMARA H PEREZ, SISTERS IN ACTION FOR POWER felt like someone we didn’t even know was reciting our own story back to us. Sisters in Action For Power covered how this shift from movement work towards organization building impacted their ability to do the work they had set out to do; The Ford Foundation revoked $100,000 of funding that had been granted to Sisters in Action for Power over a single tweet - something that has always been a threat looming on the horizon for us. Sisters in Action for Power had to rapidly shift to grassroots organizing and crowdfunding practices to be able to reach the goals they had set for that $100,000 in funding. They realized how much power the Ford Foundation had over them, and how securing such funding had impacted how they approached the work at the ground level.
Something that is still very much a process within non-profits, even though we are not businesses, is business culture. There is still a prevalent cultural value of things like “viability,” “performance,” “scaling,” and “results.” This shift in how we view organizing has a huge impact on how we carry out our work. Once you start getting large donations, your goals slide towards maintaining that income so you can keep doing the work to this new (funding) capacity, similar to how traditional business models under capitalism are concerned with steady growth over time. Perez notes this in their essay as well:
“...Such critiques [of the non-profit model] are also about the business culture that it imposes, how we have come to adopt and embrace its premises and practices, and the way that it preempts the radical work so urgently needed from a social justice movement. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain political integrity in circumstances that demand a professionalized, businesslike practice. And perhaps that is the point.” (INCITE!, Amara H Perez, 95)
Perhaps that is the point!
An image of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny. He has an intense look in his over-tired eyes and he is gesturing towards a wall overwhelmed with papers connected by various red strings and feverish handwriting.
This shift in focus has monumental impacts on our movements at large…
It causes important social change work to come to a halt when funding is unavailable and, as such, shifts control over these movements at large to the foundations that support them.
It establishes uncomfortable competition between the organizations that are most alike over limited resources, removing the possibility for true collaboration.
It leaves more space for forms of violence like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism to be reproduced internally.
It creates a willingness to sacrifice perfectly aligned, mission-based work for a lesser fit as a result of funding availability.
If your mission is social justice-centered, the pressure to maintain a strictly professional practice actively removes tools from your toolkit to achieve your goal.
Furthermore, if we’re all focused on chasing the dangling carrot of (in)sufficient funding to do the work that needs to happen, then we become incapable of focusing on fulfilling the work itself to the degree that it needs to be carried out. The work itself exists because of the government’s neglect of its responsibility to provide care for its people. This responsibility is being passed off to non-profit organizations where it continues to be neglected. Wealthy donors can avoid paying taxes AND continue to neglect the disadvantaged populations that they assumed responsibility for when this transfer of power happened (ie. the 1800s) — The very populations whose disadvantages the wealthy actively contribute to as a result of extreme financial imbalance under capitalism. It’s almost like under capitalism, you’re not supposed to receive adequate care as a disadvantaged individual, because it’s useful for that system to have disadvantaged populations. :^)
As an organization with the explicit goal of doing our part to dismantle heteropatriarchal white supremacy in games, we must first allow ourselves to see the impact that heteropatriarchal white supremacy has on the very system we are trying to operate within — prioritizing capitalist goals that distance non-profits from their mission as a result of competition and scarcity. As a non-profit, we must refocus our attention on our primary goal and untangle ourselves from our unproductive investment in business culture. It’s clear that our participation in the non-profit industrial complex as intended will ultimately undermine our political integrity as an organization trying to dismantle the system of patriarchal white supremacy. As usual with Rad Magpie, something big needs to change.
We talk more about the impending changes in our blog post about the History of Rad Magpie & in our newsletter (sign up here).
For more information about INCITE!, please visit their website at https://incite-national.org/
You can buy The Revolution Will Not Be Funded here
This blog was written by Megan McAvoy with editing by Dana Steinhoff, Maggie DeCapua, and Walter Hill