Cartagena       One of the nice things about taking a vacation, especially at the end of the year, when so many are also away from their work, so not beating down your literal or digital door, is the chance to catch up on some reading on diverse subjects.  Recently, a survey indicated that adults from 15-up only spent around 15 minutes per day on reading that wasn’t related to their work.  It’s part of our job to push up the average during the holidays.  In my first couple of days of personal pleasure, I’ve read Multitudes, a book about crowds, an anti-Gustavo Le Bon effort, and Kent State:  An American Tragedy, which is exactly what it was.  I also just finished, The Revolution Will Not be Funded:  Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, a holiday gift from mi companera, which kind of falls more in the work category, than pleasure for any of us who have spent our lifetimes building and working for nonprofits.

The book was originally published by South End Press in 2007 following a similarly named conference that I believe was held twenty years ago in 2004, and then reissued by Duke in 2017.  The book itself is an anthology of sorts that, true to the book’s title, critiques foundations and what they call the “non-profit industrial complex” or NPIC and how both together tend to obstruct social change.  Taking particular, and deserved heat, were tax-exempt nonprofits, 501(c)3 organizations, which have restrictions on their political activity in exchange for not paying taxes.  Many of the authors damned such organizations, their co-optations, and mission drift, hardly offering faint praise.  A number of them underlined the wild growth of inequity then and the surge of foundations and nonprofits at the time, all of which has continued to accelerate even more rapidly now.  Several mentioned the fact that the payout requirements for foundations had gone down from 8% to 5% of their assets, but with the rising stock market at that time, they were still engorged with money.  Groups were being organized, one of which, the National Council for Responsive Philanthropy still has its shoulder to the wheel and is directed by a former ACORN organizer.  They bemoaned the fact that foundations were able to count their staff salaries, fancy office rents, and administrative costs as part of the 5%.

An article by Nicholas Lemman from the Atlantic in 1997 was referenced.  He ended it saying, “Foundations are becoming so much more significant so rapidly that they deserve to be brought into the company of central institutions whose course is the subject of constant public scrutiny and debate.”  Needless to say, that didn’t happen.  A book by Jennifer Wolch called The Shadow State was repeatedly referenced with a devastatingly researched look at the threats the NPIC posed to democracy.  The book is now out of print, and Wolch, now an emeritus planning professor from Berkely, may have also gone another direction.  Sister II Sister argued militantly against foundation funding, but seems not to have survived over the decades.  A short piece by Project South argued for maximum grassroots funding and minimal non-dependent foundation grants.  This Atlanta-based nonprofit specializing in leadership development and other issues is still active.  Their IRS 990 showed $12 million in income that year and only $6 million in expenditures.  They seemed to have scored big during Black Lives Matter with $28.4 million that year and a bit over $8 million in expenditures.  They seem to have made a separate peace with foundation and corporate giving.  Suzanne Pharr was probably quoted more than any other individual for her remarks at the conference, and Wikipedia seems to indicate that she stayed the course with various stints and after directing the Highlander Center at the time of the conference.

The general critique of the book is, if anything, truer today, than it was then.  Unfortunately, it’s warnings were largely unheeded, and its most dire predictions, sadly, have become fully realized.  The revolution wasn’t funded, and neither did it happen, leaving all of us the worse for the wear.