Nonprofit Industrial Complex Research Articles

The enemy is inside: Feminists of color navigate the nonprofit industrial complex

The enemy is inside: Feminists of color navigate the nonprofit industrial complex

Towards a Racialized Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Towards a Racialized Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Querida Promotora

<p>This open letter to the promotoras de salud (community health workers) of Long Beach, California explores the multifaceted demands placed on low-wage, highly skilled health educators within the nonprofit industrial complex, and exposes the geographies of Latinx health precarity from the perspective of urban health care feminized labor. The letter also shares and celebrates the deep commitment to justice that promotoras struggle toward through their care work.</p>

Antiracist Praxis in Community Engagement: A Partnership Rubric

This article argues for the need for a partnership evaluation rubric focused on antiracist praxis, the application of theory into practice. Such a rubric is critical given that service-learning and community engagement now exist under the neoliberal university, which uses assessment to justify program existence. Furthermore, many of our community partners work under the nonprofit industrial complex, where it is difficult to challenge racial inequity. Community-engaged scholars have identified antiracist best practices, including using a place-based approach, partnering with constituent-led organizations, making conflict productive, using an asset-oriented approach, and building solidarity. However, the analysis of our community-engaged partnership reveals that many existing equity-based partnership rubrics do not measure antiracist praxis explicitly. We thus developed and proposed a partnership rubric to assess antiracist praxis.

Situating the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

This article centers on the nonprofit landscape in Vancouver, Canada, a city that occupies the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, which have never been ceded to the colonial occupation of Canada. Vancouver has a competitive nonprofit field, with an estimated 1600+ nonprofits operating within city limits. This descriptive review starts by defining what a nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is, then outlines an abbreviated history of the nonprofit sector on the aforementioned lands. The article then explores issues related to colonialism, anti-poor legislation, neoliberal governance, the fusing of the public and private sectors, and the bureaucratization of social movements and care work as mechanisms to uphold the status quo social order and organization of power. Focusing on under-examined issues related to the business imperatives of nonprofit organizations in the sectors of housing, health and social services, community policing, and research, this work challenges the positive default framing of nonprofits and charities. Instead, we contend that Vancouver’s NPIC allows the government and the wealthy to shirk responsibility for deepening health and social inequities, while shaping nonprofits’ revenue-generating objectives and weakening their accountability to the community.

Rights, not rescue: trafficking (in)securities at the sport mega-event.

We examine the impact of fantasies used in the redevelopment of sport mega-event cities on host communities; particularly as related to the male-dominated FIFA World Cup and forced prostitution. We start with a discussion of event fantasies, particularly those that circulate in relation to humanitarian aid and the alleged involvement of women and children in forced labour and sexual exploitation. We trace these fantasies across several FIFA host cities since the 2006 FIFA World Cup, hosted in Germany, to leverage continual and perpetuate attention (and profit) through the non-profit industrial complex. These fantasies have facilitated and coordinated collaborative consensus amongst state authorities and allies to act in a meaningful manner even as the evidence of forced prostitution is still scant-while the realities of people that continue to be subjected to violent and exploitative labour in the construction of stadia, athlete recruitment, or equipment and apparel industries are seldom addressed. We do this to question the lived impact of policies and personalities of rescue on people engaged, consensually, in erotic labour within host cities, that are often made target of rescue intervention. The figure of the proverbial sex slave, as a highly racialized and hypersexualized trope, is mobilized through the sport mega-event to further police the bodies of all women in labour and migration. We end with a cautious message to future host cities, particularly cities implicated in the 2026 FIFA World Cup within Mexico, Canada, and the United States, of the highly-profitable and politically-advantageous rhetoric of damsel in distress.

Careful Data Tinkering

In this paper, we describe and analyze the data practices of an activist non-profit, the Housing Justice League. We focus on their Tenant Power Hotline, a community outreach tool for tenants facing eviction and seeking organizing support. This research contributes to existing scholarship that examines data practices and the use of information and communication technologies in non-profit and grassroots organizations. To this existing scholarship, we share the structure of a counter-institution: an organization that strives to operate outside the non-profit industrial complex. We then interpret the work of Housing Justice League through the lens of care, identifying homebrewed databases and data fragmentations as negotiations between care and efficiency. We argue that care is enacted through the assemblage of the technical systems, and present tinkering as an alternative approach to developing data practices.?

Survivors “Surviving Well” and “Surviving Poorly”: Reflections on the Limitations and Possibilities of Transformative Justice

Survivors “Surviving Well” and “Surviving Poorly”: Reflections on the Limitations and Possibilities of Transformative Justice

Redefining Success: Evaluating Decision-Making Structures and Metrics of Effectiveness inf Racial Justice-Oriented, Bay Area Nonprofits

In the wake of uprisings in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the summer of 2020, individuals and communities have turned to racial justice-centered nonprofit organizations to guide conversations and advocacy combating institutionalized racism. Simultaneously, historically white organizations and corporations, including some racial justice nonprofits, have been challenged to reevaluate the way they meet– or fail to meet– the needs of their Black, Indigenous, & Person of Color (BIPOC) staff and communities. The institutionalization of racial justice work into the familiar 501(c)(3) status in the last fifty years in particular, in what scholars have named the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC), can limit actual change-making into coping with symptoms, rather than addressing root causes, of racism in the United States. The cooptation of racial justice work into a nonprofit framework is marked by competition for limited external funding sources and often results in the exclusion of BIPOC in decision-making in favor of short-term solutions to perceived inequities. This study builds upon existing research exploring the structures that determine how organizational decisions are made.  I present a case study of three Bay Area-based, racial justice-oriented nonprofit organizations, in which I find that organizations that practice intentionality about centering impacted identities can overcome these traditional limitations of nonprofits and excel as effective advocates of structural change. Additionally, highly effective organizations understand ‘success’ in terms of narrative shift and building power, rather than numerically centered definitions that appeal to funders without affecting change.

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

Toward A Just and Humanizing System: A Critical Structural Analysis of the Human Services Field

ABSTRACT This paper advances a critical conceptual discussion and paradigm shift regarding the preparation of human and social service students. This work looks to make apparent the racial and class realities of preparing a primarily white, female, upper/middle-class human service professional to work in a field that overwhelmingly serves poor Black and Brown communities. The frameworks/concepts of The Racial Contract, Structural Competency, and The nonprofit Industrial Complex are employed to examine and understand social systems and structures of pertinence to human services. Finally, implications for human services, both in terms of human service curricula and practice are considered.

“You Start with the Youth”: Narratives of Deservingness and Dissent at a Homeless Service Organization

As they provide social services to people experiencing poverty and homelessness, many nonprofit organizations perpetuate ideologies that obscure the political and economic causes of poverty and blame poor people for their plight. But the ideologies and practices of service provision are more diverse than many scholars of the nonprofit industry have assumed. What are the processes by which professionalized service organizations not tied to broader social movements might nonetheless facilitate rather than hinder structural explanations of inequality among their clients? Using ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and analysis of art and writing by young adults experiencing homelessness, I investigate the prevalence of structural explanations of poverty among clients at a large homeless youth service organization. I find that the organization’s liberal assimilationist narratives about “youth” facilitate more critical analyses of poverty and inequality among homeless participants. As the organization’s public-facing communications emphasize the positive meanings of youth to assert clients’ deservingness, homeless clients leverage the organization’s assimilationist discourse to advance more radical critiques of the systems that oppress them. Building on scholarship about the medicalization of homelessness and the nonprofit industrial complex, this case study demonstrates how multiple ideologies and practices spanning the continuum from repressive to mobilizing can take hold within a single organization, and by extension, the nonprofit service industry.

Beyond 'Literacy Crusading': Neocolonialism, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and Possibilities of Divestment

Beyond 'Literacy Crusading': Neocolonialism, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and Possibilities of Divestment

Plantation urbanism: Legacy, property and policing in Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville, Kentucky is one of many cities throughout the Southern United States that still celebrates the brutal legacy of plantation culture. From an economy dominated by the plantation dynasties of bourbon, horse racing and tobacco, to the centering of bourbon whiskey as a culturally significant economic development engine and tourist attraction, to the city’s flagship event, the Kentucky Derby containing elements of a memorial pageant to antebellum plantation regimes and their culture. This paper documents the legacy and consequences of urban redevelopment by Louisville’s plantation dynasties in the Russell neighborhood and the connections between investment, surveillance and policing in the murder of Breonna Taylor. We will define the concepts of plantation capitalism and plantation urbanism as components of racial capitalism and monopoly capitalism that originated and are kept alive in the Southern US. This paper will explore how the legacy of plantation regimes reproduces a particular social management system that reinvents itself through economic diversification in real estate, planning, policing and surveillance, that we call plantation urbanism. The Russell neighborhood in Louisville is currently experiencing massive investment through public and private funding. We use examples of how private developers launch nonprofits to access philanthropic capital, and state support of private investment to illustrate how plantation dynasties hoard resources and exercise political control over time. This paper will document the historical and material forces of plantation regimes that drive state-led gentrification to create the unhousing of Black residents and the interlocking relationships of institutional actors in that process of government, philanthropy, the nonprofit industrial complex and the police.

Free-Riders in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex: The Problem of Flexitarianism

Abstract Social movements have traditionally viewed free-riders as a problem for effective mobilization, but under the influence of the nonprofit industrial complex, it is possible that movements actively facilitate their presence. Free-riders become an economic resource to professionalized movements seeking to increase wealth and visibility in the crowded social movement space by discouraging meaningful attitude or behavior change from their audiences and concentrating power among movement elites. Actively cultivated free-riding is exemplified by the professionalized Nonhuman Animal rights movement which promotes flexitarianism over ethical veganism despite its goal of nonhuman liberation. Major social-psychological theories of persuasion in addition to 44 studies on vegan and vegetarian motivation are examined to illustrate how free-rider flexitarianism is at odds with stated goals, thereby suggesting an alternative utility in flexitarianism as a means of facilitating a disengaged public.

Hope and Despair in the Queer Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Research Article| April 01 2020 Hope and Despair in the Queer Nonprofit Industrial Complex Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer PoliticsBeam, MyrlMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 236 pp. Margot Weiss Margot Weiss Margot Weiss is associate professor of American studies and anthropology and coordinator of queer studies at Wesleyan University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2020) 26 (2): 343–345. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141886 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Margot Weiss; Hope and Despair in the Queer Nonprofit Industrial Complex. GLQ 1 April 2020; 26 (2): 343–345. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141886 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Picando Piedras: Picking at the Rocks of Social Justice under the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

ABSTRACT In the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) is the contemporary manifestation of social service provision in the United States. The question of how activists persist in their work despite the structural barriers the NPIC imposes on social justice organizations has yet to be given a full examination. This grounded theory study relies on interviews with people working in social justice nonprofits and presents themes of survival and critique when working within this structure. The findings indicate that belief in change, personal experiences with social justice, and a non-traditional view of self-care contribute to navigating social justice work in the nonprofit sector.

Radio Adelaide: A case study of community radio change and resilience within the non-profit industrial complex

Abstract The Australian community radio sector is a rich source of information for researchers, activists and practitioners working to support and develop community broadcasting worldwide. With a 46-year history, it represents an established and enduring third tier of independent local broadcasting with over 450 non-profit radio services legislated to provide opportunities for community engagement and participation. This article focuses on the political, economic and institutional factors involved in a change of ownership and management of Radio Adelaide, the country’s longest running community radio station. The process illustrates the impact and effects of the non-profit industrial complex as stations struggle for financial survival and independence in an increasingly competitive, corporatized environment. It is a case study which questions the contemporary understanding of a strong and resilient sector, highlighting themes to inform community media research and practice internationally.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex's Role in Imposing Neoliberalism on Public Education

Essay explores the Non-Profit Industrial Complex’s (NPIC) substantive role in imposing neoliberalism on public education. Using the experiences in Los Angeles specifically, it looks at the connections between foundations and 501(c)3s that share and advance an agenda of deregulation, austerity, and privatization. Additionally, the essay examines to how privately managed charter schools aren't just part of the NPIC, but are the primary weapon in the push for privatization. Lastly, the paper looks at the pushback from communities, and some alternatives to the NPIC with movements like the demands for ethnic studies, that are genuinely grassroots, in contradistinction to the NPIC.

The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States by Craig Willse

Reviewed by: The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States by Craig Willse Ashley Mog THE VALUE OF HOMELESSNESS: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. By Craig Willse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. In The Value of Homelessness, Craig Willse brings together interviews with people who work in homeless services organizations in urban centers alongside careful historical tracing and his own experiences in homelessness activism. Through this study, he critically implores researchers in the social sciences to ask different questions about homelessness. Rather than using individuals as endemic of the problem of the unsheltered, he challenges us throughout this book to denaturalize the construction of the housing system and the racial capitalism that undergirds our current neoliberal milieu. He moves through a historicization of homelessness from 1930s New Deal programs to the current moment and argues that there are specific apparatuses that "produce and distribute housing insecurity and deprivation" (22): social science; social service programs; public policy at local, state, and federal levels, and federal governmental arms that are concerned with homelessness, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Social services and social sciences shape the conversations about and resources allocated for the phenomenon of homelessness—both have been actively involved in creating the definitions that led to current governance around unsheltered populations. This governance directs what he calls "surplus life" through a proliferation of required expertise and economic imperatives. Surplus life is partially managed through a portion of the nonprofit industrial complex specifically focused on homeless services. Willse argues that these organizations work by gaining "financial backing through [a] promise to reduce the negative impact of those neoliberal surplus lives on social and economic order" (49-50). HUD additionally manages surplus life through "the databasing of homelessness" that requires programs to meet very specific requirements to receive funding (109), which then actually prevents the kinds of assistance that would alleviate the conditions of poverty that lead to homelessness. What masquerades as "helping" and "good" for unsheltered people is largely funded by organizations and governments that want the administration and obscurity of the social inequality created as a byproduct of reaping the benefits of racial capitalism. Through his careful critiques of the ways sociology has specifically theorized and methodologically conceptualized "homelessness," he asks anyone invested in social science to question the "limits of doing good" (177) through research. For example, he talks about the ways that Institutional Review Boards consider "ethical" research—as researchers we are asked to take special consideration of vulnerable populations. Doing this, while undoubtedly important, also has a universalizing effect on principles of protection: people in positions of power have a disproportionate access to shape their own narratives because "mechanisms developed to measure the ethics of research are embedded in the very institutional and governmental complexes we are trying to study" (178). How does one conduct research within an institution when that research's potential is to question the production of inequality by that very institution? Ultimately, he asks academics to think through our complicity in systems that lead to governing marginalized and vulnerable [End Page 89] populations. Questioning the "accepted configurations" (55) that we have of housing and homelessness crises, will enable us to move beyond accepting homelessness and housing insecurity as given, for example. As Willse argues, this could "undermine" rather than "underwrite" (182) the knowledge production that sustains surplus life. Ashley Mog Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 Mid-America American Studies Association