I am not much of a charity giver. I don’t generally write checks to orgs.
My thing is to keep extra on hand to help a mom out, buying diapers at the end of the month or picking up the remainder of a grocery bill when the person ahead of me has over-shopped and runs out of cash. It comes from knowing that small relief when someone steps into help just a little at the right time. Haven’t we all been at a crowded checkout and something happens to our credit card? I have been both the recipient of these small mercies and also the giver. It is a kind of mutual aid for the universe that so many people engage in, responding to needs as they come up, and also allowing ourselves the good fortune of having someone take care of us occasionally and feeling like “Wow, people are good!” which always makes everything feel right with the world.
It isn’t always easy to accept help, and often - when the need is great and the feeling is ripe desperation, when the balance of giving and giver is off - it is humiliating, bottomless and riddled with shame. But in less intense times, it’s worth flexing that muscle just a bit, letting people help and support, because we can’t have any kind of equity without it.
But I get that giving money to orgs is a solid way for folks with more money than time to do something beneficial for the community, right? We know nonprofits are dispatched to look after the really complex difficult components of our communities and they are only able to do that through our support, right?
I worry about how money gets spent in non-profits. Which is why I was excited to read the chapter The Non-Profit Industrial Complex in Freddie deBoer’s new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. I’m liking the book a lot and learning from it, but this chapter has special resonance. DeBoer reminds us that many people who give to charities are more interested in not having their money go to the government. That this is a little bit of “sticking it the man,” even though they might actually be “the man.”
The rich are often accused of - I make this point in my book (out in less than a week!) - not involving themselves in public life. They take private helicopters and jets so why would they want their money to go to roads and highways, something that wouldn’t benefit them? DeBoer believes that nonprofits can drain money from public coffers and absolve the government of responsibility to its citizens.
Oh man, this resonates.
“All of that money that’s therefore not taxed is money that fails to end up on the government balance sheet,” deBoer writes about the money going to orgs and not to taxes, “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.”
This makes so much sense to me when I think about how many people depend on charities to get their food.
When I ran a small pantry in the front of my house, the first year of the pandemic, people were sending me money. If they got a check from the government and didn’t need it, they cashed it and gave it to me. This is a kind of mutual aid. They got something they didn’t need and passed it along to me to provide food for people who struggled. It was community-minded. I was not a non-for-profit, had no status and was clear that I couldn't offer tax breaks for the donations. I also had a very clear mandate that every cent, every dime that people gave us, went to buy food for people to access in the community. (I knew Costco intimately) There was no overhead, no infrastructure, no marketing, no website (only a FB group- can we talk about Facebook as a community organizing tool?)
But there also weren’t staffers whose job it is to make sure all the organizational work has been accomplished. There was me and the integrity of the effort rested on me as I stumbled around clumsily trying to run this thing that was truly running me. The only accountability was whatever I put in place. I guess if I wanted to go out and buy a shitload of Jimmy Choo’s with donation money I could have, so in lots of ways people funded me personally to do this work. But what vaporous thing did I give off that made me trustworthy and how do people assess whether a non-profit is trustworthy and how does that factor in to how they spend their money? Are people even looking at the books of non-profits? Probably not. It all runs on the fumes of trust. And deBoer underscores this and says no, that transparency is not the industry standard and that the simple, technology-infused ways for people to give quickly - pushing a button - have made accountability even more remote.
There was no way our pantry could continue on infinitely and it was never meant to. But I could take risks, switch up policy, move quickly. On our FB pantry group we, together as a group, trouble shot problems. I remember one time, some people came to the pantry and took all the meat I had in the fridge. (They might have been hoarding but also could’ve had many people to feed) A woman who went home without getting meat was beside herself, the situation triggered all her issues around scarcity, poverty and being left behind. We talked it through in the group and together, decided to do regular foods at the fridge 24/7 with six refills a day, but meat shopping was relegated to the freezers on my side porch by appointment. This calmed everything down. A bigger operation couldn’t have plugged into people’s issues and made a fast pivot. As Deboer points out, individuals can side step having to report to boards or change the whole direction of a big cumbersome overloaded ship. What I lacked in infrastructure I made up for in agility. I might not have been a paid staff person, but the combination of camaraderie and “something to do” during the pandemic sure helped us get through a tough time, and that has a lot of personal value.
What I learned - and I learned a lot about poverty - is that everyone wants to give and no one wants to be given to. Even people in deep deep poverty took opportunities to share part of their foods they picked up with other people, or took extra food to drop off to a shut in elderly neighbor. The unhoused often help each other, creating encampments where food and provisions can be shared. ( Unfortunately this also applies to drug use) Truly, for so many people who came to our pantry, they were not just people taking, but also giving. I am in many FB groups offering free and food pantry/bank updates and often, people are giving up what little they have for others. It makes people feel good to give. It makes people feel like shit to receive 100% of the time. This to me has been proof that when people accuse the poor of constantly taking, sucking the system dry, that this is just bullshit, and the opposite of what actually happens in real life.
Mutual aid is of course better than charity. But it represents a kind of floppy ideal. Mutual aid almost defies organization. It’s something we all do naturally - giving free flute lessons to the kid next door and mom pays with eggs from their chickens and veg from their garden, is a great example. But mutual aid happens when social capital is high - social capital is the amount of relationships people have in their communities, how much trust they have in their communities to care for them, and the value of how those relationships can be leveraged to help and be helped.
People who often get into trouble with the law or CPS, often do so, because they don’t have these networks. My work with mothers in the CPS system has taught me that the more alone a parent is, the more likely they are to be duking it out inside the system. I don’t have research to back that up. It is purely anecdotal, but when people are in danger of losing their kids, they are often fighting without anyone near them with resources. Being alone in the world makes people vulnerable to problems and then when the problem hits, they have fewer solutions to access.
In fact one of the foster kids we had for awhile had a mom in just this spot. She moved to Vegas at the behest of her sister and then they had a falling out. Alone, navigating Vegas, she ended up paying rent to someone who scammed her and she was arrested for squatting. Had she had supportive family who could let her stay with them, rent a bedroom for a small fee, or even better, lived for free while she saved up for her own place, she might not have ever been in a situation where she could be scammed. Being alone, outside of people with money, resources and some power, is all by itself a predictor for hardship, I think.
In many ways, the pantry offered people more than food. It connected them to other people who had resources.
Of course, non profits do work that supports our communities and brings resources to people. But do they enable the government from taking care of its own people?
This is a question I ask myself a lot. By the time our pantry closed, I was pretty sure that all hunger relief work was simply a way to enable to government to not do its job. I felt this strongly enough that for a while I distanced myself from all food giving, including our wildly popular 100 Dinners, where our cookbook group cooked 200 home-cooked wholesome meals for people in the community to pick up. I just couldnt do it anymore. Deboer writes about this extensively. “...non-profit dollars are almost always distributed in a such a way as to distinguish some select group as specially deserving of their generosity, as an act which inherently creates an applied class of the undeserving. And this undermines a core tenet of left philosophy, which is that basic human needs such as food, shelter, education and healthcare are not privileges that must be earned but rights that accrue to each of us by dint of being human.”
When I think of non-profits, I think of someone who saw a need and decided to fill it. I love that about non-profits so much. Think: the mother whose child is killed by a drunk driver and starts a group like MADD, as a way to change peoples hearts and minds, create new legislation, and prevent other parents from having to endure the same terrible experience. This mom couldn’t have made the difference she made trying to become a cog in the wheel of government. Non-profits helped her do this important work. She didn’t have the power to lobby congress without the support of a group of well-funded people who have had similar experiences that could crescendo into a movement.
Non-profits have to do two things, according to Freddie’s book, 1) do their core work (like feeding people) and 2) make enough money to fund that work. This makes sense. I like how he talks about how this is balanced in orgs, where sometimes working for donors becomes top of mind as opposed to working for the people the org serves. Who do we serve is a big double-tongued beast. Charities are at the mercy of two masters.
A wrote a lot in my book about the centrist nature of organizations like food banks, who are quite good at getting food out to people, but kind of miserable at advocating for the end of hunger. I mean, if the board of a food bank is made up of executives from Walmart or Foster Farms, they probably won’t advocate politically for better unions, better salaries, better work conditions, more responsibility for climate issues. In the case of Big Food, those company execs who sit on boards often get their surplus products into food banks and schools, setting taste preferences (away from whole foods) in the next generation of kids, while reaping untold billions in unpaid for marketing.
DeBoer concedes that people deserve to be paid for their work, but acknowledges the dilemma, that nonprofits have “influence beyond their numbers, they can direct the course of broad movements that should rightfully be led by volunteer organizations, and they pull those movements toward incrementalism and working within the system, regardless of the radicalism of their employees.“
We know that things get watered down in the non-profit world. Maybe they are better suited to messaging the community and addressing hearts and minds? Maybe the radical activists need their edges and curves rounded and softened a bit to make the message more palatable to the public? Or maybe non-profits have to tap into the more over-arching issues for their communities, getting bolder, and more activist in their positioning, more politically engaged? Maybe we should all strike so the government might actively take care of its most vulnerable people?
Of course possibly the biggest problem with non-profits is that they are largely run by people who don’t always represent the communities they serve. Why are nonprofits led by people who are 80% white and what would happen if the people who are served could be mentored and supported and maybe even paid, to not just work for the nonprofit, but lead it? How would that change how communities flourished?
DeBoer has me thinking about all of this.
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ENDNOTES: Meth Lunches is out on Tuesday. pre-orders still count toward first week sales. If you can, please grab a copy from your favorite bookseller.
Also, Freddie deBoer’s substack is always excellent and you can grab his book here.
Thank you, as always for reading. xo
Another great read! You are so insightful about hunger, so called charity and being poor. As a person who was on the government side for years, this year has taught me volumes about the recipient side -- for instance: A sweet medically fragile sister of my son-in-law and her teen came to live with us. We took them from poor living conditions and health care. Long story kinda' short, the teen, who is non-binary is living with a non-traditional family with 4 little children. Child Welfare was called on the family as many people use that as a weapon against friends, family and neighbors in the less equitable areas. One of the moms called me hysterical that CW was going to take her kids and the teen away. I told her to calm down and one-by-one we solved all the issues and documented them so when Child Welfare arrived, it was a short visit and the case was closed. All the adults in the family (there are 3 in a polyamorous situation) sobbed with joy because "we knew what to do " and they didn't have to worry anymore. Who knew? There are things my middle class mind thinks everyone knows -- but they don't, do they? Also -- Sunday is my birthday and my gift to myself was my pre-order of your book and I just cannot wait to receive it!!! Love to you and yours! Keep writing!
This is so good and painfully accurate