Employment endnotes

Sorry for the lack of updates in the past months - I have been incredibly busy. As some of you may know, I was let go from my foreclosure organizing position at Housing Action Coalition of Rhode Island (HAC) at the end of last month. A week later Rosalina, the organizer at RI Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) I had been working with on this effort was told there was no work for her there anymore, and that her position was being ended immesiately due to doubts about future funding.

So ended our time in the belly of the housing nonprofit beast in Rhode Island.

There is a long story here, full of lies, betrayal and intrigue, and if anyone is interested in hearing the particulars I would be happy to share. For the purposes of this post I want to discuss a little about what I learned about how the nonprofit industry operates in this state.

A little context first: HAC is an extremely small nonprofit - the only staff while I was there was myself and my boss, Brenda Clement. Brenda is a lobbyist, meaning that she spent most of her time at the General Assembly talking with legislators about bills she (or the people paying her) wanted passed and negotiating to make that happen. RI Coalition for the Homeless is significantly larger and has much more funding. A third nonprofit, RI Housing, acted as a major funder and partner to both of these agencies.

Nonprofits are self-interested
At both HAC and RICH, funding and alliances with "power holders" (politicians, bankers and mortgage brokers, basically anyone who has a lot of money and decision-making power in this system) governed the actions that they supported and decisions they made. For example, after a protest against Bank of America by the Tenant and Homeowner Association (the Association) Rosalina and I had helped organize, my boss complained about being criticized by her connections at the bank. She made it clear that, while BofA maybe be putting people out of their homes, they also gave money to housing groups and had power in the General Assembly and so were not a good target.

A related example: when the Association demanded accountability from State Senator Juan Pichardo because of his refusal to sponsor a bill they wanted put forward (after he said he would and spoke at one of their events), my coworker and myself were told that we were not allowed to support this action and (to quote my boss) "Juan can handle his constituents". That is to say, the Association was a problem and needed to be controlled, and HAC's support was based entirely on whether its members wanted what it wanted. When Juan saw an e-mail I had forwarded for the event from my e-mail account at work, he contacted my boss and I was let go from my job a month earlier than I had expected.

They are disconnected from the people they supposedly serve/advocate for/etc.
The board of HAC is made up of Community Development Corporations, the board of RICH is largely shelter providers to people who are homeless, and Rhode Island Housing has BANKS on its board. All three of their executive directors are white even though the people that use their services are generally lower-income people of color. Simply in regards to foreclosure work, I'm sure that none of these people has ever been in danger of losing their home because they couldn't afford to pay a mortgage.

What is the role of the affected community, then? In this case, while my boss was negotiating a harmful compromise bill with bankers and mortgage lenders, she did everything in her power to keep the Association members unaware and out of these talks. People who are at risk of losing their homes are not in control, no more than people who are homeless control RICH. What the community was supposed to do was create photo-ops and make some noise while the real power politics played out behind closed doors.

These observations have been based largely upon my own personal experiences with two particular nonprofits. In that sense, I make no claim that this is how all nonprofits work. In fact, at least one of the community-based groups in Providence which has been taking on the organizing work (DARE - Direct Action for Rights and Equality) is also incorporated as a nonprofit. However, I do think that we need to consider how these characteristics that I noted in this post are present in nonprofits in general. There is an existing critique of nonprofits and the nonprofit model from the radical left, and I think it's crucial that we think about these things more critically. From my own standpoint, I graduated college wanting to go into the nonprofit sector because I had read a lot of materials in classes about how NGO's (non-governmental organizations) were a growing alternative to private companies and more connected with communities. I would imagine many young people in my generation, especially those who went to liberal arts colleges, were given a similar story. It's important that young radicals think critically about everything that presents itself as an alternative to the system, especially when they are offering money.