How the Nonprofit Sector Fails Communities

Hi.

My name is Majora Carter.

I am 16 years clean.

I am a recovering executive director.

There. I said it. And by the way, I began saying it soon after I founded the pioneering environmental justice solutions organization called Sustainable South Bronx in 2001.

In short order, I became a grassroots leader with an international profile — a MacArthur Fellow, a TEDtalker. But I had reverse founder syndrome — I soon found myself physically, financially and emotionally drained. Less than five years after I started my organization, I fantasized about leaving but I didn’t know how else I could do the work I loved.

As my profile grew, expectations of my organization remained high, but our funding levels dropped. Sustainable South Bronx had a $300,000 budget gap.

I asked my funders for help. I asked for introductions to new funders, administrative support, or building a fundraising board. I was met with silence, “You really think you need that?” and “I don’t know anyone who would want to be on your board.”

I ended up filling the $300,000 budget gap with paid speaking engagements and consulting work. But it was exhausting.

So what was a fearlessly innovative local Black woman leader who spent all of her professional career working in support of her community to do?

Move on.

I left my organization in 2008 and started my own consulting firm in the hopes that I would be able to support myself and local projects outside the realm that most funders seemed comfortable funding, such as a market-based tech social enterprise.

I had a hunch that with me gone, members of the philanthropic community would come to support Sustainable South Bronx. And they did.

Did I feel let down by the sector I had poured myself into for more than a decade?

Of course I did. But I am not condemning it completely. I would never say that no good work is done by the nonprofit sector. The lives of many individuals are improved by effective programming and the dedicated people who strive to make the world a better place.

However, can we honestly claim that the nonprofit industrial complex values all those who work within it equally?

“I make decent money with good benefits and I have a healthy work-life balance,” says no grassroots organizer ever. But folks who work in philanthropy and at large nonprofit organizations generally can say that.

And all the while, many social issues remain vexing over decades, despite billions of philanthropic dollars spent on charitable causes.

Over time, I have come to realize that the nonprofit industrial complex mostly maintains and enables the problems that it then places itself in a position to manage. And, like all systems in the U.S., it is not immune to the impacts of systemic racism and bias.

I experienced this firsthand as the founder of Sustainable South Bronx because, as is the case with many “grassroots” leaders, especially female leaders of color, there was no separation between the personal and professional. We live and breathe our work, often at great personal expense — physically, emotionally and economically.

For example, the $300,000 budget gap that I had to fill with paid speaking engagements and consulting work? Yes, I did it, but at what cost? I still had all the organizational work to do, while moonlighting to keep the organization afloat. I wore my body out in the process, gained 30 pounds and ended up in the hospital because I ignored my body rebelling against me.

This problem is hardly unique to me. A 2020 report concluded that grassroots organizations led by people of color in climate advocacy received a fraction of the support that white-led organizations received; organizations led by people of color, literally on the front lines, received less than 2% of total grant dollars.

So let’s look at the neighborhoods where the nonprofit industrial complex is entrenched: They are usually identified as poor, low-income or underprivileged communities; they can be inner cities, Native American reservations or even white postindustrial communities where job-creating industry has come and gone.

I refer to these as low-status communities because “status” implies something larger at work, that inequality has become well established and accepted. Low-status communities are places where schools, public health, air and water, parks and trees, food options, incarceration rates and career opportunities are all worse than other parts of the same city. The nonprofit industrial complex has played a consistent role in the management of low-status communities for decades.

In the U.S., low-status communities are generally somewhere on a spectrum with two poles:

1. Poverty Maintenance. This is where you see the concentration of things like government-subsidized, low-income rental housing; health clinics and pharmacies; community centers; and direct service providers. There are very few banks, but plenty of check-cashing stores and pawn shops that will charge you to use what money you may have. Philanthropic and government dollars fuel programs that are designed to manage this poverty and its attendant health and educational issues. Statistically, these communities do not improve. Supposedly well-intentioned programs act as a talent-extraction tool where the most promising young adults are encouraged to grow up and “be somebody,” but to do so somewhere else. Money is being made from all this, but not by local people.

2. Gentrification/Displacement. Here one sees outsiders coming in to change a community to suit their needs and desires. We should note that people in low-status communities want nice things too — that is why they leave, when they can, to experience them.

Regardless of where they are along the poverty maintenance or gentrification/displacement spectrum, low-status communities all have one thing in common: They are places where inequality is assumed by those who live there, and by everyone on the outside looking in.

The nonprofit industrial complex consistently engages in poverty maintenance while, in the meantime, real estate market forces take advantage of vulnerabilities in low-status communities, which leads to the gentrification/displacement dynamic. This is easier to accomplish when decades of talent have been encouraged to migrate out of these neighborhoods.

What if the nonprofit sector looked at low-status communities not as problems that will never be solved, but as impact investors might look at underperforming companies with a great product?

I believe talent retention, the same tool used to grow successful companies, can also be used to build great neighborhoods developed by the people born and raised there and others who want to join in.

I was blessed to play the role of impact investor in my hometown of Hunts Point in the South Bronx. Our goal was to test a simple hypothesis: What would happen if we prototyped projects that made people feel as though they wouldn’t have to move out of their neighborhood in order to live in a better one?

Before my company started testing our theory, the largest gathering spots on our main commercial street, Hunts Point Avenue, were the waiting rooms at pharmacies and health clinics. Not exactly the places where a young person would go in the hopes of meeting their future boo.

When we launched the Boogie Down Grind, a hip-hop-themed café in 2017, it was Hunts Point Avenue’s first dedicated commercial “third place” since I was in high school in the 1980s. We saw over time how community members relished the idea of having a place where they could just hang out at a place for a drink or a bite, or use the space to create content or build networks — it was the type of place that they would normally have to leave the neighborhood to experience.

We also created an event venue called Bronxlandia. The community came out in support when we came under fire from the local community board that repeatedly tried to prohibit Bronxlandia from getting a liquor license.

Our work in Hunts Point seeks to replace the poverty maintenance paradigm that leaves low-status communities open to predatory speculation and bombards them with programs that inhibit community pride as well as local wealth creation.

My hope is that the nonprofit industrial complex will begin to acknowledge that it has played a significant role in perpetuating the negative outcomes that low-status communities habitually experience. This is an essential first step toward pulling these places out from decades of economic stagnation.

If the nonprofit sector rejects the poverty maintenance paradigm, we can make real progress. Instead of plaguing low-status communities with de facto talent-extraction strategies where the most promising young adults are encouraged to go somewhere else, the nonprofit sector could seed conditions for local wealth creation through a talent retention community development strategy, creating a restorative economics approach that could achieve the outcomes we need as a city and as a nation.