How Nonprofits Stifle Meaningful Change, and Why
A review & discussion of the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
Initially, I picked up a copy of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex expecting to read about how nonprofit organizations exploit the passion of their employees and volunteers, and push them to work far harder than is healthy or sustainable for them.
In my own writing, I am obsessed with how organizations feed off our culture’s hatred of “laziness” and manipulate workers’ emotions in order to keep them grinding to the point of exhaustion. And as an academic with a partner who has worked for numerous nonprofits, I know that labor exploitation doesn’t begin or end in the for-profit world. I have witnessed in my own activist work how compassion can be used against you, to erode your boundaries and keep you agreeable and compliant even when the group loses sight of its original cause.
I did not find the validation I was seeking in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Instead, I found something far more important: a multidisciplinary, well-researched explanation of how nonprofits and the foundations that fund them often ground political progress to a halt, stifle revolutionary movements, and warp compassion from a lifelong cause, into a self-serving career.
