The Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Who gets to speak out?
Non-profits have the sheen of goodness, service, moral uprighteousness to them; they are often above critique. And, usually, they should be. But over the past few years, I have become to think of Cleveland foundations and non-profits as sometimes as malicious and destructive as beneficent, and, not coincidentally, I have come to see them as much more powerful than I thought-—perhaps the most powerful players in Cleveland, as well as in many other Rust Belt cities with deep pockets of old money and wealthy foundations.
Some occasions that led me to these shifts in view:
1.) When I started Belt Magazine, particularly early on, when we were often looking to be responsive to recent news, I would reach out to people who had strong, smart views about breaking stories. I would reach out and to commission a piece from them: “Would you write up your point of view in 800 or so words, and we would publish on Belt and pay you?” I asked. Some of the topics I looked for editorials on: sin taxes, Q funding, the demographics of Cleveland (are young white millennials really moving into the city in significant numbers?), the Tamir Rice shooting, the consent decree, funding for the RNC, the Greater Cleveland Partnership.
I was turned down four of every five times, for pretty much the same reason: “I am worried I would get in trouble with work.” “I am not allowed to, given my (non-profit) job.” “I cannot say these things publicly for fear of retribution.” One person, not employed by a non-profit, told me that if we ran a deep dive/expose on the Greater Cleveland Partnership I wanted to run that “Belt would have to fold immediately.”
Oof! Naive me, not employed by a non-profit (okay, at the time I was, by Oberlin College, but barely, and academia does, when it comes down to it, allow more freedom of expression, apparently) was taken aback, time after time, by these responses, by the fear, by the (understandable) refusal to express what I knew to be deeply held views publicly. Eventually I stopped trying to run editorials about highly charged Cleveland news. I struck out too often.
2.) After the 2016 election, I read an absurdly large number of stupid analyses of how “Trump won the Rust Belt” (which he didn’t, but whatever). The only one that really made sense to me, that I keep thinking about, and forwarding to others, is this one. And within it another way tell the story, with non-profits playing a starring role. If the link is tl;dr:
Keep reading to see how this led to support for Trump (I find some of this analyses flawed, but much surprisingly persuasive).
3.) Randy Cunningham’s book, Democratizing Cleveland: The Rise and Fall of Community Organizing in Cleveland, 1975-1985, which makes a convincing case that non-profits, particularly CDCs, basically bought out community activists. As he puts it:
These days, many people wonder if the U.S. is a functioning democracy; let’s dial that down to the local level: is Cleveland? If foundations and powerful non-profits control the city as much if not more than the mayor and elected officials? We cannot vote for who serves on the boards of the larger, more powerful foundations, nor call for their removal. We can vote for the city council and mayor, sure, but in the 2017 mayoral election, Frank Jackson won by receiving a total of 35,506 votes. That’s about 9% of the population of the city. (There were 56K-some votes cast; less than 15% of the total population of Cleveland voted in the last election.)
It’s a problem, and one I will be addressing in more depth as this chronicle unfolds (maybe this is one long goodbye letter, given all the bridges I may be burning.) I hope there will be a chorus of others doing the same. Here’s to people with critiques of non-profit power being taken more seriously. Here’s to well-informed people who care about the city feeling free to speak their minds without fear of losing their jobs, told not to tweet or post on Facebook about this or that subject, or in any other way reprimanded. Because the free exchange of ideas should be the ground upon which we trod, the underlying assumption, the shoveled walk. Right?
Cleveland Chronicles is a record of life in Cleveland throughout 2019 as filtered through the lens of the chronicler. Please sign up to receive it via email. You can do so for free, or, to support it and/or access the archives, for a small fee. I take posts down from the web after a bit. The frequency is unpredictable; sorry if it seems spammy.