Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next)

by Dean Spade

ways. First, elite donors get to run the show. They decide what gets funded and what doesn’t. Nonprofits compete to show that they are the best organization to win a grant. To win, nonprofits want to make their work look legitimate to the funder, which means working according to the funder’s beliefs about the causes of and solutions for a particular problem rather than challenging those beliefs. For example, the funder may favor nonprofits that make sobriety a condition of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter, because rich people would rather believe that homelessness is caused by poor people’s drug use than that it is caused by a capitalist housing market. To win grants, nonprofits also seek to make themselves look “successful” and “impactful,” regardless of whether their work is actually getting to the root causes of the problem. For example, social service nonprofits will often claim they have worked with large numbers of people, even though most of those people did not become less vulnerable or get what they needed from their contact with the nonprofit. Similarly, homelessness service groups sometimes claim that they reduced shelter use, but the people who stopped using the shelter are still unhoused and simply not using the shelter for various reasons. In this way, poverty-focused and homelessnessfocused nonprofits are essentially encouraged to merely manage poor people: provide limited and conditional access to prison-like shelters and make people take budgeting cl...