In the nonprofit sector, we have this sometimes annoying little thing where we frequently talk about how “our job is to work ourselves out of our jobs.” In other words, when you are engaged in mission-based work, the idea is that if you are successful in achieving your mission, someday, the actual organization, as it exists, should become irrelevant.
For those of us who have made a long careers in the sector, it can be easy to roll your eyes at this kind of thought process because many of the missions that we are engaged in are SO needed and SO complex that they don’t realistically have any kind of end coming in our lifetimes. For example, if you could work at a food bank for 50 years, bearing witness to only growing depths of poverty in your community, and because you exist in the wider context of the American economy, it can be very easy to become jaded about it as you see that it’s all getting WORSE in those 50 years, in terms of needs. Or if you’re like me, and you work in feminist related nonprofit work, and you see misogyny as string as ever, gender policing at an all time high, and the overturning of Roe versus Wade, you may also have an overwhelming sense of backsliding and battles lost some days.
Basically, more often than not, our work is so daunting that as much as we want to, and as much as we’re “supposed to,” we can’t conceive of a future where our agencies would actually shutter because the issues were working on, have gotten so much better.
And all of this whole ramble that I’m offering here is only just to say how beautiful it is to get a chance to see a mission that actually was able to be worked out out of existence in my lifetime.
Seriously, when it comes to the breakthroughs that we have made related to HIV and AIDS, this is a truly incredible moment as a people… We really should be celebrating this. Not necessarily the singular or shuttering of the organization here, but just the full story of how medicine has advanced to rise to the challenge of this particular virus, and persisting in doing so in the face of so much bigotry that comes with HIV. Despite all of these obstacles, we’re figuring out the fucking cure… Like we’re really doing it y’all. Well I’m not, but brilliant scientists are 😆
I’m old enough to remember all of the news of the early 90s where AIDS was so stigmatized, seen as a complete death sentence, and so feared mongered. I viscerally remember the fear.
But now? This shit is beautiful. Gotta bask in the victories.
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