#ngoization

[marxandmusings]

From NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects, Edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor”

Are they really colonial? 🧐

[gradesky]

Michael Novick of the Anti-Racist Action network has been around a long time, and has a list of bona fides pages long. He has seen many an organization come and go, and he believes that the 501(c)3/NGO/not-for-profit corporate model has been the death of popular movements and authentic resistance. “Such organizations vacuumed up the flotsam and jetsam of the resistance movements of the 60s and 70s, gave them paid staff positions, and neutered them. This was true long before the emergence of the current round of the ‘anti-war movement’. It happened to the women’s movement and the Black and Chicano liberation struggles as far back as the 70s. In the late 80s, most of the anti-racist projects that sprung up to deal with the first wave of Neo-Nazism went the board and staff, grant-writing model, with the result that they lost both their militancy and their anti-establishment spark, making them politically irrelevant. Most went out of business as other vogues took precedence with funders.” There is no doubt that this madness must stop, and yet, where is the “anti-war movement” here when we need them most? Not reading this article, for sure, even though it was written for those who would attack just-cause critics of the “anti-war movement”, those who lament that they have no other funding options and who can bring themselves to rationalize taking blood money, those who put their own names and careers ahead of the people they purportedly represent—and for all those who recognize this hypocrisy and want something more, something better. Though it is difficult and may require sacrifice and even dismantling this corrupted system, we must look at how our movements come to dance with the devil, and turn into the very things that we once so despised

Charles Shaw, “The Gate Keepers of the So-Called Left”

[redwoman1492-blog]

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

Arundhati Roy

[muzahmat]

Most large-funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are, in turn, funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place. Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt? It’s a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators. In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They’re what botanists would call an indicator species. It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation. In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework, more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context. Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the… people of those… countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian,… another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese [person]…in need of the [Westerners] help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and reaffirm the achievements, the comforts and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization. They’re the secular missionaries of the modern world. Eventually–on a smaller scale, but more insidiously–the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into negotiation. It depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with local peoples’ movements that have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be activists in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing some immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they’re at it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts. The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

 Public Power in the Age of Empire by Arundhati Roy

[journeybyafricans]

Africa: The NGO-Ization of Resistance

NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. A hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization…

Africa: The NGO-Ization of Resistance was originally published on Journey By Africans

[redforgender]

Everyday Acts of Solidarity and Mutual Support

What stands out for me are the everyday acts of solidarity and mutual support.  Support networks are crucial as in Haiti there is always a crisis but just the energy needed to live and work through the week is tremendous and sometimes overwhelming. The…

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[veinsofcoal-blog-blog]

Getting ready for Haiti

For eight weeks this summer I will be working as the social media and outreach intern for the 501(c)3 non-profit organization Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL), started by the inspiring Reed alumna Sasha Kramer. SOIL uses methods of ecological sanitation (EcoSan) to mitigate the ongoing sanitation crisis in Haiti that was only worsened by the 2010 earthquake. One of their most promising projects is the implementation of EcoSan toilets that turn human waste into much needed compost for sustainable agriculture.

Haiti came into the international limelight after the earthquake, and it seemed that every journalist and pundit felt entitled to present the public with their half-baked theories about why poverty persists in Haiti. International commentators have gazed at the Haitian poor with a mixture of disgust, pity, and fascination for centuries. In a 2010 New York Times article, David Brooks suggests that “Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.” And although he does recognize that Haiti has “a history of oppression, slavery, and colonialism,” he points out that “so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well.” His analysis, like too many others, blames the victim and clearly ignores the particular history of colonization, slavery that has brutalized so many Haitians, starting with the indigenous population that was decimated by the Spanish in the mid-sixteenth century. Brooks cites the “progress” of Barbados without explaining who is benefiting from that “progress.” Barbados has been hospitable to tourism and transnational capital, but their economy still favors accumulation of capital with the elite classes and the benefits of tourism are not necessarily distributed equitably. It is not justified for arrogant observers like Brooks to patronizingly define universal “progress” and dictate what that should mean to Haitians. 

Á la Arturo Escobar, I have serious reservations about mainstream development practices and the role and efficacy of NGOs and non-profits working in marginalized communities like in Haiti. Through working in Tanzania, Venezuela, and Saint Kitts, I have learned many lessons about community organizing and the importance of critically assessing the many representations and discourses of “progress” and the “other” that we have inherited as a part of our cultural milieux.

How can NGOs and non-profits work together with Haitians while avoiding the superiority complex that Brooks’ comments so exemplify? So many organizations flooded into the country after the earthquake with good intentions and often little historical awareness and certainly not a nuanced analysis of the politics of representation. Although many of these NGOs have been largely ineffective, it is not fair to dismiss the work of all organizations as examples of “NGO-ization,” the buzzword that refers to the trend of NGO proliferation amidst a hubristic Western view of development and a misunderstanding of power relations. 

Disappointment with many failed NGOs in Haiti can lead to cynical inaction. But we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to supporting NGOs like SOIL. My education at Reed and my experiences abroad have taught me to be endlessly critical, but this is different from being cynical. SOIL is an established organization with a relatively large impact in a high-stakes community. They have a large Haitian staff and they are demonstrating the ability to use ecological sanitation practices to provide sustainable livelihoods for thousands of people. Progress in such a place is slow because of the many historical obstacles imposed on the island, but persistent organizations like SOIL deserve recognition and support despite a popular tendency to have only short term memory when it comes to analyzing poverty. Each international project that I have been involved with has changed my perspective on development work and added layers of complexity to my praxis, and I have no doubt that I will learn so much from my experience with SOIL. As a social media and outreach intern, I can’t wait to add nuance to their public image that will reflect the complexities of international alliances while promoting the great successes that SOIL has already seen with EcoSan methods.