Nonprofits “organize,” but foundations serve as the organizational vehicle for wealthy people’s money. They pay almost no taxes in exchange for supporting, usually through grants, the various organizations that Go Out Into The World and Do The Work of advancing the policies or public works that the foundation supports. But the foundations and their “grantees” are functionally very similar in the faith they place in the elite to fix the world’s problems. No matter how progressive the receiving nonprofit proclaims to be—or how committed to “organizing”—the larger philanthropy ecosystem will bind the nonprofit to its wealthy patrons (and their often very vague demands), unless the nonprofit relies solely on grassroots donations. Meeting the needs of millionaires is not easy. When their needs are vague and undefined—or poorly thought through and unsuited to the needs of local communities—it requires labor and stress (and ulcers) to keep them satisfied. It also requires a great deal of exploitation: the people working the hardest at nonprofits often make the least. People will work themselves to literal sickness chasing vague grant imperatives and using their dedication to The Work as a justification for their physical and mental burnout. The treatment of workers in the nonprofit industry is perhaps its most disturbing feature, and it often goes unnoticed by larger society. There is a confusion, a frustration, that arises when you don’t see society changing at the scale or speed with which you’d like it to, especially when that “change”—however vaguely defined—is your literal job. But as long as nonprofits exist, it will be this way. This is because nonprofits exist to manage the contradictions of capitalism.
Tarence Ray, A Way Out
