The Birth of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex w/ Claire Dunning (09/04/23)

Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Phil Rocco and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Claire Dunning about the complex history of how nonprofit organizations became so pervasive in US political life and the issues with how the non-profit system promises to address big, structural problems while at the same time structurally constraining what these groups are and aren't allowed to do.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)

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Claire Dunning 0:01

So much of this is based on the notion, right, the opportunity agenda of the 1960s looms large here, that largely our political economy is sound, and that we just need to get people onto the ladder into it, right? That has been the underlying philosophy, gone by different names, gone by different sort of versions since then. I think nonprofits are wrapped up in the theory of the world that the political economy is basically sound, and we just need to get people into it, rather than saying maybe it's a problem with our political economy, and the racial capitalism that undergirds it.

[ Intro music ]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03

Welcome to the Death Panel. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism, or pre-order Jules' new book coming January, called A Short History of Trans Misogyny, at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. So today, I am here with my co-hosts, Phil Rocco.

Phil Rocco 1:31

Hey.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:31

And Jules Gill Peterson.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:33

Hi.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:33

And we are joined by a wonderful guest that we're very excited to talk to you today about their book. Claire Dunning is a historian of the United States in the 20th century, whose work focuses on poverty, racial capitalism, governance and the nonprofit industrial complex, and is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and History at the University of Maryland College Park. Claire is the author of the book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State published by University of Chicago Press. Claire, welcome to the Death Panel. It is so great to have you here today.

Claire Dunning 2:07

Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:09

First off, I mean, I know we were talking about this before we started, but we all really loved your book. And I really appreciated specifically the way that you think about your work as a historian as using historical analysis to get at and attempt to offer an answer not to a question necessarily about the past, but a forward looking question, as you've put it. And this book really does that in terms of trying to answer a few really important questions about why nonprofits have the role that they have in our political economy. And whether nonprofits, charity, or philanthropy can really, truly achieve racial and economic justice, or if those goals are themselves prevented by the very structure of the state's relationship to these kinds of nonprofit organizations. But it also gets at this question sort of about why the state is the way it is, and how it's constructed. And sort of how these choices and values that we sort of see and maybe take for granted as embedded in the political economy really have a very deep and important historical logic to them. And it's a really sort of careful and diligent history that was also fascinating and really fun to read. And I don't want to jump ahead, though. So just to start us off, for listeners who might not be familiar with the book or your work, can you talk about sort of some of the main arguments in Nonprofit Neighborhoods and elaborate on this idea that I mentioned sort of about how you think of your work and how you think about history in terms of pointing us towards knowledge about the present?

Claire Dunning 3:35

Thank you for all of that. I think I'll start with your second question first. As a reader, I love to know where people come up with their research topics. And we dedicate so much of our lives to these things, I want to know sort of what's the human story behind it. So maybe I'll start offering my own and sort of why I think this history can and hopefully is useful to those of us in the present. After college, I was working at a community foundation for a couple of years. And it was my first exposure really to thinking about the nonprofit sector, as a sector. So we were a grant making entity. I was a sort of junior staff member who got to observe these larger conversations, as my colleagues were grappling with both really sort of nitty gritty questions about budgets and accountability, and how our grant dollars were supporting particular programs, how they were evaluating their programs, etc. But then also grappling with big questions about legacies of racism. It was also the financial crisis. So we were sort of asking questions, at the time, about families going through foreclosure, but also nonprofits in the housing space going through foreclosure and how did we, and how could a foundation support these entities? My colleagues were understandably thinking about the present and the future. And I just fundamentally couldn't understand why this was the set of relationships and what the role of the foundation was, and what the role of the city government, who was often in a lot of these meetings, what their role could or should be in this moment of crisis. And to me, that was a historical question about how we got to this current landscape and why we had both such a rich array of nonprofit organizations and such persistent inequality. And there was some temporal mismatch, right, we were talking in three or five year grant cycles at best. And we're also talking about problems that are decades, centuries in the building. And we're talking about individual small neighborhoods, but also talking about a financial crisis that was enveloping the whole city, country, globe. So there were all these sort of puzzles that came up for me in that work. And again, plenty of people were asking about it in the present. And to me, it felt like a story whose origins lie in the past. So I went to graduate school, decided to write about the history of the nonprofit sector. Several of my advisors sort of had this puzzled look on their face when I said [Beatrice and Phil laughing], I want to write about the nonprofit sector. They said, well, what is that? And I said, well, A, I don't really know and B, it's sort of an awkward term, right, because the nonprofit sector incorporates everything from really small organizations to huge universities and hospitals. So it's an awkward catch-all term. But I think that there's work that we can do to historicize it and understand why these entities are so ubiquitous in our contemporary landscape, particularly in cities, and why we rely on them in moments of crisis and moments of semi-stability to solve public problems, right? Why do we rely on private entities to solve public problems? Why do we rely on small entities to solve big ones? And why do we rely on strategies that haven't really proven useful thus far? So those are sort of the questions animating this. And so it's a story about Boston, which I write about as both sort of on the vanguard of social welfare experimentation during the 20th century, as people sort of looked to the city, and some of its successes and some of its failures as a model to replicate. It was a forerunner in a lot of federal programs. And it's a local story, because I think local stories give us that granularity to understand these big concepts of state and market and nonprofit sector, what that actually looks like. So the book, in brief, sort of locates the origins of what some people call the nonprofit industrial complex or just sort of the growth of the nonprofit sector, in the post World War II period, in a moment where cities were undergoing significant demographic and political economic changes, through deindustrialization and suburbanization, and cities seemed to be in this moment of urban crisis. Scholars have written a lot about this notion of urban crisis and how it was a constructed idea and social and political and economic manifestations. And I sort of write about well, there's also a governance change, and an administrative, and how government functions comes out of this moment of crisis, comes out of urban renewal, where the government for the first time begins to make direct grants from the federal government to local community organizations, and grants that sort of employ and charge these local community groups to facilitate participation in urban renewal, provide some services to people who are being displaced by urban renewal. And what begins as sort of these experiments on the ground, I write about a group called Freedom House in Boston, ends up becoming a blueprint for a wider array of policy and political strategies for dealing with Civil Rights protests, Black activism, long standing structural poverty, and these patterns of grant making. Initially, federal government to local nonprofit, later mediated by different tiers of government, becomes a really popular way of managing crisis and responding to demands. And that popularity, while genuine for a lot of reasons, I argue, really masks a deep inadequacy as a strategy for dealing with structural problems, whose structural origins remain fundamentally intact. That small nonprofit programs, while valuable, while important, right -- this isn't to denigrate the work that they do, or the important, in many ways, life saving role that nonprofit organizations can play -- it's masking a sort of deeper undercurrent of inadequacy. And this has not been a strategy to repair historical and ongoing harms. And so that's sort of the overarch of the book. It goes from the 1950s to the present, traces the sort of rise of what we would call today, social innovation, the notion that private entities can and should respond to our public problems, and argues that we need to think at a bigger, structural level, not just did this organization build 10 units of housing, or provide these after-school programs, or tweak their budgets here or there. But let's try and have a bigger conversation about why these organizations play the roles that they do.

Phil Rocco 10:21

I think, you know, Bea made a very good point here, which I think is that this book really helped me get some clarity on some pretty enduring -- I mean, you're telling a story about one city, but as somebody who's pretty familiar with politics in another city, right, or the city that I currently live in, the -- there's so many resonances, not just because -- I think one line that recurs in your book is that, you know, Boston became a city of contrasts, right? And it seems like every major American city, and certainly ones that experienced this period of like deindustrialization, you know, now can be said to be a city of contrasts, right? You have very wealthy, you know, extremely wealthy downtown, and some neighborhoods, and then many neighborhoods that just feel completely abandoned by the city where there's entrenched levels of poverty. And I think the -- related to that is the sense that where power lies is actually quite difficult to figure out, right? That like it is -- it would be impossible to say that if you want to understand where power lies in a city, that you should go to City Hall, right. That that is often, you know, really not the case. And I think moving to a new city, I'm always like, okay, trying to understand politics. And it evidently is really difficult, not just because journalism has been sort of like hollowed out, which it has been, but also because the journalism that does exist, it's really hard to report on things that go on behind closed doors, with no public meetings, of a very decentralized set of nonprofits, right. And I think that trying to understand sort of why that is, and why, you know, if you look at like the local government's tax rolls in whatever city you're in, you're gonna see tons of exemptions, and the list of exemptions, that tells you where power lies, really. But, you know, I think you historicize that as something that didn't emerge directly because of machinations at the local level, but really, is the product of federal government strategies to try to respond to various iterations of what people called, with various meanings, like "the urban crisis." And so I wonder if you could talk about like, you know, this is really a story about the role of the state in reshaping the role of like the "voluntary" sector to do things the state might otherwise be doing, and where power might otherwise be concentrated in government agencies, the state is actually doing things to change kind of where power lies. So I wonder if you could talk about like, what's the role of the federal government in changing the political landscape of cities?

Claire Dunning 13:10

Thank you for all of that. I think that was one of my biggest surprises. And I think I continue to surprise people by thinking about, we have -- we have this myth in the United States, right, of the independent nonprofit sector, the charitable realm. We call it the "third sector" --

Phil Rocco 13:25

Yes.

Claire Dunning 13:25

[Beatrice laughing] -- as if it is completely independent from state and market, right. And that's no accident that people are invoking and coming up with this term, right? Government money supports nonprofit organizations more than private donations. That fact -- I teach it to my students, I write about it and talk about it with regard to my book. It's a shocking fact. We are so invested in this notion, pro or con, right, that the nonprofit sector is its own thing. But it is constituted by law, right, by political and policy underpinnings. The IRS regulates who is or who is not a nonprofit organization. And the notion that nonprofits are independent, right, the historical record shows us no, not at all, right. Federal policies are creating government programs that are funneling dollars from government pockets into nonprofit organizations and with dollars, right, if you've ever had a grant or applied for one, you know that that grant relationship is one of power and authority, but also of data sharing, of information, of budgets and control, right. So when the policy is coming down, or coming out of Washington, saying all of you community organizations, please apply for funding -- it's a level of surveillance and insight that the government gets to local organizations and the government gets to set priorities around who the recipients are and sort of what cities, what the kinds of programs they're running. Some of the strings attached to these set by government policy include things like representation on boards of directors, who gets hired in what kinds of staff roles. And these administrative strings, they can cut in both directions, right. So in the 1960s, under the War on Poverty, the phrase maximum feasible participation, which under law constituted a requirement that recipient organizations had to employ and hold on their board of directors, people whose lives were directly impacted by the programs that were being funded, right. So primarily, this means people who are low income and people of color. And this requirement is a huge shift in terms of who's getting to make decisions and people on the ground had to fight dramatically for representation on boards. Sometimes these rules increased, in a few occasions, they decreased the role that local folks had over organizations in their own neighborhoods. But all of this is structured by the state, by policy. So what's happening in Boston is a hyperlocal story. But Phil, as you said, right, it's happening all across the country, because organizations like the ones I write about in Boston, are being held to the same standards, are operating under the same sets of guidelines, right, the same kinds of programs and expectations, feedback mechanisms, budgetary requirements, reporting expectations, all of the reams of paperwork that are flowing between nonprofits and their funders, government funders, right, largely that I'm talking about, that's a level of sort of standardization that is enveloping the nonprofit sector at a particular moment of its growth, right. And so in many ways, the policies that are coming out in the 1960s, and then continue to expand in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, etc., are a standardizing precedent that is actually encouraging the growth of the nonprofit sector. This is a moment when new organizations are being founded to take advantage of government programs that are offering to foot the bill. And that's a significant, sort of in many ways, a radical opportunity, that here is a chance for government dollars to reach communities that have traditionally been excluded from it. And on the one hand, that's a deeply radical moment. But it's also one that quite purposefully hides the presence of government in these private organizations. It's a way of circumventing white supremacist tiers of government by getting around exclusionary political systems, but it's also a way of masking government, by sort of emphasizing the notion that private is better, private is more responsive, in ways that it absolves the government of responsibility, even as they're really present in it. And it's that sort of complex landscape, I think, of where public and private are intersecting in ways that are both democratic and anti-democratic, and the presence of the state with these private organizations. It's messy and complicated. And to me, that's what makes this work fascinating and important to sort of tease out those various lines of, there's no immediate good guys and bad guys, if we will, right. It's sort of these complex processes responding to an unequal landscape. But the state is so deeply present here. And nonprofit organizations are both simultaneously expanding state capacity, right, the ability for local groups to implement programs of their own design on public dollars, is an absolute game changer, particularly in marginalized communities. And these relationships, right, they are appended to the state, and they lose a lot of control when they accept these kinds of grant dollars. So it sort of cuts both ways.

Jules Gill-Peterson 18:46

And I wonder, maybe before we move towards sort of more of the local story, because it's so fascinating, I just wanted to dig in a little on maybe two aspects of what you were just saying, and be careful to avoid -- I'm trying to be careful to avoid personifying the state too much. But I guess, you know, just wondering if you can tell us even more sort of like why is the state interested in behaving this way, right? We're talking about principally the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and then into the Nixon administration a little bit as well. But this is the 60s, this is this -- in the mythology of American liberalism, this kind of high tide moment, particularly in Johnson's War on Poverty, and this is sort of memorialized and perhaps mythologized by multiple political traditions as a kind of moment of maximum kind of public investment. And of course, the amount of money the federal government is sort of pumping through grants is certainly going up. But some of the things I think that the 60s are best, or most remembered for, are more direct public programs, like say Medicare. But here, your book is really about a very key, key, key instrument that is rather different, right, where the public is actually being privatized through partnership. And I wonder if you could just like give us a little -- even a little more sense of sort of what's in it for the Johnson administration or the Kennedy administration? Why does the state prefer to operate in this manner? Why does it want to devolve power, in theory, towards the neighborhood level? You already made some allusions to some of the kinds of maybe motivations or strategies that are sort of concealed in there. But what is this sort of urban crisis, so to speak, that is on everyone's minds? And why are cities sort of poised to receive this money through the kind of nonprofit sector? Just sort of trying to really tease out kind of maybe the -- all the sort of state motivations here, but like, yeah, why do it this way? Other than, of course, this is America, and things get done in this kind of way all the time. But specifically, right, this moment is so pivotal, and I just feel like really dialing in helps us see everything that comes -- you know, has come since, really kind of emanating from this particularly charged moment in the 1960s.

Claire Dunning 21:16

Thank you for that. I think I also often fall prey to talking about the state in sort of non-personified forms, and it is people, right? One of the things I found so powerful about studying history is that these things aren't naturalized. And we can know people who made decisions and sort of locate who they were and what their motivations were. And if people made these choices, I find that empowering, because we as people can make other choices. So I really appreciate that nudge. And I'll tell a couple stories, actually, to sort of think through why this particular set of public-private partnerships is emerging. And some of it sort of slightly predates Johnson and Kennedy, under urban renewal, where it's the end of the 1950s, urban renewal had this reputation, well earned, of being top down, and what James Baldwin called "Negro removal," right, that the displacement of Black families and Black businesses, people are protesting that and sort of calling out the hypocrisy of these programs about who cities are being improved for, and at whose expense. And so the sort of political crisis of urban renewal and the protests around it, and demands for inclusion and a voice, the Federal Home and Housing Finance Agency writes a few rules into their guidelines saying, you know, use community groups, try partnering with them. And they're very vague about who constitutes a community group. And often, it's sort of elite civic booster groups. But in Boston, in 1960, a new mayor had been elected, John Collins, and he had promised to do urban renewal differently. He promised to "plan with the people" and sort of separate this image of the top down bulldozer to a slightly more participatory version that this could look like. And so he hires a new renewal administrator, this man, Ed Logue, who comes from New Have. And Ed Logue, to his credit, is sort of thinking in more capacious ways about not only the economic and physical renewal of the city, but what he calls social or human renewal might look like, how can we improve not just housing but the lives of people in it. He has his own vision of what that could or might be, but he sort of has this openness about nonprofit organizations might be a part of that story. And at the same time that Ed Logue is sort of open to this and he's talking to some folks at the Ford Foundation, a local community group, led by Otto and Muriel Snowden, Freedom House, they're a Black couple of social workers in the neighborhood of Roxbury. They see urban renewal as actually a really good thing to come to their Black neighborhood, right. This is sort of a moment of indecision, and they say we want those federal dollars, but we also want a role in sort of shaping them. And so they write a telegram to Ed Logue and say, if you don't include us in some of these conversations when you come to our neighborhood of Washington Park and Roxbury, it has to be understood as a moment of discrimination and we won't believe any other story. So Ed Logue says, okay, you know, let's give this a go. And they end up entering into a partnership with a contract, a grant that sort of cements this partnership, where Freedom House is going to take charge of facilitating community participation, which is a requirement for urban renewal, that there has to be some community input, and Freedom House says we'll take charge of that process. So they sort of use federal dollars funneled through the Boston Redevelopment Authority to hire some local planners and organizers. They transform Freedom House, they hang all these maps on the wall. It's this visual, I think, embodiment of this private space taking on a public role. They host community meetings, and they really facilitate and get neighbors on board, and they liaise with the Redevelopment Authority. And in the end, they help facilitate a community vote where the residents of Washington Park get together and say we approve this plan, that Ed Logue and his team have listened to us, and we're good to go. And it's a really profound moment, because this has gone better in the Black neighborhood of Roxbury than it has in some parallel processes that are playing out elsewhere in some white neighborhoods in the city. And Ed Logue and the mayor are just thrilled, right? They have had the success story of they've listened a little bit and, you know, right, let's be clear that this isn't a purely representational sort of process. It definitely skews towards middle class interests and those of homeowners, and working class Black folks are sort of squeezed out. But on the surface, it appears this beautiful moment of a-ha, partnering with Freedom House helped the government get what it wants, and it helps appease protest and anger at being excluded in the Black neighborhood, right? So the racial politics of this, the local manifestations between, you know, local Freedom House and local Ed Logue as the renewal authority. And it becomes this sort of, in many ways, national story. Freedom House hosts the Society of American Planners. They tour groups from international audiences. It is this perfect, beautifully multi-racial, liberal moments in the early 1960s that Johnson hears about and others, and they say, a-ha, this is a way of both appeasing protest, moving forward this liberal agenda of urban renewal and sort of anti-poverty planning, and it's a way of sort of both absolving the government of responsibility, saying here, you local nonprofit, you are so good at this, take charge of this bit, while also maintaining a degree of control, right? A grant can be given, but it can also be extracted. And so this balance of turning over degrees of autonomy and authority is a really powerful story. In Boston, the mayor sort of gets on board. And of course, the mayor wants more and more control, as more and more dollars come in, they sort of want to claw back some of that authority, but it's politically popular. And so at the federal level, when Johnson is trying to pass his War on Poverty agenda and the Economic Opportunity Act, in the Johnson archives, I found this list of talking points when they were trying to sell it in Congress. And the talking points are trying to frame this new program, which is significant federal spending, right, is, in coded and uncoded ways, responding to Black poverty. So in that way, very clear with the liberal agenda, but their talking points are trying to remind their Republican and conservative colleagues, this is the oldest tradition in America of relying on these independent nonprofit organizations. They have degrees of autonomy, we are not responsible, we're not growing the size of government. So it can sort of be spun politically in a couple of different ways and to different audiences. And it's one of the things that I find so fascinating about the American political system and the sort of myth of the nonprofit sector, is it is often something that liberals and conservatives can agree upon, right? We have rarely those moments of convergence. But everyone loves a nonprofit. Everyone loves a nonprofit, for different reasons. And with sort of different versions of what that looks like. But when I teach this to my students, I just have this sort of laundry list of both Republicans and Democrats sort of relying on and sort of tapping into this myth of the independence. And so Johnson is very much doing that in the 1960s, to respond to Black uprising and protest and rebellion, and to respond to need and growing poverty, and respond to sort of calls for self determination. This is a way to do that, in part, and that in part is really critical from both a policy and a political perspective.

Phil Rocco 29:14

Yeah, and I mean, I think that like you can see the -- not only the ideational kind of reason why this idea takes hold, but also the sort of like practical reasons why. I mean, like, I think it is in both, but in different ways, in both sort of conservative and progressive ideologies going back 100 years, you know, a central part of the mythos is like that you can do politics without power. That like you can somehow get rid -- you can like get rid of power. And so how are we going to get rid of power for conservatives? It's like, we're gonna get rid of like power, by which we mean like arbitrary rule, by turning things over to the markets where price signals will make sure that things don't happen arbitrarily. And for progressives, it's like, we're going to get rid of power by channeling resources out of City Hall, right, and towards neighborhoods, towards alternative sites of power. Now, in one sense, that's part of like the old -- and you know, away from like monopolistic political parties. That's a big part of it, especially for progressives, right, is that the party is a -- you know, parties are a problem, too, which is why you have so many nonpartisan elections, right, at the local level, after reform, but the -- you know, I guess there's one aspect of it too, which is -- I think responds to a kind of concrete material reality is that, you know, for -- in cities with political monopolies of any kind, Black and brown residents are shut out of those. They're not politically incorporated, right. Thinking of the first Black Alderwoman in Milwaukee, you know, was a member of the Democratic Party, they wouldn't even put ward heelers in her ward, right. There's like no political capacity, like for her ward. So I mean, to one extent, it's like there is actually a -- there's like a concrete material political reason for wanting alternative sites of power, because City Hall is like blocked off, wouldn't you say?

Claire Dunning 31:15

Oh absolutely. No, I think that that's enormously important when we're thinking about the political landscape, right, that the traditional partisan democratic processes are deeply anti-democratic. And so Black and brown and other excluded folks have -- are running candidates and are not winning, right. So this is an alternate way of building up power outside of a exclusionary system. And that's appealing to a lot of people, building up this alternate site, where people who don't have any ability to control or deliver services are getting to do so, are getting to design school curricula, or after-school programs, or housing, right. The group in Boston I write about in the South End, called the Emergency Tenants Coalition, who build this -- who protest and wrest control of an urban renewal project called Parcel 19 into a nonprofit driven community development. And they rename the group -- they rename the community, Villa Victoria, right? It's a Puerto Rican community. And they rename it Villa Victoria, they design it with a Puerto Rican architectural aesthetic. And you don't get that kind of control when you're running a purely government program. And so this sort of alternate source of power is really important, as you said, Phil, I think that's absolutely spot on. And I'll add separately, something I did forget to mention about another reason this is so incredibly attractive, is at foundations, right, we have to also think about the non-government money that's flowing into these realms. So the ability for a nonprofit to take both government and private dollars, builds capacity beyond what the state claims it's able to do. So when you look at the sort of budgetary, sort of nitty gritty of all of this, the Ford Foundation is substantially subsidizing in Boston and some of these groups, what the government claims they are funding, right, because the government isn't willing to fund overhead in the same kinds of ways. And so private philanthropic dollars are subsidizing state capacity in a way that is politically attractive to those who want to ensure degrees of austerity, particularly in the neighborhoods that we're talking about.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:34

Well, and I mean, I think one of the things I couldn't stop thinking about as I was reading your book is there's a essay of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's called In the Shadow of the Shadow State, where she's talking aboutt the kind of ways that nonprofits as a category, right, are sort of what -- what is the problem that they're seeking to solve, and how do they become attractive to people across the aisle, is part of it is like that ability to sort of propose the accountability and oversight, like the ability to yank the budget. And the efficiency comes from the idea that these budgets are small. These are lean organizations, sort of, they have -- you always see people talk about nonprofits as if they have some sort of like innate connection to the community, intrinsically. And therefore, it's important to sort of -- like in the example of the COVID response, you know, like community organizations were talked about as like a shortcut or a silver bullet, like, okay, so we have this problem where we need to address vaccine inequity, for example. So, rather than sort of doing the work, what we do is we like tap the nonprofits that we're gonna partner with, and we go from there. And it's sort of like the idea being that these are capacities that either are beyond the scope of government or they're sort of things that just like almost require too much work or something, to be done efficiently at that scale. And there's sort of such a way also that this then shapes the very structure of the organizations, right? Because that very idea of accountability, and the idea of running it lean, like, as you're saying, one of the kind of principal ideas that your book is engaging with is sort of why do we attempt to solve such big problems with such small organizations, right. And I think too, sort of like obviously, the whole sort of relationship to power is very important too, because as Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, "The shadow state, then, is real but without significant political clout, forbidden by law to advocate for systemic change, and bound by public rules and non-profit charters to stick to its mission or get out of business and suffer legal consequences if it strays along the way." You know, so much of the story here is not just sort of like what sort of structures prevent nonprofits from doing something beyond reproducing the status quo or sort of these small tweaks and sort of things like that. But it's also how are these organizations sort of shaped by the pressures of the state and by their relationship to the state.

Claire Dunning 36:10

Asbolutely. This notion of nonprofits having to stay away from the political realm is both in reality and perception, a huge quieting factor, right. And so, and it's not so much that nonprofits are being challenged in the courts for engaging in -- to be clear, they're prevented from partisan activity, right? Partisan and political, not the same thing, of course. And yet, there's a sort of gray area where -- and this ambiguity, where nonprofits sort of often steer clear of getting a slap on the wrist. And it's the sort of in between, sort of informal kinds of discipline, that, again, sort of simultaneously build up alternative power structures, but then make sure that they never acquire too much power or too much independence, because it is outside the traditional political realm. And so any kind of talk of policy, any kind of talk of sort of sustained political engagement is actively discouraged and undermined. It's the hardest thing to get funded and the thing for which organizations are cut off. And, you know, executive directors have -- are put in this incredibly difficult position of both advancing a mission which could and often would involve a policy argument, and needing to keep people employed, right? When you got to make payroll for people who are working hard, living and serving in a community, those issues of payroll are important. One example I'll pull on from the book is a group this -- who was funded under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which started under Johnson, but continued under Nixon most famously. And it was on a community security grant that funded this group in the South End that had started a neighborhood escort system. So on days when welfare checks were delivered to a local public housing development, a series of staff members would sort of patrol the community and help elderly folks go to the mailbox. And so this was a local grassroots program and one of the organizers under it, this guy William Shabazz, recognizes that what his neighbors in the public housing development need isn't just an escort to the mailbox, but they're deeply food insecure. And so he starts a surplus food program of dry beans, macaroni, powdered milk, of sort of redistributing some surplus food, right, to people in this community. And it's a really successful program, a sort of add-on. But city funders get word of this food program and give a big slap on the wrist to the grantee organization and say, this isn't what we funded you for. We funded you for security only, no can do. And the executive director tells Shabazz look, great program, but I can't risk not getting funded again next year, and he gets fired. And the successful food distribution program, which in a different era, we would sort of applaud the responsiveness of this, the upstart grassroots self initiative of this foodstuffs program, right, is threatening in some way to the city government, who either because they're worried about their federal funders, or they don't like the notion of food distribution, maybe it smacks of socialist agenda, who knows what, right, they're not into the food program, they're just a security program. And so he gets fired and the program ends. And it's that kind of both overt and covert disciplining of, don't stray too far from the terms of your grants, that keeps the political engagement, that a food program, right, which is a core program of the Black Panther Party, keeps that quiet and keeps it from continuing. And that kind of lack of political opportunity has been -- cuts both ways of what enables these kinds of processes to be deeply popular with those in power and among elites. and prevents it from becoming anything more, which is what those on the ground have been pushing for for a long time, right? That lack of political engagement, people were writing about and petitioning for, and right, their organizational records show they understand this inherent tension and are sort of grappling with how far can they push what their programs look like, how can they infuse a more political agenda, and the reality of their powers so deeply circumscribed by the structures of funding that accompany it.

Jules Gill-Peterson 40:32

Yeah, I love the way that you frame this, as you know, these -- this can be both democratic and anti-democratic at the same time, and at sort of different scales and on different levels. And I think one of the really, really interesting stories that you tell throughout the book is the sort of shifting -- I don't know the shifting perspective and buy in and function of Black organizers, really over the course of the 1960s, kind of moving from the first half of that decade, sort of coming online in this new relationship to the federal state. And by the end of the decade, when it's Nixon in the White House, and when Black Power has become a much more significant political movement, and the kind of shifting not just ideology, but even the kind of notion -- well, I was just thinking of a particular example I'd love to have you share with us about the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, bit's so fascinating, this idea that went into this center, which opened in 1965, that you talk about this sort of notion of a one stop shop for social services, that you would just sort of put all these different referral services and counseling and employment services and kind of all of the sort of social service infrastructure you might need in one spot, and then people can come there for their problems and get referred out or get connected to services. The Roxbury version of this was kind of a model that has an interesting career, because it seems like by the end of the 1960s, as the funding structure or the politics at the federal level are changing, and white backlash against Black freedom movements, and Black rebellion has really, really, really grown and in some ways, Nixon is riding that wave, but there are also local versions thereof, you also tell the story of this service center, sort of at the same moment that it's kind of losing some of the funding it had enjoyed, sort of just deciding, well, we kind of function as the state in some of these neighborhoods, and there's a sort of Black nationalist way to do that. Anyways, I don't want to over-summarize, I was just sort of curious if you could maybe talk a little bit about that example, as a portal to thinking about the way that Black organizers and Black political movements get in on the ground floor of this new arrangement with the federal and local state, but also continue to transform and push, as the politics kind of shift in the 1960s.

Claire Dunning 43:06

Yeah, thank you. One of the founders of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center is on the cover of the book, Hubie Jones, as a younger man than he is today, is really a really critical and interesting figure. His career is fascinating. He is wonderful. And, yeah, so the Roxbury Multi-Service Center is founded, as you said, in the mid 1960s, with both Ford Foundation dollars as part of their Gray Areas program, and federal War on Poverty dollars. They don't own furniture. So they're sort of borrowing card tables. They're above a chicken shop, or sort of a chicken farm, sort of place where you buy chickens, like live ones. And, yeah, they're trying to help their neighbors and start this one stop shop where you could get these referrals, as you said Jules. They -- Hubie Jones talks about coming from a social worker background where he's taught to sort of respond to the individual, and that was sort of the program model. And yet they realize, right, that people are coming in again and again and again, looking for housing referrals, but the housing doesn't exist, or they're dealing with predatory landlords, or they're dealing with problems of insufficient wages or different family dynamics. And they see, right, and through their own neighbors telling them and their own lived experience, that this is a deeply structural problem, and so Roxbury Multi-Service begins to undergo this transformation as their own political and sort of situational experience shifts towards a Black nationalist tradition. They start observing a different set of holidays, they start supporting anti-Vietnam protests, and sort of incubating in the ways that they can, lending some of their capacity to more overtly political entities as they sort of grapple with this role of being simultaneously fed by the state through these grants and dissatisfied about what their constraints politically and capacity wise are. And so one of the pivots that they make among others is to sort of talk about in, again, a sort of nationalist, self-deterministic lens, we don't want to just refer people to housing that doesn't exist, we want to build it. And this notion of building housing sort of aligns -- and owning the land thereof, and investing in local business, is this really interesting moment that plenty of people have written about in the Black nationalist tradition, and the sort of rise of Black capitalism, and the ways in which the market is seen as having emancipatory potential, right? That the freedom that one could get by owning the land and owning the housing and not at the whims of predatory, often white landlords, is a critical moment in the early 1970s. And I write also about a man, Mel King, who goes on to be a state representative and passed away just this past year. But long, storied career, he is the first Black man to make it out of the primary for mayor in the early 1980s. But in the 1970s, he and others are thinking about what does it mean to turn to the market. And so on the one hand, I frame this as sort of shockingly aligned with a neoliberal sort of set of policies. They're looking for the state and for foundations to shift their grants to loans. So sort of think about a financialized model of lending instead of granting, helping community groups own housing that they are then going to rent out or sell. And so it's trying to lift and participate, and bring these nonprofit organizations into a more capitalist fold. And so on the one hand, we can think about how that strategy sort of helps perpetuate neoliberal practices and policies that, you know, in retrospect, we know to be perpetuating of inequality. On the other hand, the historical record shows us that Hubie Jones and Mel King, when they're talking about the market and when they're talking about sort of the financial mechanisms that might shift for nonprofits, they're leveling a deep critique there, of the state and of the grant making programs of the 1960s, because they realize how constraining they are, and how the existing efforts within the nonprofit structure and within traditional government relationships have not created the kinds of power shifting that both had been promised or sort of hoped for. And so that critique that they're leveling is a deep critique of the processes that they are participating in, as nonprofit leaders, as staff members who are hiring people on these government programs, they see the inadequacy, and they see your critique there about, as you were saying, the sort of simultaneous democratic and anti-democratic structures of building up this "third space" that is outside of policy and political processes.

Phil Rocco 48:06

But at the same time, there's a sort of lock in effect, isn't there? I mean, the fact that there now -- there's an organizational structure, there's some administrative, in a way, like down payment. Do you think the fact that -- that the sort of relationships have proliferated, in a way, make it hard to -- make it hard to bolt from that arrangement?

Claire Dunning 48:29

Oh, absolutely, right. And sort of both administratively, but also at the day-to-day human level, right? You have staff you're paying rent, you're collecting -- you own housing that maybe people are living in. Absolutely. So it becomes this, yeah, sort of -- sort of lock in, where, as an executive director, you're scrambling for the next grant, right? You're always looking for what's the next federal program that I can sort of shift what I'm currently doing with enough continuity that it's not going to harm my staff, or my constituents or my community, but I can tweak it just a little bit. So now we're doing education, great. We can do a version of that. And there's a degree to which that is both authentic and performs, right, to sort of compete for grants, and you promise things and then only partially deliver, right? Which is true of any grantmaking relationship. But no, absolutely, it creates these systems that sort of self perpetuate in a way that it becomes dangerous, right, to sort of level a critique about, you know, we're not able to do all of that right? No organization, when you're seeking a grant, can claim a sense of inadequacy or can claim we're promising more than we can deliver. That would be a terribly risky move, and yet, enables these kinds of storytelling about the triumphalism of the nonprofit sector, right, that those at the top, those in decision-making power, right, whether that's local corporate elites who sort of like the do-good feel of sort of giving away scholarships of different sorts, right, that that is both -- how do you say no to at least some dollars coming your way, right? There's -- that's a politically risky move. And so one of the things that I try and think about is my critique of this sector in the book, and in the work surrounding it, there's not a lot new there. And people who work on the sector know absolutely, and have always known the inherent tensions and inadequacies. But because of, right, where different people stand, have different ability to say that sort of, right, the quiet part out loud, or to sort of name those political dynamics about how grants have perpetuated these systems, and how we just keep on going, right. And is why we talk about tweaking at the margins, instead of actually having a bigger conversation overhauling why we rely on these organizations, right? They can't put themselves out of business. There's risk there.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:50

Yeah. No, I mean, it just -- you know, this reminds me so much of the work of people like Dean Spade and Andrea Richie, who really talk about sort of how, in so many ways, when movement work gets tied up in financing structures, you can see -- you can often see sort of the structure of the financing itself, acting as a way to pre-limit what the sort of long-term picture becomes, right? Like, it's a way of sort of forcing the gaze away from the big picture and tying it up into what's the next grant cycle, what's the next project, what's the next campaign? And it's a kind of relentless -- and I think that kind of is obviously one of -- as you've been saying, and as your book really shows, one of the things that makes this so attractive, right, in our political economy, is that scarcity and that ability to, I think, suck up time and space within an organization. I mean, you talk about sort of the way that, -- in such an important, I think, and nuanced way, the way that ultimately, it's like, so often the conversation could be reduced to like, well, okay, if nonprofits are bad, like, then what, right? Or, you know, like what, do you want a world where they weren't doing anything, right? And no, no, absolutely no one is saying that at all, but it's so important to just stop and look at the structure of sort of how, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, the sort of shadow of the shadow state, actually what it looks like, right? Why the things are the way they are, because I think so many people sort of just take for granted the fact that these institutions, the nonprofit sector, is the way it is because that is some sort of right way for it to be designed, right? Like that this is attractive and reproducible, because it's good, right? And not that maybe it's attractive and reproducible because embedded in the financing structure are certain values that are very important in terms of reproducing austerity, in terms of sort of directing funds towards -- public funds towards private goals, towards private wealth, towards building the state, through a preference of public-private partnerships, rather than building capacities of the state itself. And so, it's not just about like individual organizations or administrations or types of governance, it's really also about kind of like an ethos of how we want to build the state, and how figures who participate in this, regardless of sort of what perspective they're coming from, and what their goals are, their goals and their behavior and their decisions, regardless of their values, are ultimately shaped and influenced by their interaction with the system and their relationship with the state.

Claire Dunning 53:49

Yes to all of that. Yes to all of that. I am sitting with what you said. So much of this can be a distraction and yet, let's just have a conversation about what a public good is and who should be delivering it, right, and who benefits. And these programs work in some ways, but they really don't work in other ways. And on the one hand, I'm empathetic to, right, bureaucrats and state authorities, right? If we're sending out public dollars, there does need to be a degree of accountability, and if tax dollars are going to public or private organizations, some kind of accounting for how those dollars are spent, right? There is the potential for bad actors and there is a potential for things to go beyond what's intended. And on the other hand, the amount of burden that creates on an organization, right, isn't an accident. There's something called trust based philanthropy, which is certainly private giving, not public giving, so governed by a different set of practices and rules, but this notion of trust and surveillance and how much time gets eaten up in these processes, rather than pausing and thinking about what's the actual goal here. And so often, the actual goal is things that are perceived to be able to be measured, and not things like ending white supremacy, or reverting historical wrongs, right? The goals are both so much more modest, because they can be counted and evaluated and measured.

Phil Rocco 55:21

But they're also -- they're also programmatic goals.

Claire Dunning 55:24

Yeah, exactly. Because those are things that can be measured. We don't talk about building power, A) because no one thinks you can measure that, but I'm sure people can. But we also assume that's the only thing --

Phil Rocco 55:34

Oh, you can.

Claire Dunning 55:34

Totally, you totally can. [Beatrice laughing] But we also assume that it's only valuable if it can be measured, right? We shouldn't justify building power because it can be measured, that in and of itself could or perhaps should be a goal, right. And so all of this about where and how our priorities lie and who delivers them.

Jules Gill-Peterson 55:53

Well, you have a really great way of describing that in the conclusion, of there's been a preference for kind of engineering and changing systems, right, systems of administration, systems of private-public partnerships, systems of social service delivery, and so on and so forth. But those systems are actually supposed to be addressing structural problems, and structure and system don't necessarily even coincide, right. And so it just, in some ways, you know, here we are sitting on the outcome of a series of historical processes that your book tracks, and you also note, right, coming to Boston -- I don't want to get too far ahead, but just coming to Boston in the contemporary moment, right, despite these decades of this nonprofit neighborhoods model, it's not like Boston is an affordable city with great infrastructure, very little segregation, affordable housing, right, and a plethora of well accessed services. And in fact, the neighborhoods with the most of these nonprofit organizations remain still the neighborhoods with the least wealth, the least property ownership, the least, by all of those "metrics," right, the ones that continue to be given the least resources and have the worst outcomes, right? And so there is something sort of, I don't know, I just think like, again, because -- I don't know, the way that the nonprofit complex just seems like it has -- it has somehow mythologized itself to make it seem like it's always been around, and this is how we do it, and there's not much else we could do except tweak those systems. And yet, in some ways, it seems like this arrangement could never have actually fulfilled any of its promises, because it was just sort of set up, in some ways, to miss the mark, or -- I mean, I know there's no one person who designed this, and there's no one entity that was responsible. But in some ways, it feels a little bit like that fundamental mismatch between system and structure that is the sort of hallmark of the US state and of the liberal approach to all of this, right? Just sort of, is one explanation for why despite the grants handed out by the government increasing so dramatically, even from the 1950s to the 1960s, and the rise of this really well now professionalized, really smooth and slick nonprofit industrial complex, you know, it turns out, we still don't have -- we still haven't addressed poverty in cities in a meaningful way, and still don't have a functioning multi-racial democracy, and so on and so forth.

Claire Dunning 58:39

No, I mean, I think there's certainly elements of that, that are in the book, and I grapple with, in my own right, about sort of, where do we go from here? And do we say that it was always doomed from the start? No, not necessarily. I think there were radical potential. It has been a profound change, right? So historians think about change and continuity, and the growth of the nonprofit sector, and the movement of both authority and dollars through it has been a significant change over the past 60 years. And I would argue that we're not done yet. And the notion that we have to hold individual organizations accountable for things that are far beyond their own reach is a problem. And that it's not about doing away with the nonprofit sector, or significantly shrinking the number of organizations or whatever, but is about maybe rebalancing where burden and expectation to solve public problems are, and what is a public problem, and who's responsible for it? I think we've offloaded way too much on to nonprofit organizations, such that the problems of racial inequality, of poverty in cities as they were in the 1950s, were believed to be problems that could and should be solved by community organizations. And that's just not working for us. Those are problems that are created by the government, right? We could have a whole other series of episodes about how the government has created and perpetuated inequality and how its own operating procedures perpetuate these problems. And so therefore, the government bears a degree of responsibility that it has yet to take on, right. So one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is, right, how this book supports a broader conversation around reparations, right, some of those broader conversations around what repair and public problem solving could look like, that can be nurtured by the nonprofit sector, they certain -- nonprofit organizations could and should continue to play a role in our society. But the burden of big problems, and the notion that small entities, through service provision, can move the needle, is not proven to be true by the historical record, and this sort of notion that systems can change structures. We've moved systems a lot, right? We've fundamentally changed how money flows. We've fundamentally changed who delivers goods and services. That is really different, and it has made governance more participatory, more decentralized, and more diverse. And we don't want to necessarily let go of that. There are -- people fought long and hard for a seat at the table, and that should not be yanked away. At the same time, right, in this sort of both things can be true mantra, it's not touching the structural level. That is a policy and political move. And I think we are beginning to have that conversation, I think, publicly, right, that are the crises of the past few years, decades, whatever, we're more willing to talk about maybe government should or could play a larger role, right. I think we're on the cusp, or maybe we're in it, right, having those conversations. And so that's exciting to me.

Phil Rocco 1:02:03

But I think the question that keeps coming back to me, as I read the book, right, is that it's the development that you talk about has really created a new field of power, right? It has scrambled people's ability to act collectively, wouldn't you say? I mean, it's -- and it's turned, because these organizations, community foundations are really where the resources are, right, not necessarily in local governments. It's turned public attention to them as solutions, as opposed to government, that that tends to scramble collective action. But it also, it distances -- I mean, the resources are in these communities, but other things aren't, like regulatory authority, for example, still remains firmly within the power of the local or sometimes is preempted by the state government. But that's often the switch you need to flip. And the other thing that I think is interesting is like the extent to which, and maybe you can talk about this, like the kinds of solutions that now naturally enter into the conversation have changed, you know, the thing that you open the book with is talking about this social impact bond. And it's just -- I wonder if you could actually go into it, because I think it matters that the solutions that are on the table to these problems, have a way of, while they don't solve the problem, obviously, they perpetuate this idea that the solution is always just around the corner and that like, give us five more years, give us ten more years, give us 30 million more dollars, and give us an army of evaluators, and like out of work social scientists to do the evaluation work [laughter], and we'll solve this goddamn problem. So can you like talk -- I mean, like there's a solutionism that is very rooted in some of these -- in these projects. And so I wonder if you could talk about like that aspect of it as well.

Claire Dunning 1:04:08

Mmm, the solutionism of it. Yeah, it seems both sort of so rooted in optimism and a pragmatism about how to do something against what seems like inevitable odds. But no, social impact bonds are this wildly complex, and yet also so simple, sometimes called Pay for Success programs, right? So the government vows to pay a nonprofit for its services if the desired and sort of contractual outcome is achieved. And in the time between when the nonprofit provides a service and the government says, a-ha, we've done it, we've employed this many people, kept this many people out of the carceral state, etc., who puts up the dollars? Private financiers. So Goldman Sachs is the sort of key financer along with some foundations. They sort of put up a loan and say okay, the government's gonna pay us back, but we'll front the money to this nonprofit. It's these wild systems and tons and tons of lawyers. And as you said, Phil, lots of social scientists evaluating and proving and all sorts of things before the money actually moves from the government to pay back Goldman Sachs who initially fronted the money. And, yeah, this notion that if we just sort of shift something small, something big will result, I think, is enticing. That if we just change how the money flows, the structures underneath will alter. It's also a way to do something, I don't know, I'm not the one who can or should say like how -- like it's an imperfectly stacked deck, right? The notion of austerity is always way overplayed than what it in reality could be. But people are dealing with constraints, right? That's true of people in government, just as it's true of people in the nonprofit sector. And there's a series of tough choices about how you use limited resources, even though, right, we talk about them as if they're more limited than they truly are. Yeah, I don't have a great answer. But this sort of optimism and sense of the solution's just around the corner, and that we can operate within more or less the confines, right? So much of this is based on the notion, right, the opportunity agenda of the 1960s looms large here, that largely our political economy is sound, and that we just need to get people onto the ladder into it, right? That has been the underlying philosophy, gone by different names, gone by different sort of versions since then. I think nonprofits are wrapped up in the theory of the world, that the political economy is basically sound and we just need to get people into it, rather than saying maybe it's a problem with our political economy, and the racial capitalism that sort of undergirds it. And nonprofits, by and large, right, and there's certainly exceptions to all of this, who are willing to name those dynamics, but are largely operating under the -- either because they believe it, or they have to operate under it to win funding -- things are basically sound, and we just need to finetune at the margins.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:07:17

Right. I mean, there's that much bigger container, right, to look at all of this through that prism, of the kind of decision coming out of World War Two, that the United States is going to, as a tool of policymaking, simply declare that the incredible boom in US economic growth will just be the tide that lifts all ships, and there won't be any need to do sort of fundamental structural reform or major redistribution. I can't remember off the top of my head the exact reference, but I was reading recently about an internal memo in the Johnson admin that was like, you know, just looking at some post-Marshall Plan European countries and even some, I think, Eastern Bloc countries and was sort of like, okay, well, we calculate that if we wanted to completely eliminate poverty as defined by the federal state, we could redistribute X amount of money. I think it was in the dozens of billions of dollars. Just direct transfers to people, and we could, within a couple -- you know, within 10 years, functionally on paper, eliminate that kind of wealth inequality version of poverty. And then in the next breath, the report's like, but of course, we don't do that in America. We'll just have everyone -- we'll just improve everyone, right? Like just to re-emphasize for -- you know, that these 1960s programs are all premised on the idea that the primary unit of inequality is the individual, which is just like wild. And so like, getting that -- I think that kind of solutionism, or pragmatism, in part, is about, well, we got 20 people low paying jobs as typists in the bureaucracy of this social service organization, isn't that better than them being unemployed? And it's this like really intentionally decontextualized point of view that is operating in a million different iterations around the country. And so of course, it adds up to something, right. But that sort of very American sense of, well, we don't actually want to disturb the fundamental order of the political economy, we're just going to go full steam ahead on it ideologically at the macro level, and then either hope that that lifts people up, or just make these little attunements and where it fails, we can then fall back on really crass and usually racist massifying arguments that there's a culture of poverty in this neighborhood, and that's why it's not -- it's not rising with the tide of everyone else. But one thing I really wanted to ask you about too, I'm just sort of curious, is also about the nonprofit sector as a form of employment, because I feel like that's also a part of the story you're telling. And that kind of fits into this conversation we're having about the contradictions here, and also how people become stakeholders, right? Even in -- become stakeholders in systems that they don't even necessarily want to ratify, and one way is by getting employed. And I was just thinking about, and something I'm selfishly really interested in, the way that the rise of the nonprofit sector, for example, creates a lot of employment opportunities, say, for Black women. And it's at this moment of deindustrialization, where the wage sector is going through a lot of flux and the loss of the kind of ideal of the unionized labor -- or the unionized steel job, or whatever, right, is giving way to the healthcare sector worker, and they are just groups of people who are -- who have had incredible, incredible structural barriers to formal employment for so long, are being now told in the '60s for the first time, like, hey, we could pay you for your experience of marginalization, we could pay you because you know your neighborhood so well, because you have been poor, because you've experienced police harassment or incarceration, that's a form of valuable knowledge, but we're gonna pay you pretty bad wages relative to other sectors. And overall, the nonprofit sector, it seems like, is sort of part of this early kind of history of neoliberalism, and the sort of move towards stagnating wages, relative to cost of living overall in the economy. But it also seems to me, and I'm curious, yeah, what you would say about this, too, it's like -- you know, it's this, again, these kinds of situations where it's like, you're being offered a job, a formal job, a legit job, right? And like, that's really hard on the individual level to turn down. And why should people turn that down, right. But over time, we're also sort of seeing this kind of precarious -- you know, this precarity, the role of women workers in general under War on Poverty programs is really fascinating, the way that if you're on an unstable grant, and your salary could be -- you could lose your job at any time, or you never quite get the same benefits, or women were paid a lot, or Black women were paid a lot less in certain sectors. I mean, I'm just sort of curious too, if part of the story here is about nonprofit jobs and social services jobs, not like they didn't exist prior to the mid century, but that they undergo a kind of fundamental transformation that I think speaks to a wide variety of people's experience with the labor market to this day, where they're like, I have so many degrees, and I'm paid so terribly. I wonder if some of that is traceable back to this moment?

Claire Dunning 1:12:50

Absolutely. I'm so glad you asked this employment question, because I do have -- I've written elsewhere about the sort of labor side of this. That it is, absolutely, as you named, this moment of deindustrialization, and sort of question of where people in cities are going to be employed. And there is a school of thought called the New Careers Program that comes out in the 1960s, where they sort of argue that the "eds and meds" and human services are the future of employment in cities, and growing these kinds of jobs, they're seen as entry level. They're called non-professional jobs, which is sort of a denigrating term, but in an attempt at the time to sort of recognize and create career ladders that are employing people who don't have the kinds of credentials that are typically valued, and as you said, have lived experience, right? They live in the public housing development, where a local health center is starting, right, or a Head Start organization that's a preschool and is hiring and employing and training parents, mothers, mothers of color, in particular, and saying, you deserve a wage and recognition and respect for the role that you're playing, that likely had been a voluntary role up until then, right? And we can think about volunteering in highly gendered and racialized ways. And the ways about whose labor is or is not valued with a wage or who's able to donate time has a deep history. And so this is a moment of paying people and hiring, and I try and include a few pictures in the book of, right, when Freedom House begins to work for the Boston Redevelopment Authority around urban renewal, they hire five Black women who are now getting a wage, right, and some sort of benefits. That's profoundly transformational in the lives of individuals and communities, for organizations, for sort of the professional field. But this theory of New Career sort of assumed that if you got people on the career ladder, a ladder would be built. That there would be ways for promotion, that there would be salary increases, that these sort of non-professional jobs would lead to career ladders. And that didn't happen. Career ladders don't sort of appear out of nowhere. Grants notoriously keep wages purposefully low. Salaries are deeply depressed in the nonprofit sector. And so I write about elsewhere a protest, right, where all of these people who are hired on these New Career contracts in the 1960s, say I'm one step out of poverty, but I'm not far from it, right? I'm working, but my wage is not sufficient, right. And that's a structural problem. That's not individual nonprofit organizations. And as I've alluded to, right, these executive directors are trying to keep people employed, they're losing payroll constantly, right. So people will go a month without being employed, the turnover is high. And at both an organizational and an individual employee level, that kind of disruption is deeply painful and sort of reinforces precarity at organizations and in the lives of people who are -- you know, may love their job, may hate their job, may probably feel somewhere in between, but feel caught, right, that we don't pay people in nonprofit sector well. That continues to be a significant problem. So either you have to have significant privilege, right, to be able to take jobs in this field, or be willing to work for under what you're worth, or, right, you're battling constantly. And this kind of work is not supported in the same kinds of ways that work in other sectors are valued. And I think at both an individual level, and the stories we tell, right, under paying workers in the nonprofit sector suggests and creates a narrative that it's optional, that it's supplement, and because your heart should be the one that compensates for it, because you feel good about it, or you're helping people, right? Again, deeply gendered and racialized. And so the nonprofit sector is one of our most diverse workforces. But when you look at the more granular level, right, it continues to be at the top executive levels where pay is and can often be quite high, we're still seeing white men holding the majority of those roles. And so the dominance of women of color in the sector continue to be at the entry level position. And the sort of deep-seated racism and sexism that pervades other sectors is very much present in the nonprofit sector as well. But we naturalize it, because we say this is a helping field and people are relying on the goodness of their hearts to sort of do this kind of work, and who would step in if not for them. So I think that that's a huge, huge problem. And again, I want to circle back around the creation of, right, this political economy, where everything is sound, and we just need to lift people into it. One of the things that the nonprofit -- sort of rise of the nonprofit sector has done that I trace in the book is it begins to recognize identities of sort of -- it begins to recognize that the state has been built around the needs and expectations of sort of the ideal citizen as a white, married, employed straight person, right. And so we begin to see, through these kinds of government grants, a recognition that people have other needs, right? The young and the old, people who don't speak English as their first language, right, queer people, Black people, ethnic minorities, right? All the sort of diversities beginning to get recognized through these grants, but their needs are seen as outside of the norm, right, that one of the things I think a lot about is we are simultaneously recognizing the needs of the sort of non-ideal citizen, but we're meeting them through privatized, unequal means. And I think the employment statistics, when we look at who's working in the nonprofit sector, and who's being served, is a place where our values about whose problems are deserving of support and whose aren't, are getting replicated.

Phil Rocco 1:19:07

One thing that you say in the book, and I think it's not merely because these nonprofits are providing jobs, it's also because they are -- they're providing the connective tissue for land redevelopment deals, right, that they become, in a way, part of the growth machine, right. And I think that, you know, it's hard for me to understand that apart from the fact that there's -- in a lot of the cities where this is happening, there is -- I mean, there remains massive disinvestment in a lot of neighborhoods, right. I was talking to somebody who is a public school advocate in St. Louis, and had been kind of fighting this yearslong war with a charter voucher coalition. And she was saying, look, people join this coalition, not because they're sort of ideologically committed in any way to vouchers or charters, but because the coalition has resources, provides money, provides jobs, and there aren't any to go around. It also creates community institutions that -- in a place where they don't exist. And so I sort of wonder, as we're thinking about this as like a history that helps us understand the kind of very fractured and unequal cities that I certainly live in, that many of us do live in, what's the role of kind of local government and the federal government at actually coming in and doing things to reinvest in ways that channel power more fruitfully or allow for power to be built in places where it's so sort of decentralized and fragmented?

Claire Dunning 1:20:59

Yeah, I think a lot of people join these kinds of coalitions, which has always been true, right, sort of holding your nose a little bit, right, sort of, you don't always have the privilege of ideological alignment. And so if it's an opportunity to bring some resources, if a charter school is the only way, seemingly or real, to get new school facilities, or a new curriculum, or a degree of parental involvement that people are seeking, I think people have to often put their own ideologies or sort of politics aside in favor of desperate survival, right? Trying to win resources that maybe your kid or your family can take advantage of. That's a sort of constant, I think, of history. And we continue to see that played out. And the fact that those kinds of coalitions do have resources is a reflection of the preferences of elite donors. There's been some really interesting work on the Gates Foundation and others, around how their interest in charter schools has created this sort of movement, just because dollars had been on the table for that, whether or not that's been what people were asking for or not. So I think these kinds of, you chase money where it can exist, and these sort of both false binaries around like what's the alternative, but also, sometimes there doesn't always appear a readily alternative in the lifespan of your own children going to school, or you're needing housing, or you're needing a job. So I think that the uneven landscape is real.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:22:31

Yeah. I mean, I always think of -- it's such a difficult thing, right, that -- because those -- we -- you know, like, especially the work that I've done on disability, one of the critiques I get is like, well, god damn it, stop critiquing the ADA, you're gonna contribute to rolling it back. Or like, how dare you say Medicaid is imperfect? And like, absolutely, you know, I completely empathize with that. But whenever I sort of encounter that, I always think back to this thing that Craig Willse says, who's a longtime organizer, writer, and he talked about like -- it's from Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues, which is like a series that I think is at the -- we'll put a link to that, maybe, in the episode description, because listeners would probably enjoy that as well, something Dean did many years ago, in 2013. But he says -- Craig says, "We don't argue for some pure space, where we can know that the political work we do is perfect, and will have no unintended consequences and will have no harms. That's never gonna happen. And I think sometimes we hold up a false model of that pure space, and we measure our failures against that model. And I think we want to be experimental and thoughtful at the same time, right? So we want to think like, what does the nonprofit status help us do? And what does it keep us from doing? And when we pair it with something that's not incorporated as a nonprofit, what can that work do? What can that autonomous grassroots organizing do? What are its limits? And how do we think about complements back and forth? So I think ultimately, I want the nonprofit form to fall away, along with the nation-state form." And so I think, you know, Craig's kind of take on it, and for a long time, he's done work where he's sort of working directly in the community with people who are homeless, and then sort of writing about that, and he teaches, so he's someone who's like very critical of the kind of centrality of the kind of university expert and sort of needing to incorporate a critique of that into the work that you're doing. And I think that the way Craig talks about it is sort of like the comparison to a political -- a perfect political movement that exists in a vacuum, right, it's kind of like fighting against that like, "oh, well you use an iPhone and yet want communism?" kind of framework, right, which is that, yes, like, we live under capitalism and the contradictions are the point, right? Like the contradictions are what are intolerable. And these are things that are terrible, and these are sort of harms we shouldn't have to balance. And that's part of where our political work and our political lives sort of comes from. It's not that like, you know, sort of looking at the ways that our wins can have harms, right, or even the maintenance of sort of the reproduction of our movements can have harms, and the very structure that we have to sort of participate in, or in the ways that the structures of our movements are shaped by the state and our relationships to the state, you know, sweeping it under the rug helps nobody at the end of the day. And I think your book treats that with a lot of care and kind of takes the perspective that I think Craig offers, which is like, there is going to be no movement that has unintended consequences and harms. And so, well, how do we deal with that sort of contradiction and consequence, other than being really honest about it, and really trying to look at how does this sort of analysis help us understand decisions about the present and about our current movements, because it's not just about litigating what worked 10 months ago, or what worked 10 years ago, or 100 years ago, but part of the very structure of sort of nonprofit as a model of privatization of public goods, right, keeps people accountable to those wins and successes, right. And sort of the failure itself is something that you want to shy away from, if you're presenting yourself for, you know, oh, I deserve this grant, because so much of philanthropy ultimately is like investing in the idea that somebody has the knowledge to end poverty, not in like ending poverty itself, right?

Claire Dunning 1:26:52

I'm sitting with that quotation that you read, and its power in naming both a place for ideal theory and that we can't let that get in the way of the day to day realities of what we have in front of us, and moving forward, regardless of the inequities of our current system. I'm sitting with that quotation, and really grateful to you for raising it up here. I think it captures beautifully and perfectly for me what the study of history can do for us, right, which is to ground big visions and realities and to extend our muscles of empathy for people making tough decisions, which isn't to say, not holding back the criticism for consequences that might have been intended or otherwise often unintended, but to recognize people making decisions within a set of constraints, and let's keep making decisions in the present, hopefully informed by that, but still with an eye towards a revolution that's incomplete. And the nonprofit sector can play a role in that, but maybe not as much as we've expected it to.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:28:01

I think that is the perfect place to leave it for today. Claire, thank you so much. This was such a fantastic conversation. And thank you again for this wonderful book.

Claire Dunning 1:28:10

Thank you for having me. And thank you for this conversation. Truly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:28:13

And Claire's book again is Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State, published by University of Chicago Press. And you can follow Claire on Twitter, @ClaireMDunning. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. If you'd like to also support the show and become a patron, you can do that at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism, or pre-order Jules' new book coming in January from Verso called A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. As always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)