seeing outside of the non-profit industrial complex

so many people (including me up til recently) have wood-for-the-trees problems when it comes to charities /  non-profits (and the public sector, and academia, for that matter), and the prospect of working for one. i'm so heartened to see this discussion on tumblr, at Radically Hott Off (though i'm confused about how to reference tumblr stuff properly) about the failure of non-profit orgs to actually do much to effect social change, apart from set ourselves up in nice salaried positions and then work to maintain that salary structure:

"the number one reason I hear people say that they are working at 501c3s [US term for charities / voluntary sector orgs] is because they believe in the work and they’d be doing it anyway and this way they can survive. but…isn’t there just a bit of moral —-unevenness i guess—in assuming that our neighbors, our fathers, our grocery store check out lady—don’t have the same wishes?

[...]

what happens if instead of saying *I* want a job that pays me enough to live on AND makes me feel a little less ethically violated—and say *WE* want jobs that pay us enough to live on and doesn’t kill the world? indeed makes the world a better place? 

[...]

what would it look like to begin the left transition from dependency on 501c3s to a steady communication with radical on the street/community driven movements? [...]. *F*eminist orgs do absolutely NO grassroots organizing, instead focusing on “recruitment” in universities—that is: finding the next generation of women to run the orgs.

[...]

it’s like there’s no clear understanding that raped women in prisons, raped women in migrant camps, raped women in your family, raped next door neighbors, raped friends, etc are all pretty freaking powerful and can create more changes than olberman can ever dream of—if we’d work to give those women skills to organize. The right may have more money—but they have the top five percent of the money makers to recruit from. we have the entire world."

yes. it's really clear to me how much we who are working in charities/non-profits are just working to bolster the comfort of our own privilege - sleep tight at night knowing we've "done good", "tried hard" - rather than actively undermining the structures that privilege us over those we say we are trying to help.

when i quit my proper job and was handing over to my replacement, i was explaining to her some of the issues around supporting women with 'no recourse to public funds' and how totally trapped those women can be, between their abusive partner and the immigration system. her response was like a perfect summary of why i had to quit! she said: "oh wow. you'd just want to take her home, wouldn't you? i mean, i've got a spare room and... oh but you couldn't. you could never do that! ... but if she had nowhere else to go! it's so terrible! ... but obviously i know you could never do that..." and in that paid role, of handing over my old job to this new worker of course i had to shake my head along with her: "no, you could never do that."

but you know how women's aid refuges started in the 1970s - feminists had spare rooms and opened them up to strangers fleeing abuse. they squatted buildings. families shared rooms. that absence of resources is unimaginable now when compared to multi-million pound blocks of self-contained apartments that new labour helped to fund for several cities' DV provision.

except - that absence of resources is precisely what women with no recourse have now. but somehow we've forgotten how to offer our spare rooms to them, or how to squat or do whatever is necessary to protect these women. because women like us are now relatively protected by the state. sort of. well, maybe not. but hey at least we're getting paid now, eh? and god forbid we risk offending the funders.

i so love the part of the quote above that i bolded. i'd never even thought of it that way. it just highlights so perfectly the entitlement of the reasoning (that i held for many years) that we have a right to elevate ourselves into paid charity positions so that we can feel better about ourselves, as if other people without the same access to those jobs don't feel the same way. and then when we're in, we have the audacity to keep (other) survivors out, because you know, 'managing volunteers is resource-intensive', 'we don't have the funding right now to run a volunteer training programme', 'volunteers complicate risk-management' etc etc.

so - yes! that seems like an amazing central premise for organising - not that i should scramble to get a funded place inside the nice safe (and shrinking) NPIC while extending a hand from the parapet during office hours to 'help' 'them' - but that i should work for the right of all of us to be doing well-resourced, well-recompensed, non-violating, meaningful, engaged work.

love, again

i finished reading the first half of Endgame. i was folding down the page-corners each time he wrote something relevant to this blog, and now the whole damn thing is folded. my 'jensen' tag stands to get embarassingly large, but what can you do? this guy is doing all my work for me - so much of the stuff i wanted to do with this blog about linking up abuses and oppressions and looking for the universal truths and functions of it, reading this book has saved me years. *and* in volume two, my friend who is half a book ahead of me tells me, he talks to lundy bancroft!! like, i was getting all ready to tie jensen in with bancroft on this blog and then dreaming of emailing jensen to tell him how he's so nearly there but just needs to talk to this perpetrators-expert dude bancroft, but they're way ahead of me. oh to be a geeking-out fly on the wall. sigh.

anyhow, what was playing on my mind, as i read the last few pages, was to do with love. i've written before a bit about how love and passion are policed, pathologised, occasionally criminalised, including by 'well meaning' social workers and the like (do i need to keep on with the well-meaning disclaimer? can i start saying something less polite soon?). the weight of this was brought back to me as i was finishing up volume one and came across paragraphs like this:

"...Everything the culture taught me: how to submit, how not to make waves, how to fear authority, how to fear perceiving my submission as submission, how to fear my feelings, how to fear perceiving the killing of those I love [he's not just talking about people] as the killing of those I love (or perhaps I should say the killing of those I would love had I not been taught to fear love too), how to fear stopping by any means necessary those who are killing those I love..."

this all struck home with me, hard, how much i fear taking action against abuse, oppression, destruction, how the state of fear is infinitely more comfortable, and how i deal with that by loving less. numbing, depression, caring less, shutting down my love to only those closest to me, or only those things and people i can immediately see. and then - what does it mean? how can i love those closest to me without loving the other people, the other things?

"we are only free, when we are supporting the freedom of others"

(my biggest internet crush of the moment is all for Mai'a)

which is one side of things. but also, how hard is it to love in the face of that policing and pathologising? i was thinking - the women i work with often love with their all (others are numb and shut-down, but that's a different story, and a reason why there can't be a one-size fits all approach to DV work right). but the social workers - they can't afford to love, and empathise. they can't really know what it is, or how could they do that work? i wonder what their definition of love must be, and what it's got to do with (their own) 'good' families and ownership and 'security' and hoarding. they are probably really having no fun. i mean, i don't have a lot of time for the oppressors-as-wounded worldview but then sometimes -. what can you say?

i was also thinking about how i have to hide from my colleagues and people 'in the sector' (!) just how much i love my job, or rather, my work. it's not ok to be passionate about it. the management could pathologise me as 'driven' and starting looking for 'boundary issues' i might have. i was too driven when i was twenty, but i work damn hard on my boundaries and have figured them out over the years, at least within the framework of the voluntary sector (if i ever start doing the grassroots work i dream of, i think those must be somehow different boundaries to figure out).

i made some personal mistakes along the way, though i'm pretty sure my 'clients' were not impacted. like for example she didn't know it, but i did fall in love with one woman, not in that way, but in the example she showed me of mothering and of courage and awesomeness. when things went wrong for her i cried and cried - but of course she doesn't know this. then she made things right for herself. i 'should' have had stronger boundaries and not empathised so much. i got in a mess for a weekend. my managers never found out either, thank god. and.. well, what's wrong with caring that much, once in a while?

well, it was agonising... when you (allow yourself to) love something, pain is going to be part of it. so - i allow myself to love some things - a certain amount, and then draw lines, and exclude some things, and love some things abstractly. like the gulf of mexico. women i work who are eligible for benefits in the uk or who have enough income have more choices and options open to them if they are being abused. it's safe enough to empathise with their troubles, to try and figure it out with them. the gulf of mexico, on the other hand... and women with no recourse to public funds. many agencies switch off on hearing those words. it's too much, a stretch of empathy too far. i won't switch off. but i know there is something happening to my heart as the situation becomes bleaker for my longest-term 'client' with no recourse. i can feel myself starting to shut down as i can't bear to think of all the implications of her lack of options. it's safer not to love or care 'too much', to be A Professional. which, of course, entails not fighting as hard for what she needs. which is why we have all been professionalised - offered privileges in return for leaving behind the people we were trying to work with. at risk of losing these privileges, we then fear caring, loving and fighting.

No. it's becoming so clear how much it being not-ok-to-love is so much a part of how oppression functions. this kind of work has to be driven by love, and feeling and acknowledging pain has to be part of it. as supporters, we have to find ways of supporting each other in this. 

i love the groups, the women's support groups, i love the many moments every week where i can see amazing change happening, i love the women i work with. i want the crushing structures that make people feel mental for feeling highs and lows, or who lock people away and/or take away their children for loving, to end. and even more, i want the systems to end that make it impossible, too frightening, to love people (and places, and seabirds). and, jensen would say, what am i going to do about it?

working with the system

"One of the scariest manifestations of modern capitalism is the system's ability to co-opt experiences, practices, even culture, and to then re-create and repackage them within a careerist, profit-driven (even in "non-profits" [voluntary sector]), and competitive logic. The non-profit system... supports the professionalization of activism rather than a model of everyday activism. For many of us, activism has become something you do as a career. When organisers from other countries see that activists are paid to do work in the United States, it makes them wonder. It took my father (who is very familiar with grassroots struggles) a few years to understand the work that I was doing. "Your job as a community organiser; what does that mean, it's your employment? Who is paying you to do this work? And why?" And since many of us are being paid by foundations allied with corporate interests, my father also said, "Clearly, they are paying you to keep you from really challenging the system, to make sure that you are accounted for."

When we focus on organizing as a part of everyday life, the process becomes as important as the final product. In many cases, foundation funders and the non-profit culture expect groups to achieve a campaign goal in a relatively short period of time. They are not interested in funding the much slower work of base building which takes years and years to do. Consequently, non-profits become short-term goal orientated, even if they did not begin that way. Many also become focused on "smoke and mirrors" organising, in which you do something that looks good for a photo op but has no real people power behind it."

Paula X. Rojas, from Are the Cops in our Heads and Hearts? in The Revolution will not be Funded, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

This is so relevant to the three-year periods of funding that have been the status quo under New Labour. they just won't fund an existing project (in the name of 'encouraging innovation,' yeah right) - everything just lasts for three years. it's insane. or calculated. especially in the domestic violence field where everyone knows it takes women on average seven years to leave, three years is pointless and leaves women hanging, distraught, i've spoken to them when their services grind to a halt...

i would be so interested in hearing/reading critiques of the UK domestic violence voluntary sector and the ways in which its funding is messed up, if anyone can articulate this or point me in the right direction... i heard an amazing speech from Amrit Wilson, the chair of Imkaan, an umbrella body for Asian women's refuges, at the Transnational Feminisms Conference in Manchester. she had so much to say, but i haven't found anything written down, or anyone to talk to yet (i wish Amrit would be my friend, but i think she's busy).

i mean, it's becoming increasingly painfully obvious to me that we need to restart at a grassroots level according to the needs of our own local areas rather than wait for ever-more coercive state funding. Rape Crisis centres' funding is being cut with heartbreaking regularity so as to make them almost non-existent now, (far too feminist, and overtly challenging and sceptical of the state; gotta go) and they are slowly being replaced with one-stop type centres (Sexual Assault Referral Centres/SARCs ; check out the difference between RC's website talking to "you, if you need support" and the Home Office SARC page: "victims receive an integrated service," gross.) which have streamlined the whole process, supposedly to make it easier for survivors (true, you can be examined medically, interviewed and counselled in one place), but this also has the effect of meaning the police are always in the building. and although survivors do have the right to use these centres without reporting to the police, i'd be interested to know how many 'monitoring details' they have to hand over. Supporting People, the central government body that funds accommodation and housing-related support for vulnerable people, including many/most refuges for women fleeing domestic violence, has moved from just needing age/ethnic origin/blah blah a few years ago to now requiring national insurance numbers for all people passing through those services. so everyone is tracked! amazing isn't it.

and yeah. why are we doing this work as a job? why am i? why am i getting paid to be a sticking plaster on a wound, and working far more with than against forces that cause violence in the first place? i'm really not sure. but i will figure out what else to do.