By Alex Chadwell, musician, teaching artist, administrator, artist-researcher

Thousands of education nonprofit organizations across the country, in urban and rural areas of every state, provide supplemental, supportive, and sometimes essential services for millions of students. They utilize diverse programming, from academic support and English language learning to arts and recreation to health education and meal provision to summer programs and beyond. They are active before, during, and after the school day, on weekends, on school campuses, and at other locations such as community centers, arts venues, and religious centers. 

They have effectively become de facto extensions of the public school system and, in this way, have become embedded in the civic and social fabric of the United States. 

While this arrangement has become normalized, we must examine the relationship between education nonprofit organizations and public schooling in the U.S. and how education nonprofit organizations often inadvertently provide ineffective and problematic programs. This, in turn, produces a means for the ruling class to conservatively address societal inequities without indicting themselves, relinquishing power and money, or making structural change.

Access paradox in the nonprofit industrial complex

The current iteration of the interconnection between education nonprofit organizations and public schools in the United States can be traced to mid-twentieth-century liberalism and its respective policies. In her book Nonprofit Neighborhoods, historian Claire Dunning writes that among the core beliefs of this ideology were “the need to expand opportunity rather than restructure society, a faith in social scientific evidence and the replicability of experimental findings, . . . the assumptions that local solutions could address structural problems, [and that] increasing participation via private routes could substitute for a sharing of public power” (2022, p. 58). In the destructive wake of urban renewal^[1]⸺a federal program that, between 1949 and 1973, decimated 2,500 neighborhoods, the majority of which were comprised of Black and working-class communities, in 993 cities across the United States⸺the American federal government began to address and attempt to ameliorate the public and structural problems of poverty and the lack of or inadequacy of education, housing, health services, and employment, etc. through public-private partnerships with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and corporations. 

Late capitalism and the consequent increasing wealth disparity, the continuously growing yet unregulated philanthropic sector, and the neoliberalist policies that address the deficiencies of public institutions through private means have led to the current political economy, sometimes referred to as the “nonprofit industrial complex.”

One of the economic ways that the ruling class sustains the nonprofit industrial complex is by creating an environment of scarcity that foments competition and division through its strategic deployment of resources via grantmaking and other methods of fund distribution. Dunning writes that fundamentally, “grantmaking is an expression of power by those with resources over those seeking them . . . and by definition, a grant exists as a privilege to be won rather than an obligation to be fulfilled” (2022, p.10). The “power of grantmaking [is] the ability to set priorities, demand information, assess budgets, and define time horizons for change” (2022, p. 143), therefore limiting how, where, and for whom nonprofits can serve. The nonprofit organization is, thus, operationalized as a way to keep specific communities surveilled, policed, and disempowered. 

My first encounter (that I was cognizant of) with the nonprofit industrial complex was when I was a teaching artist in New York City. I found myself assigned to teach at underfunded schools in divested neighborhoods that had cut arts education from their curricula years ago, sometimes dating back to the city’s near bankruptcy in the 1970s. To address this shortcoming, principals contracted nonprofit arts organizations, using governmental grants and private funding, to provide fill-in arts programming. 

It was then that I began to see the inequity (and irony) of nonprofit arts organizations providing fill-in arts programs with the deferred tax dollars that could’ve been funding those same schools that I was at and how, by circumventing the public education system, programs were less substantive, consistent, and accountable. 

In many communities across the country, arts and cultural institutions and arts education organizations have essentially created their own industry of providing arts programs for underfunded and under-resourced public schools. School districts have largely relied on these organizations to offer arts programming. Rather than address the systemic underfunding of public schools in the U.S.^[2], this short-term turned long-term arrangement has created a vicious cycle. 

Artists and the experiences that they facilitate in schools, afterschool programs, community centers, and summer camps have the potential to be powerful instigators of transformative and radical education, but they are not replacements for full-time arts teachers. Not only are they not replacements, but artists and arts organizations can also, and often do, perpetuate the hegemonic heteropatriarchal, capitalist, colonial, Eurocentric world system that sociologist John Law calls a one-world world: “a world that has granted itself as exclusive, cancels possibilities for other worlds, and by, presenting itself as exclusive, cancels possibilities for what lies beyond its limits” (Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 3). 

This is often accomplished through the process of democratizing culture—a top-down, center-out scheme where the dominant and approved cultural products and beliefs are distributed to everyone under the pretense that access and exposure to this “high” culture is equality. The approved cultural products, beliefs, and dogma are primarily from deceased, white, Western European, heterosexual, cisgender men and their respective values, norms, and perspectives. Providing access and exposure for “underserved” (i.e., marginalized, disinvested, and oppressed) communities and individuals is almost always showcased as an act of benevolence. 

Among the many reasons for its persistent existence is the “access paradox.” By withholding access to the social and cultural capital of the dominant culture, people from the non-dominant culture are prevented from succeeding in the dominant culture’s world. However, if access is provided, the dominant culture and its hegemony are solidified and reinforced.

Many nonprofit organizations face a similar paradox. By seeking and accepting government funds and philanthropic dollars to provide social services, they are participating in and perpetuating the nonprofit industrial complex. However, if they stop providing services or cease to exist entirely, they would leave millions of people without essential services.

A more recent experience provided me with an opportunity to see how the nonprofit industrial complex also impacts non-arts education nonprofit organizations. As part of my graduate program in literacy education, I mentored a tutor at a nonprofit organization that provides, among other things, one-on-one after-school tutoring.

Like the example of arts education mentioned above, this organization provides programming, using tax-deferred and restrictive dollars, for students who are actively being disenfranchised by the school district – usually students of color and students from low socioeconomic status who attend underfunded schools. While not always the case, organizations often do not provide equal or better services than a fully funded school could. Even without considering the quality of services offered, nonprofit organizations will never be a one-for-one replacement for a public institution like public education. 

Two causes of problematic program offerings: Volunteer labor and structural organizational deficiencies

Nonprofit organizations often rely on volunteer labor to carry out some or all of their programming. Common in the education sector is a reliance on volunteer tutors, who usually do not have a background or training in education, to implement programming. The tutor I mentored was a well-intentioned retiree who, with additional free time in retirement, sought out a volunteer opportunity without considering if he had the appropriate skillset.

People volunteer for various reasons: to boost social capital, because they are required to by work or school, due to an implicit belief of “it’s the right thing to do,” or to learn new things, among other reasons. 

Volunteering is a common-sense^[3] value in America. In fact, people’s dedication to volunteering is a defining characteristic of American culture in that it embodies the highly regarded individualism that influences so much of America’s social policy.

The intense pressure from funders and taxpayers for low-cost, high-efficiency, and easily measurable activity from nonprofits prevents a critical examination of the limits of volunteer labor. In a blog post, Volunteerism and Expertise, artist-educator-scholar Pablo Helguera challenges us to consider why certain skills are deemed acceptable to be carried out by volunteers versus professionals. Using the programming at an art museum as an example, he suggests that an institution would never rely on volunteers to curate an art museum; however, when it comes to the education department, volunteers providing programming is not only normalized, but often suggested as a best practice and cost-saving measure.

Unsupported and untrained volunteers contributed to this organization offering suboptimal, sometimes problematic, tutoring under the guise of charity. I will provide a few examples from working with my tutor, Robert (a pseudonym), that demonstrate how volunteerism resulted in ineffective and problematic tutoring:

• Curriculum – Robert did not follow a curriculum, and the organization did not provide one. He had no literacy or general education training, and again, the organization did not provide any. He created a curriculum based on his current understanding of what education “should” be, influenced by his own private high school education fifty years ago. For example, the vocabulary words he chose for his student to learn were words he “thought she should know.”
• Culturally sustaining pedagogy – Nonprofit organizations are disproportionately located and provide services in divested neighborhoods where public social services have failed or been withheld. Education nonprofits frequently aim to support students of color, students of low socioeconomic status, English language learners, and immigrants or children of immigrants. Simultaneously, volunteers in the U.S. are disproportionately white.
  
  This was the case for Robert and his student.
  
  Robert is a white cishet male; his student is Latina and a child of immigrant parents. Robert lacked the cultural competency essential to facilitating culturally sustaining pedagogy. Like many white volunteers, Robert viewed those he was helping through a deficit-based and assimilationist perspective. In his mind, he was there to help her successfully navigate an English-centered, white world, thereby dismissing her culture.
• Teaching style – Informed by the two deficiencies listed above, Robert taught in a didactic manner that reinforced the banking model of education^[4] and undercut the student’s agency in her learning.

Coalescing with these individual-level deficiencies were various, common organizational shortcomings that further exacerbated issues of equity and quality. It was unclear if or how the organization was evaluating its tutoring program. While certainly not a holistic measure of success, they did not track measurables such as test scores or report card grades.

To be clear, I am not advocating for educational programs’ worth to be measured solely by changes in grades and test scores, but there must be some metrics to assess program value and growth. Relatedly, the scope of programming was small; tutoring was strictly limited to one hour a week. To serve as many students as possible and make claims of more significant impact, the organization limited the amount of tutoring per student that could occur, perhaps unintentionally putting their interests before those of the students. 

In recent years, many organizations have been considering barriers to access; typically, organizations focus on surface-level accessibility, such as financial and geographical. Fewer organizations are tackling issues such as decolonizing white spaces and supporting multicultural onto-epistemologies. 

This program was offered free of charge, aside from a nonrefundable deposit, but it was housed in the organization’s downtown building with limited parking. In a city with subpar public transportation, this barrier results in exclusion for many students and families. 

I was struck by how such problematic and ineffective aspects of the tutoring program went unquestioned while being marketed and seen as altruistic charity. But this is often how white saviorism manifests collectively. White saviorism is often seen as an individual occurrence, carried out by a white individual or group of white individuals who “fix” something, but less attention is given to how other white people appropriate that savior activity to repress feelings of guilt, responsibility, and accountability, and ultimately remain complacent. 

Teju Cole sums it up in his book of essays, Known and Strange Things, “the white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening” (2016, p. 340).

Ineffective and problematic programs like these function more as a “patina of caring and concern to the ruling class which funds the work” (Kivel, 2007/2017, p. 130) than an asset to the community. Dunning adds that this function of nonprofits “provides the perfect avenue by which to express . . . concern for poverty [and other inequities] without threatening the political-economic status quo” (2022, p.58).

The number of nonprofit organizations in the U.S. will almost definitely continue to expand in the coming decades. The question then is, “How can progress toward equity and liberation be achieved within the nonprofit structure?” Viewing this through a lens of worldmaking, it is a question of how to create new worlds within our existing worlds. As Nelson Goodman puts it in his book Ways of Worldmaking, “Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking” (1978, p. 6). Both the classroom and the nonprofit structure offer possibilities for this (re)making. Speaking directly to the nonprofit industrial complex, authors Zac Chapman and Nairuti Shastry propose in their recent essay, Will the Revolution Be Funded?, that we “build strategic alignment across groups working within, without, and against philanthropy.” Below, I offer a few thoughts on how educational nonprofits can work within, without, and against the nonprofit industrial complex.

Remaking the relationship: Locations of possibility

I am reminded of bell hooks’ assertion that “the classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility . . . [where] we have the opportunity to . . . collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress” (1994, p. 207). 

Education is a tool that can either function to perpetuate the hegemonic one-world world or be the means by which we collectively create a pluriverse^[5] of new worlds. 

Using the example of the access paradox of English language education, literacy scholar Hilary Janks argues that to disrupt it, educators must remind themselves and their students that “the power of English is neither natural nor unassailable” (2004, p. 36). She suggests that as teachers provide access to the English language, they must also provide an understanding of how English became dominant and how it continues its hegemony today. 

Teaching must also remind students of the ephemerality of language and that English is continually reinvented, identifying the existing diversity even within this dominant language. Then, they can be encouraged to redesign and transform English to dismantle systems of domination. 

Concurrently, students must be supported in maintaining and developing their home languages so as to simultaneously weaken the linguistic capital^[6] of English.

Similar to the possibility for radical (re)making found in the practice of education, Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse write in the foreword to the seminal book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, that “the nonprofit can be a vital site from which a great range of workers, activists, advocates, and community members collaboratively transform the conditions of everyday life” (2007/2017, p. xx). 

I have spent a lot of time focusing on how nonprofit organizations participate in and perpetuate the nonprofit industrial complex. However, in their third sector role, blurring the lines between the public and private sectors, nonprofits have a unique capacity and positionality for disruption and transformation. I offer the following questions for education nonprofit organizations to consider:

• Are the programs and services offered responsive to the community that the organization serves? How is that determined and known?
• Is the organization constantly assessing and reassessing programs for quality, efficacy, relevance, and responsiveness? 
• How does the organization determine if it is the right organization to offer its programs and services? And if the programs and services are appropriate?
• How does the organization partner and work with schools, families, students, and communities? Are power relations examined? Do students, families, and other community members have decision-making power? Is the organization operating from a deficit-based and assimilationist approach?
• Does the organization incorporate some level of advocacy and movement work to serve both the local and individual needs of the community it is accountable to while also working to dismantle the systems of oppression that perpetuate the need for the organization’s services?
• Should the organization continue to exist? or give itself a time limit? Scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “The purpose of the work is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity” (2007/2017, p. 51).
• How is the organization working to disrupt the ways that American schooling sustains the dominant onto-epistemologies of the one-world world?

Our neoliberal and technocratic society has convinced us that scalability, efficiency, and replicability are characteristics of success. It has also persuaded us to believe that stopping equates to failing and that recognizing and admitting our weakness and limitations is a sign of inadequacy. Cultural thinker Diane Ragsdale writes in her essay To What End Permanence? that because of this “nonprofits are quite often established with perpetuity in their sights” (p. 121, 2019). 

Specifically about arts organizations deciding whether or not to continue existing, she writes that “the decision … needs to be about something more than whether there is a stash of fixed assets, sufficient cash in the bank, subscribers and donors willing to renew, players wanting to play, and individuals technically qualified and desiring to take over” (p. 121, 2019). This is just as applicable to education nonprofit organizations. 

In addition to sustaining the status quo, assumed permanence and rigidity prevents the innovation, responsiveness, and flexibility that is required to continually address community needs and desires while simultaneously disrupting systems of oppressions. Let’s use our creativity, responsiveness, and unique position to continually (re)define the function of both the nonprofit sector and education in the United States.

Footnotes

1. For a detailed history of urban renewal and its impact on United States’ cities, I recommend Dr. Mindy Fullilove’s book, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It.
2. For more information about how U.S. public schools receive and spend money, I recommend Bruce Baker’s book, Educational Inequality and School Finance.
3. I am using Antonio Gramsci’s concept of senso comune (common sense) “the term he uses for all those heterogeneous beliefs people arrive at not through critical reflection, but encounter as already existing, self-evident truths” (Crehan, 2016, p. x).
4. See Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
5. “the practice of a world of many worlds . . . heterogeneous worlding coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 4).
6. See Pierre Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power.

References

Baker, B. (2022). Educational inequality and school finance: Why money matters for America’s students (2nd ed.). Harvard Education Press. (2018)

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. Thompson, Ed., G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Cadena, M., & Blaser, M. (2018). Pluriverse: Proposals for a world of many worlds. In M. Cadena & M. Blaser (Eds.), A world of many worlds (pp. 1 – 22). Duke University Press.

Chapman, Z., & Shastry, N. (2024, June 11). Will the revolution be funded? The Forge. https://forgeorganizing.org/article/will-revolution-be-funded 

Cole, T. (2016). Known and strange things: Essays. Random House.

Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and its narratives. Duke University Press.

Dunning, C. (2022). Nonprofit neighborhoods: An urban history of inequality and the American state. The University of Chicago Press.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary edition. The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. (1970).

Fullilove, M. T. (2016). Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it (2nd ed.). New Village Press.

Gilmore, R. W. (2017). In the shadow of the shadow state. In INCITE! (Ed.), The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (pp. 41 – 52). Duke University Press. (2007).

Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Hackett Publishing Company.

Helguera, P. (2021, October 29). Volunteerism and expertise: If we truly value the museum education profession, why should it be expected to be volunteer work? Beautiful Eccentrics. https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/volunteerism-and-expertise 

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. 

Janks, H. (2004). The access paradox. English in Australia, 129, (33 – 42).

Kivel, P. (2017). Social Service or Social Change? In INCITE! (Ed.), The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (pp. 129 – 149). Duke University Press. (2007).

Morris, A. J. F. (2009). The limits of voluntarism: Charity and welfare from the New Deal through the Great Society. Cambridge University Press.

Munshi, S., & Willse, C. (2017). Foreword. In INCITE! (Ed.), The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (pp. xiii – xxii). Duke University Press. (2007).

Ragsdale, R. (2019). To what end permanence? In M. Joseph & D. Bruin (Eds.), A moment of the clock of the world: A foundry theatre production (pp. 111 – 122). Haymarket Books.