Stop clout chasing!! Giving a little to take a lot from poor communities. Grant giving is being used by the non-profit industrial complex to use poor people's clout for financial and political gain! Read the story!

It’s terrifying to hear people on staff at young community organizing and climate justice organizations across the state and country say that they look up to PUSH Buffalo as an example of what they want to “be” when they “grow up.” The truth is, PUSH Buffalo is not a success story, and one of the purposes of this movement is to examine why, and what has gone wrong. There are many people and situations to blame for PUSH Buffalo’s lying and community harm, and one that has been there since the beginning is grants – aka the money $$!! Grants are a major way that nonprofit organizations fund their operations, pay themselves, and pay their workers.

Grants are terrible.

PUSH Buffalo was founded in 2005 with powerful, revolutionary ideas about people power and what it means for a community to have control of their neighborhood, but then it began landing huge grants from City, County, State, and Federal government agencies, as well as many wealthy individuals and private foundations. The influx of money and pressure to keep making more caused PUSH Buffalo to grow crazy fast and make promises that were impossible to keep. Its programs, campaigns, and human relationships have never been able to keep up with its promises to foundations and government agencies. Much of PUSH’s current struggle and workplace toxicity can be blamed on lack of capacity and money problems. 

Grants are terrible. PUSH Buffalo is a greedy, harmful, slow-motion train wreck of an organization trying to survive in the nonprofit industrial complex. Nonprofit organizations are just another component of our global capitalist death trap that squashes revolutionary ideas and community control of resources. Incite!, the company that publishes a book called “The Revolution Will Not be Funded”, defines the nonprofit industrial complex this way:

“The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:

• • the State (or local and federal governments)
  • the owning classes
  • foundations; and
  • non-profit/NGO (non-governmental organization), social service
  • & social justice organizations 

that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.

The state uses non-profits to:

• • Monitor and control social justice movements;
  • Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;
  • Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;
  • Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;
  • Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work;
  • Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.”

Based on our experiences at PUSH Buffalo, there is so much to say about grants, grant cycles, and how they interfere with a community organizers’ ability to affect real change. Here are some of our thoughts on why grants are terrible for community organizing and social justice movements:

• • Grants are a Ponzi scheme and once you hop on the grant wagon, you can’t get out of the cycles without firing people and cutting services. Yay, you won a $100,000 grant! Now, you must spend that grant within the one-year grant period. You must spend all of the money on what you said you would spend it on 5 months ago. The foundation or government agency might cut you a check at the beginning or the cycle, or you might have to make the purchase yourself and then put in for reimbursement. There is no guarantee that you will get the grant again the next year
  • Many grants are only available once, and never again. So if you use some of the grant money to hire a community organizer this year, you will have to reapply or find a new grant to pay them next year. Otherwise, good thing PUSH Buffalo is an at at-will employer.
  • Each grant has a different application process, eligibility requirements, timeframes, amounts, evaluation guidelines, and reporting requirements. Once the organization gets big enough, it’s at least one full-time job (often more – larger nonprofits have entire Development Departments) to keep up with all of the grants. If you don’t keep up, you don’t get the money, so development staff are concerned about money only – they don’t do on-the-ground community work, and are out-of-touch with the practical needs of the community and the organizers that are supporting them. Grant requests are often lost in translation as the grant writer is trying to meet deadlines and sell a program that they don’t fully understand themselves. In other words, the staff and organization become more accountable to the grant requirements than to the community they claim to serve in their reports. 
  • The roots of racism, sexism, ableism, capitalism, and the climate crisis cannot be addressed by the restrictive and narrowly focused grant making system.
  • The grant making system sets up another unbalanced relationship between the rich person, foundation, or government agency giving the money and the organization getting the money for the supposed benefit of the community.
  • Grants are a branch of the capitalism machine – they let rich people and corporations pay less taxes, all while looking good and building their brand (marketing) — for them, it’s a glorious combination of bigger profits and less taxes, while the community suffers and revolutionary ideas stay small.
  • Grants are a way for rich people and corporations to parasitize off the work, love, community building, and people power that has been generated by community organizers and members who are working for justice in their neighborhood.
  • Grants facilitate the theft of intellectual property and the ideas of brilliant People of Color (POC) and women.
  • Grants make people and organizations audition their poverty to wealthy people, foundations, and governments, all while they expect you to do something innovative. It’s disgusting.
  • Grants force you to write your future before you know what you’re going to do. This creates new work, and it’s the work that makes it a lie because we are trying to predict one, two, sometimes three years ahead, and that is impossible in community organizing work. We have to invent new things to do because no one pays to do the things that need to be done. For example, there is no accounting foundation or funds for nonprofit office management.
  • Grants meet the needs of foundations and wealthy people to have something to talk about. “I give to this organization.” We, as community members or PUSH Buffalo staff, are just props in their story.
  • Grants force collaborations and bullshit coalitions between people and organizations that would rather not work together. Almost every time, foundations do not have enough money to fund all of the organizations that apply for a grant, so they spread it out and make it not-enough money for everyone. To add to the tension, the foundation will pick an anchor institution to take all of the money and deliver smaller amounts to the others (PUSH Buffalo has been in this position on multiple grants). This creates so much tension and terrible power dynamics between groups that should be working together on their own terms, or not at all.
  • Grants are inflexible. They leave no room for creative, iterative ideas to grow. They force the organization to focus on their image and reputation instead of actually fulfilling their mission.
  • Grants force community organizations doing policy work to influence the legislative process by focusing their campaigns on winning by passing legislation or getting a politician to do something instead of solving actual problems.

So yes, grants are terrible. They are a piece of the PUSH Buffalo toxicity puzzle that must be considered as we uncover what is actually going on at this messed up organization in this messed up system. We’ll explore more as we move on. 

Resources: