Selling Whose Truth? Philanthropy and Youth Organizing in the Progressive Midwest

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-2 - Black and Latinx Youth Identities in Action: Activism, Affirmation, and Exclusion Within Community-Based Spaces

Abstract

Overview: Nonprofit groups like community-based organizations operate at a paradoxical junction. They must meet philanthropic-centered standards of success and at the same time, strive to meet the obligations relevant to the communities they wish to work alongside and serve. This creates direct tensions between the organizing efforts of the young people of color in these spaces and the organizations in which their efforts are affiliated.
Theories/Methods: “Commoditized social relations” within the private, non-profit sector are needed in order to supplement the public sector (Gerwitz, et. al., 1994). At the center of this structural contradiction lies the conceptualization of false generosity or “the idea that some acts of generosity are driven by concern about public perception and a desire to be seen as a politically correct, progressive person, who says the right thing and contributes to the right causes” (Patel, 2013). Small acts that often make subjects feel better about being involved in a global society predicated on stratification wholly do nothing for larger systems at play. The cycle of community power and resistance being met with the struggles of cooptation remains an all too familiar reality. Living at the whim of the state, most community-centered partnerships are inherently subject to the tenets of power and privilege. Knowing this, how do philanthropic groups conceptualize of youth of color? How and in what ways do young organizers of color experience the influences of those philanthropic groups’ conceptualizations?
Methods: In the first stage of this project, ethnographic methods of inquiry centered on participant observations and were triangulated with individual interviews and discourse analysis. This paper draws on 30 semi-structured interviews and participant observation with participants from “Rainier Community Center’s AYE (Action and Youth Empowerment) Program,” a youth organizing program within a community organization over a 2-year period. In order to truly understand how the findings from this previous study and the pending findings of my work on philanthropic groups, I use a bifocal (Lois & Fine, 2012), multi-level unit analysis using mixed methods data.

Findings: Data show the goals and desires of the youth workers and broader local community conflict with the intentions of youth organizers - most of these odds blooming from guilt-driven approaches to working with youth of color. Although the organization’s directors see value in promoting activism and political consciousness in youth participants, it is in their best financial interest to keep the fire as laid back as possible. Young organizers are aware of the influences of philanthropic-rooted accountability standards and feel conflicted on ways to address them.

Implications: Community-based organizations operate at a contradictory intersection of building relationships with large, wealthy philanthropic groups with direct ties to oppressive, pro-capitalist institutions and meeting the obligations these organizations hold within their communities. This paper considers how information regarding philanthropic influences on programming is shared with the public and holds important implications for how philanthropic groups conceptualize young people of color.

Author

• Marlo A. Reeves, Independent Consultant