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CREATING CHANGE OR CREATING CHAINS?

With the dismantling of the “welfare state” in the 1980s, many non-profits have Reagan to thank for their now booming business. At $1.3 trillion dollars in the United States alone, the non-profit industrial complex is larger than most countries. What was once commonly understood as the “job” of the government was then forced back into the public sector. Through this shift basic services such as medical and emergency shelter are now the responsibility of non-profits. It would seem unthinkable fifty years ago that the major efforts to help people affected by “natural disasters” would be in the hands of individual groups.

As a result of this swelling need for services non-profits have also been forced into a constant scramble for securing funds to continue their work. Without a critique of capitalism, many non-profits simply continue to write grant after grant application while abandoning their original statement of purpose.

This corporatization of non-profits also continues to centralize power in the hands of boards of directors or trustees and executive directors while ensuring people whom they “serve” are locked out of these processes. Within the recent past it seems impossible to find a non-profit whose “directors” do not hold Masters degrees or higher.

The Non-profit Industrial Complex is also organized from the top down. Mimicking all other authoritarian institutions,  (the military, government, corporations) non-profits disempower people by teaching them to make copies and collect signatures and not organize direct actions or share practice skills for undoing power. How can we feel inspired and empowered to change the conditions of our lives when the non-profits we are working for the same things as those we are working against?

Funding for larger non-profits often times comes from Foundations. Foundations are the endowments of for-profit businesses and serve as tax shelters. A business can create a “Foundation” which is tax deductible and in turn can have financial control over a non-profit.  Would a non-profit work against their own financial support? Wells Fargo, one of the primary sponsors of the NGLTF has a long history of racist banking practices. For example in the Mission District of San Francisco, a historically Latina/o neighborhood ATMs are locked tight by 7pm every night while locations in the whitewashed Castro is ready to keep those rainbow dollars flowing all night. 

Some non-profits start out as small community groups run and organized by people already in need of these services. Non-profits that stay committed to this vision more often than not end up being forced to disband or run out of town. How can a community run AIDS food program stay alive when all the resources are being funneled into Marriage Equality?

Surviving non-profits

**Use the photocopier for all your activist needs, and let all the radical collectives in town know you have access.

**Use your time there to research projects that can become direct-action and to find scandalous information about your own non-profit. Did the ED fly to Rio last week for an “Oakland community meeting”?

**Call in sick, often.

**Strategize with coworkers about how to stage a takeover of your non-profit.

**Collect home addresses, phone numbers and the likes of important city officials and socialites. Your non-profit’s phonebook may make a good read.

**Raid the office supply closet for paint, staplers, pens, tape and anything else that may be much more useful.

Creating Change™ Will NEVER Create Change
NGLTF-- Surrender Or Else!

GAY SHAME calls on you to resist the sham of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Creating Change Conference™ in Oakland, CA November 9-13 using direct action, infiltration, sabotage, redecoration, performance, disruption, transformation and anything else your delicious imagination concocts.

Each year, Creating Change™ recruits hundreds of fresh faces for corporate “nonprofit” jobs instead of challenging the career activist industry that serves to pacify threats to the status quo. Nonprofits claim to create an alternative to everyday oppression, when in reality they replicate the same deadly inequalities that exist in the larger world, continuing to benefit the privileged few at the top while robbing everyone else. Nonprofits mimic the power-hungry mentality of the corporate world by developing hierarchical organizations with Executive Directors and donors instead of CEOs and shareholders. Does NGLTF make sure their office's own janitorial staff has access to basic services like housing, healthcare, food, rest, transportation and free time? Are unpaid interns at NGLTF more empowered than temp workers at Halliburton?

We’re sick of the Creating Change™ money machine. How can we build an anti-racist movement at the Oakland Marriott City Center? Marriott is the Mormon-owned global tourism pioneer famous for building exclusive resorts on impoverished islands to help wealthy white people to participate in hands-on colonialism one Mai Tai luau at a time. How is supporting this chain helping indigenous communities to reclaim the land stolen from them? How will spending your money at the Marriott help to reduce backbreaking labor for poorly-paid housekeeping staff?

NGLTF is working hard for social and economic justice and freedom at the Advocate Golf Classic --presented by Subaru-- in the classic desert weather of Palm Springs. How much are undocumented immigrants being paid to water the sun-squelched golfing greens by cover of night? How many millions of gallons of water are pumped through underground aquifers hundreds of miles away, destroying wildlife habitats, ecological resources and community farming and rendering low-income communities powerless?

NGLTF is building an anti-racist movement at the Winter Party on the white sands of South Beach. Will the several thousand buff, tan white men PnP’ing to the sounds of Phil B. lead a revolt to free the hundreds of prisoners illegally jailed for their skin color and religious beliefs, 90 miles away at the US’s Guantanamo Bay naval base? Will a six-day crystal binge lead bench-pressing muscle queens to burn down police stations, end Jim Crow segregation, and dismantle the prison industrial complex?

This year’s Creating Change™ catalog invokes The Wizard of Oz to say, “Surrender, Dorothy? Never!” But GAY SHAME isn’t counting on the Good Witch to rescue us. NGLTF might break out the broom (or ask the janitorial staff to wheel in the Hoover), but in reality NGLTF prevents change by strengthening people’s allegiances to violent institutions like marriage and the military. Instead of salivating over straight privilege, Dorothy needs to concentrate on building radical alternatives. Until then… Surrender, or Else!

 

 

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