Foundations

From a recent review of the 2006 anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded:

‘Because the [Non-Profit Industrial Complex] looks for “measureable” outcomes, the people we hope to serve and love become “clients”, “constituents”, “customers” and “contacts” rather than brother and sisters or neighbors. We begin to fetishize people. We pity them. We begin to believe that they need our unique service and that they have nothing of value to share with us. The more of “them” we see or help as a non-profit, the more funding we receive. This dichotomy—between “us” and “them”—is just one such disastrous and unintended consequence of the NPIC.’

There’s been some really excellent critique of the White Savior Industrial Complex around the web these last few months, but not quite as much on how much these assumptions are baked into, and facilitated by, the legal and regulatory regime of civil society and its funding.