The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex caught my eye from the moment I saw it. I’ll admit that I was nervous to see what the essays edited by INCITE! Women of Color would say about the industry I had chosen. What I found were incredibly validating tales and analysis of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC). Was nonprofit work really a means of achieving liberation? Or does it just keep activists too busy to notice their own exploitation and deradicalization?
Palestine
On the fourth paragraph of the entire book, before any definition of the NPIC, before the introduction or even the foreword, Andrea Smith shared how a foundation punished INCITE! for authentically living their mission. Her experience was both incredibly validating and eerily uncanny to my own. She writes,
We then soon discovered that the revolution would not be funded when the Ford Foundation, who had promised us a $100,000 grant and told us we could commit the funds to various projects, suddenly retracted the grant because of our solidarity statement in support of Palestine. We found ourselves in a major financial crisis because the funds had already been committed and we had about six weeks to raise $60,000 for our next national conference. And yet we managed to do this. So, we learned on one hand that there are other ways to resource movements when we think outside the foundation universe.
Andrea Smith, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Preface, pp. ix-x
This may have been the fastest that a book has pulled me in. It was as if Smith was speaking to me directly.
What is the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC)?
Dylan Rodríguez, the author of a later chapter, defines the nonprofit industrial complex as “a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance over public ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.” If you’re like me, however, a bulleted list of the goals of nonprofits under capitalism may prove more accessible:
- 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.
Andrea Smith, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Introduction, p. 3
Someone had put into words the world I had been living in for so long that I couldn’t have done it myself.
In the following essay, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” Rodríguez precisely (albeit not concisely) outlines exactly why the NPIC is so dangerous for liberation movements:
- The staunch criminalization of particular political practices embodied by radical and otherwise critically “dissenting” activists, intellectuals, and ordinary people of color; that is to say, when racially pathologized bodies take on political activities critical of US state violence […] they are […] “criminals” […] and, therefore, as essentially opportunistic, misled, apolitical, or even amoral social actors;
- the fundamental political constriction […] of the appropriate venues and protocols of agitation for social change […];
- the state-facilitated and fundamentally punitive bureaucratization of social change and dissent, […] funneling activists into the hierarchical rituals and restrictive professionalism of discrete campaigns, think tanks, and organizations, outside of which it is usually profoundly difficult to organize a critical mass of political movement […].
Dylan Rodríguez, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” p. 26 (emphasis in original)
Using the simplest terms possible, I described this in the margin as, “1. People are criminalized. 2. Our avenues for progress are restricted. 3. We are funneled into organizations.”
The cavern of fear
Another result of the NPIC that Rodríguez explores is the way that it colludes with the state to strike fear — very specific fear — into the hearts of American citizens. He uses the following quote from a correspondence by political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal in defining this “cavern of fear”:
Americans live in a cavern of fear, a psychic, numbing force manufactured by the so-called entertainment industry, reified by the psychological industry, and buttressed by the coercion industry (i.e., the courts, police, prisons, and the like). The social psychology of America is being fed by a media that threatens all with an army of psychopathic, deviant, sadistic madmen bent on ravishing a helpless, prone citizenry. The state’s coercive apparatus of “public safety” is erected as a needed protective counter-point.
Mumia Abu-Jamal in a 1998 correspondence to the participants of the conference Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, quoted in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex”
It astounds me when I see quotes like this from 1998, as well as Rodríguez’s application of it in his essay in the 2007 book, because of how perfectly they describe what I’ve witnessed in 2025 and recent years. For example, I can only describe the environment at Americans United and its allies in the 50501 movement as one of curated fear: fear of the Republican party, of Trump, of religious extremism.
I literally designed an ad that said, “Christian Nationalism is un-American. And dangerous. And authoritarian. And hateful … and it’s coming for you.” The Mother Jones ad was part of a summer 2024 AU marketing campaign combating Project 2025. The campaign had calls to action such as donating to AU and spreading the word about Project 2025, but in the end it was a very un-subtle way of telling their audience to vote for Kamala Harris.
But the mass deportation and incarceration, the empty promises to the working people, and the genocide committed by the Democratic party are treated as “complicated,” mere imperfections of the “progressive” party that is supposed to be saving us. The truth is that neither Democrats nor Republicans have any plans to save anyone. This isn’t a doomer take, but a call to action. We must abandon the two-party system and save ourselves.
The selling of fear is a tactic to numb people, as opposed to sharing a righteous anger that will move people to act. As Abu-Jamal said, fear is a “numbing force” that will make the citizenry feel helpless. I have seen firsthand — no, I have worked firsthand to help nonprofits profit off of this fear. They want their audiences feel to that there is nothing they can do but donate to the nonprofit so that it can save them. This method actively takes people away from community organizing and tells them to hope and pray that nonprofits and Democrats will do something.
Nonprofits as a function of capitalism
It makes sense then, that it would be in a nonprofit’s best interest to keep its focus narrow. Not only would anti-capitalist attitudes alert its base to the common capitalist goals between Democrats and Republicans, but it could awaken supporters to the capitalist structure of the nonprofit itself. A raised suspicion towards the flow of big nonprofit dollars on the part of employees and members would threaten funding from rich donors — and the nonprofit’s status quo.
Rodríguez writes,
I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their non-profit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutions.
Dylan Rodríguez, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” p. 34
Quotes like this one were what made this book so validating — and also so difficult — for me. I had been removed from my own nonprofit employer’s religious freedom conference for wearing a keffiyeh to show support for Palestine, and later I was offered $11,000 to stay quiet about it. When I learned that Americans United had a major donor whose own website says they will not support any organization who is not pro-Israel, I could suddenly see the walls of the NPIC that had surrounded me and my work for so long.
Put simply,
Given that white-led social justice groups, claiming to work on behalf of the oppressed and people of color, often rely on their existing and potential relationships with wealthy white people to sustain their organizations at best presents a serious conflict of interest.
Tiffany Lethabo King & Ewuare Osayande, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “The Filth on Philanthropy,” p. 83 (emphasis mine)
A universal trauma
In the essay “We Were Never Meant To Survive,” Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo shares one of her own experiences working at the Support Network for Battered Women in 1995. I was floored at the similarities between her experience and my own, but at the same time — given what my comrades and I had gone through — I was not at all surprised.
While working in the “Latina program” at the Support Network for Battered Women, I learned that an immigrant Latina has been brutally beaten by “la Migra” (immigration law enforcement). I approach the executive director with an op-ed I wrote on behalf of the program that speaks out against all forms of violence against Latinas, including both domestic violence and anti-immigrant state violence. (The executive director’s approval is needed prior to publishing anything.) She tells me the board would never allow such an opinion to represent the organization because it is not allowed to take a political stance and “this” (the INS beating, not domestic violence) is clearly a political issue.
Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “We Were Never Meant To Survive,” p. 114
One would think that state violence against Latina women is just as relevant to the Support Network for Battered Women’s work as domestic violence is. Likewise, my pro-Palestine comrades at Americans United were always rightly infuriated that AU would not take a stance on the genocide in Palestine, despite it being a religious freedom issue and therefore under the Americans United umbrella. But that conflict of interest between justice and “the board” shattered our hope for that, just as it had shattered Rojas Durazo’s hope in her own organization twenty years earlier.
With nonprofits, it is not about doing the right thing.
“Organizations that are able to operate and function and have enough resources to hire staff . . . are careful and strategic about what they say. There are lines they do not cross, or else they are penalized. . . . Basically, it is not okay for organizations to address Zionism or historic Palestine. . . . Follow the money, and it’s clear that foundations are driving these and other political agendas.”
Zeina Zaatari, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “The NGOization of the Palestine Liberation Movement,” p. 174
The future of nonprofits
In a capitalist society, there is only one owning class. The rich are the rich. Nonprofits teach us to think that we can make change using funds from the “good” rich people. But foundation money is not free. With it, activists find themselves with a conflict of interest.
Are you in a contentious relationship with those in power? The ruling class—those at the top of the pyramid—have an aggressive and persistent agenda to disempower and exploit those at the bottom. If you are accountable to those at the bottom of the pyramid, you will necessarily be challenging that agenda. Are you willing to speak truth to power, even at the risk of losing your current job or future employment by certain agencies? Or do you hold back your real opinion so as not to make waves when you are at the “power-sharing” table? How have you come to justify your reluctance to challenge power?
Paul Kivel, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “Social Service or Social Change,” p. 147 (emphasis in original)
Does this mean that nonprofits cannot do any good? It would be reasonable enough to ask how a nonprofit can operate without donor or foundation money. It comes down to choosing between your principles and your position of power and legitimacy.
I know this is easier said than done, but The Revolution Will Not Be Funded included many stories of activists rejecting luxury so that they could do the work with little to no money. I already spoke of how INCITE! raised $60,000 in six weeks when a $200,000 grant fell through because of their support for Palestine. Additionally, the National Coalition of Antiviolence Programs rejected $600,000 from the Department of Justice after the agency “refused the group’s references to lesbian battering, racism, and commitment to organizing.” In the ’60s and ’70s, organizers with the American Indian Movement and Women of All Red Nations relied on the communities they served for donations, volunteers, and even lodging. Sista II Sista, an organization praised widely throughout the book, even “de-501(c)(3)iz[ed]” at the time the book was written around 2006.
I don’t know what will come of the nonprofit industry, and I’m curious to see how the genocide in Palestine affects the legacy of nonprofits in the coming years and decades. What I do know is that it reading the timeless essays in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded will open the minds of nonprofit workers and anyone who puts their faith in the nonprofit industrial complex.