The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Five folks who put on all-ages punk shows around town got together a few months ago to talk about creating a permanent all-ages venue in New Orleans, where we live. We are all in bands and we all book shows for bands on tour and we're all invested in providing an alternative to the 21+ bar show in a city where bar shows reign supreme. Some of us have been frustrated at the process of looking high and low for a house or other DIY space to put a show every time a band gets in touch to say that they'll be coming through town. We figured it would be worth it to sit down and talk about the possibility of having a spot that is available every night of the week and commercially zoned so we'd never have to worry about cops.

Of course, our first big questions were, where would this new all-ages venue be and how would we afford it? We were unanimously against charging high prices at the door in order to cover rent. It's enough to worry about getting gas money for bands without having to also worry about covering rent, and none of us seemed interested in passing the extra costs on to the people who would be coming to the shows. Next option? Become a non-profit, one of us suggested. Get funding from an outside source to make this thing work.

Throughout our discussion, it was understood that everyone wanted to make sure everything was going to be legit, which makes sense. Every house show you put on, you wonder if the cops are gonna come by and shut it down. It would be awesome to have DIY all-ages shows and not have to worry about all that. I get that. But then again, a bigger part of me is wondering, isn't this what DIY and punk and anarchism is all about is operating outside of the law and operating without funding?

A couple of months later, I was talking to this lady Corrina who sings for this local band called Crackbox. She's been thinking about starting Home Alive out here (if you don't know about the original Home Alive in Seattle, please look it up!) She's done self-defense training for women here and there in the past and wants to start having classes again on a regular basis here in New Orleans. Awesome idea. I've been to self-defense trainings that my friends and housemates organized when I lived in Portland and they were really important events. When Corrina started talking about how she wanted to get grants to fund a workshop featuring the women who founded Home Alive Seattle, I asked her why she didn't start small and just teach a class or two herself in someone's house or at Nowe Miasto, this warehouse in Mid-City where a bunch of our friends live.

It could be that I'm misunderstanding some part of Corrina's plan, and that non-profit funding would be the most ideal way for her to make Home Alive New Orleans real. But after our conversation I was really confused about why her idea had to be a non-profit, especially right away. I'm not telling this story to criticize her or her idea; I'd love to see women's self-defense classes happen in whatever way they're gonna happen in this city and when it does, I'll support it in any way I can. I just wonder, why make it so complicated? I want everyone to feel empowered to make things happen now with the whatever resources you have at the moment. Isn't that kind of urgency and self-determination central to who we are as a community?

I really think it's time to rethink the whole non-profit style of organizing and making things happen. As I understand it, in order to apply for grants, you have to register with the U.S. government as a 501c3 organization, which is the same as having non-profit status. I really do think it's a bad sign that the vast majority of today's activism in our country (whether it be political or cultural) is registered through the United States government. It wasn't always this way, and I think that the transition to non-profit activism has everything to do with our government being able to keep tabs on and contain political and cultural resistance.

Also, most grant money ultimately flows down from rich individuals and families who are just looking for a tax shelter for all of their damn money. When rich folks start up a foundation, it's so that they can hoard more of their wealth instead of letting their money flow into the public sphere in the form of taxes. In other words, if you're working on the books for minimum wage or close to it, you're probably paying more percentage-wise in taxes than a rich person is. I think accepting money from foundations in the form of grants reinforces the mythology that all life springs from corporations and corporate money, and that we are helpless without it. In many ways, being a non-profit makes your anti-establishment political or cultural organization part of the establishment.

I learned a lot of this stuff in 2003 when I went to this conference in California put on by this organization called INCITE Women of Color Against Violence. It's a bunch of academics and some activists that run it, and I know there's also a semi-active INCITE chapter here in New Orleans. Anyway, the conference was called “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded” and they also put a book by the same title, shortly after the conference. Don't let those middle-aged lady professors fool you, they are radical. They call the land of non-profits the Non-profit Industrial Complex and take us back to a time when activism didn't have corporate funding. The Black Panthers were not a non-profit, dude! And you can talk all the trash you want about how the National Organization of Women (NOW) is full of liberal, 2nd-wave feminist, white lady uselessness, but you gotta acknowledge the fact that as of the early 2000s they were (and probably still are) totally funded by individuals who believe in them, their members. NOW is not a non-profit.

As far as the all-ages show space thing goes, I also disagree with the idea that people can own property and believe that property ownership is a figment of our capitalist imaginations. I already pay my landlord rent every month, so I'm not really down to be involved in yet another rental contract with yet another landlord, even if it's being paid for with someone else's money. The more I think about it, the more meaning I find in the hunt for another underground space to put my next show.

I know people who do great things with their non-profits. An old friend of mine created the Prison Birth Project in Massachusetts where she acts as a midwife and doula to women in prison who are pregnant and giving birth. This is important work and there's no way I'm going to denounce it just because I am critical of non-profits. She's got a kid and she deserves to get paid for her work, just like anyone else. Besides, all of us are always picking and choosing which aspects of capitalism we're willing to deal with and which one's we're not. It's hard to be an anti-capitalist purist in a capitalist reality. I just want us all to be strategic about when we engage with the the system. It seems like turning your newest idea into a non-profit organization has become such a natural way to imagine things working, but it's not natural. It's actually a relatively new way of organizing ourselves. I think we should all look at the history of non-profit organizing and question it and consider whether it's absolutely necessary to use that model.

From The Revolution Will Not Be Funded:

“And what are our priorities? Perhaps the real problem is that we don’t spend enough time imagining what we want and then doing the work to sustain that vision. That is one of the fundamental ways the corporate-capitalist system tames us: by robbing us of our time and flooding us in a sea of bureaucratic red tape, which we are told is a necessary evil for guaranteeing our organization’s existence. We are too busy being told to market ourselves by pimping our communities’ poverty in proposals, selling “results” in reports and accounting for our finances in financial reviews.

“In essence, our organizations have become mini-corporations, because on some level, we have internalized the idea that power—the ability to create change—equals money.” --Amara Perez, Sisters in Action for Power, Portland, Oregon

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