In its power-based organizing days, San Fransciso’s Mission Coalition Organization held rent strike rallies every Sunday. (Courtesy of Spence Limbocker)

It’s easy to condemn corporate power, profiteering, and executive officer greed; for-sale politicians; and unresponsive bureaucracies. It’s not so easy to criticize innovative, small-scale, community-based, progressive, entrepreneurial, relevant, low-budget nonprofit organizations. And yet, that’s what I propose here to do.

Some years ago I studied the relationship between community organizing and community development corporations. North, south, east, west, the pattern was the same: the former disappeared as the latter appeared.

In New York City, I spoke with a former Harlem tenant union organizer. This once-promising effort of the 1970s had disappeared. “What happened?” I asked. He replied, “The organizers became executive directors and program staff; the leaders became boards of directors; the members became clients.”

In the mid- to late-1960s, I was lead organizer for San Francisco’s Mission Coalition Organization (MCO). Its housing committee organized building-by-building tenant associations that militantly confronted abusive landlords. Its community maintenance committee aggressively dealt with street maintenance, abandoned buildings, and redlining. Its planning committee blocked high-density developments that would have altered the character of the neighborhood. Together, the MCO and its predecessor blocked urban renewal bulldozers from demolishing a community. Parallel action by jobs, education, and other committees yielded similar results.

Model Cities funding ended it all. What had been committees of one organization became separate nonprofit organizations. What had been an organization with an annual convention attended by 1,000 delegates and alternates from 100 organizations with a combined membership of 12,000, who elected their leaders and held them accountable, became self-perpetuating boards of directors unaccountable to anyone. Power-based negotiations with decision-makers, backed by direct action when needed, gave way to supplication and “influence” as these groups first received government funding then had to transition to foundation grants.

The Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a major leader in East Brooklyn Churches (EBC), a broad-based community organization, told a December 1995 funders conference, “Thirty winters ago … we were witnessing some of the key early struggles of the civil rights movement in this country. ... It was a time of disciplined demonstrations, civil and mostly civilized disobedience. Thirty winters later, ... there are thousands of agencies and programs and development corporations and so-called job training efforts. There are hundreds of conferences and reports and studies. But no war, no battle, no front fully engaged against the forces of deepened poverty and hardened discrimination.”

Youngblood said he “would title his remarks a little differently from the conference theme of ‘collaboration, coordination and community building.’” He preferred “a call for organizing, confrontation and community building.” The funders’ theme of “public-private partnerships,” he said, “usually involve the private sector and the government sector, with a token community advocate or preacher on the board for window-dressing. This kind of response tends to be tame and non-confrontational. ... It tends to be small in scale. It tends to be acceptable to funders. ... And it tends not to have very much impact.” The sad fact is that what Youngblood said then is still true, if not truer, today.

The case I want to make is not about thinly disguised corporate money expressly trying to undermine social justice work. That happens, but I’m concerned about a subtler, more nuanced problem.