Member-only story
Featured
Social Justice Isn’t Profitable, but We Must do it Anyway
Even when there is no money and plenty of danger, the work must be done.
I work in the nonprofit field in the area of fundraising, and there is a lot of panic over federal funding for nonprofits right now. The Trump administration has unilaterally decided to pull as much grant funding as possible from nonprofits, particularly those doing social justice work of any kind.
The administration has gone so far as to ban certain words from federal grant applications. Hundreds of words, ranging from “gay” to “women” to “diversity” to “Gulf of Mexico” are no longer allowed and will get your application tossed out automatically.
Needless to say, the whole industry is in a tizzy over it.
Reasonably so, after all, since I’d posit that the vast majority of the nonprofit field falls under the category of “social justice” by nature. The sheer act of providing services without a profit incentive is a form of social justice, even for many “conservative” nonprofits.
In a way, service-oriented nonprofits are anti-capitalist at their core, whether they mean it or not. Their mere existence acknowledges, even tacitly, that the unfettered capitalist society in which we live is inherently unfair to those who most need the…
