A Rock, a Hard Place, and Everything's on Fire: Navigating Social Change Work in the Age of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

My thesis project defines, investigates, and analyzes the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) and its effect on social change work. My final output is a public website (nonprofitblues.com) with a collection of both formal and informal writings about the NPIC. The document uploaded to the Barrett Repository is one of four written works which combine to total 46 pages. I define the NPIC as nonprofits and their funding streams acting as a vested interest that guides the provision of aid, including who gets it, what kind of aid it is, and how, when, and where they receive it. Through research and interviews with six professionals in a variety of roles either within social change work or interacting with social change work, I conclude that the NPIC has created an individualized, careerist idea of social justice that undermines the formation and mobilization of mass movements. Additionally, it has created an expectation of professionalism, corporatization, bureaucracy, and elitism within these careerist ideas, which in turn limits the transformative power of social change work and funnels energy toward administration and upkeep instead of social change. Ultimately, the NPIC not only harms the communities nonprofits purport to serve, but also the employees who have to navigate a field wrought with influences pulling them in different directions.