I am no longer an organizer for Our Future WV. I say this for a couple of reasons.
First, I figure the world needs to know. And secondly, I feel as if I have been carrying a dark secret around for the past two weeks. Breaking up is hard to do and it’s awkward for me. People ask questions that I don’t want to answer. They want details that I don’t want to share. Suffice it to say, everything has its season.
I don’t know what tomorrow looks like. Talk about a weird space for me to be in. It has trauma of its own because of my lived experience with the struggle of poverty. Thankfully, this job landed me in the bottom of the middle class and provided a bit of a safety net, and I just hope it holds me as long as it needs to. I’m at peace though, which is what a wise woman told me the other day to pay attention to. Regardless of anything else, I know that I will be okay because I always am. My lived experience taught me more than any job ever will.
We have to be aware of the dynamics we allow to live in the non-profit realm. We know, or we should know, that all of our systems are based on what is best for white America, whether that’s education, government, militarism, etc. Even our history lessons are twisted so the white man wins. We’ve taken Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and whitewashed him. We share quote memes and know he had a Dream, but we don’t really know who he was and how he became. And I bet if he were alive today, he’d struggle to find funding and leaders to continue to press on because working for social justice is hard and messy. So hard and messy that we’ve allowed the nonprofit world to teeter on the brink of working as simply another system.
It’s hard to battle the same systems within that you’re battling outside, but it happens more than we want to realize. We have to use the right phrases and labels in order to reach the right people. We have to have a bureaucracy in place before we’re even considered competitive. We have to have government issued numbers and credit scores and great relationships with funders to even open the doors.
And what has really struck my heart these last two weeks is that we say that we want to recruit leaders and community members, but we don’t always want to allow them a space to grow or opportunity to gather real skills that can build a resume or experience. We want to work with people in poverty, as one example, but we don’t want to take the time to understand poverty or its effects on emotions, reactions, or even its trauma of and by itself. We don’t want to budget in living wage stipends for leaders. We don’t want to have evening or weekend meetings. There’s a lot we don’t want to do in terms of making our work accessible rather than a destination.
With that being said, most of my adult life has been spent working for nonprofits, and I will continue to do so. But we have to find another way to operate them in order for them to be equitable and move beyond charity. Sure, there will always be a need for charity in a capitalist world, but there is also a need for real effort to be given to systemic change.
“You’re not poor anymore”
Looking back on the past four years, there are some things that I wish would have been different. I wish, for one, that when people hire people out of poverty that they would stop dismissing any obstacle with “You’re not poor anymore,” as if saying it erases all the obstacles. Paying someone a salary above the poverty line doesn’t always mean that raises them above that line. Family size, past debt, bills … there’s a formula. And making your staff feel indebted for being hired and then having to explain that they don’t have a credit card to pay for an overnight stay is a bit backward.
I also would have asked for funding to honor the time and energy put into the work by our community leaders. We need to stop being so damn extractive all the time when we work with folks. Asking someone to share their vulnerabilities in the name of progress shouldn’t be treated as a favor. As I move forward, I am going to have open conversations about my personal experience as an Impacted leader to a staff person and maybe that will be a part of the change we so desperately seek. Here’s to the future, to the change, and to, hopefully, a new perspective.
Onward indeed,
Join Amy Jo on Rattle the Windows.
