For many the uprising of April 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray was a tipping point moment in Baltimore’s history. Those perilous hours after Gray’s funeral ultimately revealed the character and resiliency of some of the most underserved communities in our city. In addition, they shed light on some individuals and entities that have been courageously doing vital work in those communities for years and some cases, decades.
However, the difficult days that followed have also revealed that many of those individuals and entities and their sometimes life sustaining work has been chronically and in my mind, criminally underfunded.
Sean Yoes (Courtesy Photo)
I’m not suggesting laws have been broken by denying dollars to some of these people and groups in favor of more “established” syndicates (although there are laws against larceny in our city). But, it seems particularly egregious that many of Baltimore’s largest, most influential non-profit organizations have for years, consistently received the lion’s share of the millions of non-profit dollars (exponentially more money has flowed into the city after the death of Freddie Gray), to the demise, or diminution of so many who deserve a healthy share of those resources.
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), the grassroots think tank wants to change how the non-profit money gets chopped up.
“For years we have critiqued the nonprofit industrial complex in Baltimore and how it undermines authentic Black empowerment,” wrote Dayvon Love, director of Research and Public Policy, for LBS in an Op-Ed on the group’s website titled, “For Black People When White Saviors Aren’t Enough.” He went on.
“What we have argued is that the notion of White supremacy in the nonprofit sector is manifested in three key ways.”
Love makes his case by stating: the boards of many of the nonprofits that are supposed to serve Black people are in bed with the corporate sector and mostly White; the social networks deemed to be legitimate by the non-profit sector are mostly White; and the non-profit sector’s White dominated
leadership is dismissive of community based, African/Black methodologies and considers them inferior.
Love’s colleague, Adam Jackson, CEO of LBS, co-chaired the Children and Youth Fund Task Force, which began its work in Feb. The group, made up of community leaders, youth program service providers and City government representatives, was established by Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young, to make recommendations on the Youth Fund’s governance. The fund has $12 million a year set aside from property tax revenue to aid youth programs in the city. The task force concluded its work in May and crafted a set of values that would radically change the way Baltimore funds youth programs, who makes the decisions within that funding apparatus and ultimately, which programs get funded.
More broadly, if LBS has its way, the nonprofit funding infrastructure currently in place (which seems inherently inequitable and racist) in Baltimore will be dismantled and replaced with one authentically rooted in the city’s disenfranchised communities.
“Black people are often relegated to a position of having to beg White people for acceptance and resources. As a result of this dynamic Black people who are advocating for resources often frame the solution to this problem in terms of pressuring White people and the government to do more for us,” wrote Love of LBS.
The Baltimore City Council is scheduled to review the recommendations of the Children and Youth Fund Task Force in September, and perhaps vote for their implementation. If the group’s recommendations are fully established, it could redistribute funding of Baltimore’s youth programs and dramatically shift the balance of the city’s nonprofit infrastructure.
“This frame is disempowering because it easily folds right into the notion of Black people as being dependent on White power,” Love wrote.
“This disempowerment has diminished the emphasis on building our own institutional wherewithal to solve our own problems and has allowed people outside of our community to make a living off of our suffering.”
Sean Yoes is the AFRO’s Baltimore editor and host and executive producer of AFRO First Edition, which airs Monday through Friday 5 p.m.-7 p.m. on WEAA, 88.9.
