In 2022, I created this site as a profile for my music. I used to host a piece on here about nonprofits, which I wrote sometime in the mid-2010s. The piece was about why nonprofits are an ineffective solution to homelessness, and how this contributes to society's other problems. It was verbose, as I'm not a very good writer, so I removed it in 2024.
Fortunately, a Jacobin (no affiliation) article by Meagan Day expressed that sentiment much better. “Woke” or Not, Philanthropy Is a Great Deal for Big Tech describes how the rich use charities and similar organisations to maintain economic inequality. My favourite point is that activists' livelihoods and the sources of funding they depend on are often ideologically opposed. Nonprofits compromise whatever progressive views they hold to secure funding for themselves.
To add to Day's points, I'd suggest looking up who sits on the boards of charities and nonprofits. These people are among society's elite. Think business executives, business owners, senior technocrats, and so on. They're defended by professional-managerial class and sinecure types, who create positive narratives for their overseers under the guise of progressive politics. The elite and the PMC collaborate within and between nonprofits and charities to direct the public's attention away from the economy, specifically the nature of class society, and deploy all kinds of things to do so: culture wars, meritocracy/credentialism, and identity politics.
Neoliberalism, our current world order, embraces progressive politics as long as it doesn't take meaningful power or resources away from the ruling class. How many politicians are landlords? How many board members of your local charity would oppose a labour union? How many of these people would argue against redistributive economics that take from the ultra-rich and give to everyone else?
Generations of homelessness across "developed" societies have been deliberately met with ineffective solutions. Unpopular euphemisms like "houselessness" or "the unhoused" do nothing to change the fact that people are still homeless. A neoliberal society doesn't want us thinking about deeper problems: privatization of housing, lack of rent controls, private contracting in construction, or the lack of good jobs. In the end, the elite, the PMC, and their nonprofits respond to human suffering by trying to make money off of it, instead of working toward stopping the root causes of such problems. Whatever "progress" results from their efforts are cosmetic at best, and money laundering at worst. The problems that make their careers possible are always conveniently too big or complicated to solve.
Well, they're not. We can start by thinking of housing as an economic issue within an economic system. And economic systems can be "[...] discerned, understood and, if necessary, altered or changed". That quote was from Luke Savage, also a Jacobin contributor, behind another excellent piece titled Economics as politics.