This site was created sometime in 2022. It used to host a piece I wrote about nonprofits and why they're a bad and ineffective solution to society's problems, namely homelessness. It was verbose and kind of pretentious. I attempted to rewrite it a year later, but the draft never got very far.
Fortunately, a Jacobin (no affiliation) article expressed my thoughts in a much better way. “Woke” or Not, Philanthropy Is a Great Deal for Big Tech by Meagan Day describes how the rich use philanthrophy to maintain existing inequalities in society, while deploying identity politics as a distraction from economic inequality. Day accurately points out the conflicting interests between activists' livelihoods and the funding they depend on.
To add some of my own thoughts to Day's points, I'd suggest looking up the people who sit on the boards of your local charities or nonprofits. These people are likely not "middle class" — they're rich. Think business executives, business owners, credentialed technocrats, and so on. They're defended by professional-managerial class and sinecure types, who justify a hierarchy where few take and control most of society's money and resources. Further, the PMC fixate on symptoms and not the disease - which is exactly what nonprofits and charities do. It's easier to focus on something like homelessness, or their ever-changing euphemisms for it, like "houselessness" or "the unhoused", rather than attack difficult problems like the privatization of housing, lack of rent controls, private contracts, or the lack of good jobs.
How many politicians are landlords? How many board members of that charity down the street would oppose economic redistribution or more democratic workplaces, or claim that neither of these would work? How many of them would participate in union busting?
To get back to the point, housing is 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, author behind an excellent piece titled Economics as politics.