This site is mainly a companion for my Bandcamp page. I also use this place to share articles I enjoyed reading, and podcasts I used to or continue to listen to.
This page used to host my thoughts on why nonprofits fail to solve the social problems they're created for. It was too wordy, so I replaced it with this. I've since found two Jacobin articles which reflect my original sentiment much better. “Woke” or Not, Philanthropy Is a Great Deal for Big Tech by Meagan Day and Charity Is No Substitute for Economic Rights by Fran Quigley both describe why nonprofits and charities are so prevalent. The bulk of charity and nonprofit funding comes from the rich, who directly exploit poverty to stay rich. It's no surprise, then, that the organizations funded by the rich never address the nature of the economy: one where many of us have to be poor and hungry enough to work, usually bad jobs, for long hours, and often for low pay - all to make the rich even richer.
Though both articles are about the United States, Canada is hardly better. How many politicians, business executives, and other elites are involved in charities or nonprofits? How many of these same people exploit others by collecting rental income as landlords? Would the board members of your local charity oppose a labour union in their own business(es)? How many of them would argue against redistributive policies, that tax the ultra rich and redistribute it to the rest of us - a popular political position across the country, but strangely never gets anywhere in parliament?
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. It's performative busywork. It draws attention away from the root causes of homelessness: the privatization of housing and construction, a lack of rent controls, a lack of guaranteed housing rights, and the lack of good jobs.
In the end, the elites and the professional-managerial class use nonprofits and charities to maintain the status quo. Whatever "progress" they achieve is moral vanity at best. At worst, it's money laundering and tax evasion. And of course, the problems that make these organizations possible are always conveniently too big or too 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 Economics as politics, an article by Luke Savage, which is what I suggest you read next.