This site was created sometime in 2022 as a companion website for my music. It used to host a piece I wrote about nonprofits, specifically why they're an ineffective solution to homelessness, but also much of society's other problems. It was verbose, so I removed it in 2024.
Fortunately, a Jacobin (no affiliation) article by Meagan Day expressed my thoughts in a much better way. “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 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 nonprofits and charities to direct the public's attention and resources 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, is largely favorable toward progressive politics. But only to the extent that 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 union? How many people among the elite would even argue that economic redistribution wouldn't work?
Generations of homelessness across "developed" societies have been met with bandaid solutions, and more recently, (unpopular) euphemisms like "houselessness" or "the unhoused". A neoliberal society doesn't want people thinking about, let alone actually dealing with 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 make money from it, instead of preventing that suffering from being possible at all. Whatever "progress" results from their efforts are almost entirely cosmetic.
To begin solving the problem of homelessness, 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.