In a Hunger and Housing event at Rutgers-Camden a few weeks ago, there was a panel freaturing two hunger “witnesses” from the community, as well as Hogan Closkey from the Carpenter Society, and Diane Johnson, the Field Office Director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in New Jersey. There were a few fireworks during the panel, including my favorite, a story about rats falling through ceilings which Diane Johnson cut off , saying, essentially, we don’t need to hear that here. There was a crying witness leaving the stage. One particular moment lacked kind of firepower, but made up for it in subtle critique.

One of the Witnesses challenged the St. Joseph’s Carpenter Society, asking why it didn’t build housing in more neighborhoods. Executive Director Hogan Closkey answered that critique by blaming her funding sources. She claimed that she wanted to build in more places but St. Joseph’s funding required that houses be built in clusters. It was, more or less, a throwaway line that quickly got lost in the shuffle. But it also highlighted something I want to emphasize here and in my work more broadly: the non-profit package, and how funding, board accountability, and evaluation limit affect practitioners and organizations.

The Non-Profit Package has become such a fixture in the world of non-profits, do-gooders, and philanthropy that while many grumble about it, few think to challenge it. Practitioners make tradeoffs of their time, their work and their mission, to fit within the requirements of the package. Funders, boards and evaluations means mission-drift, professionalization and diverting staff from direct service to grant writing and evaluation.

That’s a package that many non-profits, short on funding, choose willingly. But after a few beers, it’s not hard to get a practitioner to admit that it rankles to see a bureaucrat from a foundation or government organization restrict the freedom of a practitioner on the ground to do what’s right.

Emerging from these grumbles is starting to be a wider, historical and big-picture critique. Books like the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Driven from New Orleans make the case that this non-profit package restricts the ability of grassroots groups to address wider social ills through movements, instead restricting them to measurable service provision that does not upset the status quo.

This naturally begs the question, what would an organization look like that refused the non-profit package? That is going to be a theme of my research over the next few semesters, but the basics appear obvious. They would be free to pursue their mission. They would struggle to find funding. They would have less information about the “efficacy” of their efforts. And they would rely heavily on volunteer labor.

Is that a bargain non-profits would be willing to make?