Nonprofit Organization Quotes

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.

And we learned, perhaps the hard way, that church isn’t static. It’s not a building, or a denomination, or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure is made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us.

The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.

A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.

Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).

Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.

Nowhere does this tendency toward artificial harmony show itself more than in mission-driven nonprofit organizations, most notably churches. People who work in those organizations tend to have a misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another. What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.

I'd rather do more with the same, then the same with less.

I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.

Camp Patriot is a God-centered nonprofit organization that provides outdoor adventure excursions for wounded and disabled veterans.

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic—work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don’t let the lies fence you in or hold you back.

I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.

For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives

In the short term, there is scant room for dreaming, for one must choose between being taken seriously and being visionary. In the long term, however, leadership cannot afford to overlook the wisdom of dreams, even the wisdom of playful dreaming. Vision that bounds higher than the barriers that confine us often spring from earnest playfulness.

Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.

from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom

Our country is a place where hope can be born and great companies, organizations and non-profits can spring up from an idea birthed on the back of a coffee-shop napkin.

Can we create soulful workplaces—schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits—where our talents can blossom and our callings can be honored?

Thanking your donor should be an opportunity to brag about the donor instead of your organization.

Donors don’t give to your organization, they give to make the world a better place.

In 2014 a survey conducted by a nonprofit organization called Stop Street Harassment revealed that more than 60 percent of women in Buenos Aires had experienced intimidation from men who catcalled them.18 To a lot of men in Buenos Aires, women’s concern came as a surprise. When asked about the survey, Buenos Aires’s mayor, Mauricio Macri, dismissed it as inaccurate and proceeded to explain why women couldn’t possibly have a problem with being shouted at by strangers. “All women like to be told compliments,” he said. “Those who say they’re offended are lying. Even though you’ll say something rude, like ‘What a cute ass you have’ . . . it’s all good. There is nothing more beautiful than the beauty of women, right? It’s almost the reason that men breathe.

The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future. If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives.

The key to competitive success—for businesses and nonprofits alike—lies in an organization’s ability to create unique value. Porter’s prescription: aim to be unique, not best. Creating value, not beating rivals, is at the heart of competition.

For the third type of coping strategy, at the societal level, we need to ask how non-state actors (such as communities and nonprofit organizations) will respond to the consequences of the data revolution. We think a wave of civil-society organizations will emerge in the next decade designed to shield connected citizens from their governments and from themselves. Powerful lobbying groups will advocate content and privacy laws. Rights organizations that document repressive surveillance tactics will call for better citizen protection. There

is the head of a popular non-profit organization that helps children of currently incarcerated parents gain an appreciation for the justice system. Our sources tell us that this charity, Legal Buddies, was in some way associated with the charges brought forth this morning. Judge

Templates of how we organize and govern such as partnerships, corporations, or nonprofits have not be updated in centuries, we still use many of the ancient rules and vernacular today, patching expanding gaps of trust and accounting all stemming from increasing modernized complexity.

You were meant to bring forth much fruit. You can be effective. Powerfully used. I’m talking to you. Not your preacher or Bible study teacher. Your legacy can still have an impact in a dozen generations if Christ tarries. You don’t have to look a certain way, receive a certain gift, attend a certain denominational church, practice a certain kind of ministry, or establish a nonprofit organization! All you need to be mighty in your generation is a shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit (the Word of God, Eph. 6:16–17). Through Christ you can absolutely, unequivocally do anything God places before you (Phil. 4:13).

We had to begin to practice deep, authentic collaboration. This meant a shift in how we move financial and human resources—there are enough people out there to support the movement(s) we need, but currently, organizations are pitted against each other to access money (less and less money), rather than creating and investing together to maximize a diversity of resources from money, to people, to spaces, to skills. Because we are not investing in a shared network of resources, it is easy to let structural and ideological particularities create deep splits throughout the non-profit sphere, rendering much of our work useless.

The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government. This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.

The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession. The program, which was aimed at low-income areas, also paid students to take additional courses online.

It’s difficult to overstate the enormity of this problem—it affects every organization, independent of the industry we operate in, the size of our organization, whether we are profit or non-profit. Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.

born and raised in Honolulu but had spent four years of his childhood flying kites and catching crickets in Indonesia. After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.

As we lead organizations—businesses, nonprofits, and churches—size doesn’t matter as much as another crucial factor. The biggest difference between leaders of large organizations and small organizations isn’t their location, the size of their building, the scope of the vision, the number of staff members, or their talent. In fact, some of the best leaders I’ve ever met have small organizations. But in all my consulting and conferences, I’ve seen a single factor: leaders of larger organizations have proven they can handle more pain.

I didn’t realize Farrah Fawcett had died of anal cancer. There were references to her ailment as cancer “below the colon.” It was like my mother, when I was a kid, calling the vagina “your bottom in front.” Up through 2010, anal cancer had no nonprofit society, no one to organize fund-raisers and outreach, no colored awareness ribbon. (Even appendix cancer has a ribbon.)* Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus; people get it via sex with an infected person, and that seems like something they ought to know when making decisions about using a condom.

When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead. This is true in corporations, nonprofits, universities, governments, faith communities, schools, families, and sports programs. If you think back on any major scandal fueled by cover-ups, you’ll see this same pattern. And the restitution and resolution of cover-ups almost always happens in the wilderness—when one person steps outside their bunker and speaks their truth.

Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals--companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.

In the factory era, the goal was to have the highest PERL. Think about it. If you can easily replace most of your workers, you can pay them less. The less you pay them, the more money you make. The city newspaper, for example, might have four hundred employees, but only a few dozen salespeople and columnists were hard to replace on a moment’s notice. The goal was to leverage and defend the system, not the people. So we built giant organizations (political parties, nonprofits, schools, corporations) filled with easily replaced laborers. Unions fought back precisely because they saw coordinated action as the only way to avoid becoming commodities. Ironically, the work rules they erected merely exacerbated the problem, making every union worker just as good as every other.

landscape that makes political fodder of this liberationist legacy. With increasing frequency, we are party (or participant) to a white liberal and “multicultural”/“people of color” liberal imagination that venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries.

This is the real estate state, a government by developers, for developers. It is not monolithic; there are plenty of disputes within it. Builders' desires are not always the same as owners', as reflected in the presence of separate developer and landlord lobbies in New York. Nonprofit developers follow a somewhat different model than for-profit builders. And of course government is still accountable to voters, who are by and large either renters or mortgage holders and continue to organize collectively against real estate's rule. But the parameters for planning are painfully narrow: land is a commodity and also is everything atop it; property rights are sacred and should never be impinged; a healthy real estate market is the measure of a healthy city; growth is good-- in fact, growth is god.

In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

I look around and see many shelters and services for survivors of domestic violence, but no large-scale movement to end male violence. I see many batterer intervention programs, but few men involved in challenging sexism. The loss of vision that narrowed the focus of men's work reflects a change that occurred in other parts of the movement to end violence, as activists who set out to change the institutions perpetrating violence settled into service jobs helping people cope. [...] Social service work addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence. Social change work challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence. In my travels throughout the United States, I talk with many service providers, more and more of whom are saying to me, "We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change. I meet more and more people who are running programs for batterers who say ,"We are only dealing with a minute number of the men who are violent and are having little impact on the systems which perpetuate male violence." [...] While there is some overlap between social service provision and social change work, the two do not necessarily go readily together. In our violent world, the needs and numbers of survivors are never ending, and the tasks of funding, staffing, and developing resources for our organizations to meet those needs are difficult, poorly supported, and even actively undermined by those with power and wealth in our society. Although some groups are both working for social change and providing social services, there are many more groups providing social services that are not working for social change. In fact, many social service agencies may be intentionally or inadvertently working to maintain the status quo. After all, the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) wouldn't exist without a lot of people in desperate straits. The NPIC provides jobs; it provides opportunities for professional development. It enables those who do the work to feel good about what we do and about our ability to help individuals survive in the system. It gives a patina of caring and concern to the ruling class which funds the work.

Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.

Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.

The charge of heartlessness, epitomized in the remark that William H. Vanderbilt, a railroad tycoon, is said to have made to an inquiring reporter, "The public be damned," is belied by the flowering of charitable activity in the United States in the nineteenth century. Privately financed schools and colleges multiplied; foreign missionary activity exploded; nonprofit private hospitals, orphanages, and numerous other institutions sprang up like weeds. Almost every charitable or public service organization, from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to the YMCA and YWCA, from the Indian Rights Association to the Salvation Army, dates from that period. Voluntary cooperation is no less effective in organizing charitable activity than in organizing production for profit. The charitable activity was matched by a burst of cultural activity—art museums, opera houses, symphonies, museums, public libraries arose in big cities and frontier towns alike. The size of government spending is one measure of government's role. Major wars aside, government spending from 1800 to 1929 did not exceed about 12 percent of the national income. Two-thirds of that was spent by state and local governments, mostly for schools and roads. As late as 1928, federal government spending amounted to about 3 percent of the national income.

up with work I found meaningful. As a young person, I’d explored exactly nothing. Barack’s maturity, I realized, came in part from the years he’d logged as a community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling year he’d spent as a researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm immediately after college. He’d tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of people, and learned his own priorities along the way. I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law. In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?” I mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I be a teacher? A college administrator? Could I run some sort of after-school program, a professionalized version of what I’d done for Czerny at Princeton? I was interested in possibly working for a foundation or a nonprofit. I was interested in helping underprivileged kids. I wondered if I could find a job that engaged my mind and still left me enough time to do volunteer work, or appreciate art, or have children. I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to feel whole. I made a list of issues that interested me: education, teen pregnancy, black self-esteem. A more virtuous

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.

Many Detroiters, for example, are beginning to see urban agriculture as a real part of the solution; to grow things right where people live, where they work, and definitely need healthier food on the table. Green city gardens are scattered throughout Detroit now, from the schoolyard at Catherine Ferguson Academy for pregnant teens and teen moms, to reclaimed land owned by a local order of Catholic friars (Earthworks), to a seven-acre organic farm in Rouge Park. Together, city gardeners, nonprofit organizations, and the Greening of Detroit resource agency are writing a new local-food story of urban Michigan.

from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible

In many ways, the U.S. bureaucracy has moved away from the Weberian ideal of an energetic and efficient organization staffed by people chosen for their ability and technical knowledge. The system as a whole is less merit-based: rather than coming from top schools, 45 percent of recent new hires to the federal service are veterans, as mandated by Congress. And a number of surveys of the federal work force paint a depressing picture. According to the scholar Paul Light, “Federal employees appear to be more motivated by compensation than mission, ensnared in careers that cannot compete with business and nonprofits, troubled by the lack of resources to do their jobs, dissatisfied with the rewards for a job well done and the lack of consequences for a job done poorly, and unwilling to trust their own organizations.

the Soil Carbon Challenge measures carbon levels over ten years. Someone at a university, completing a PhD or seeking publication, has incentives to do research projects of no more than a few years. In government agencies and nonprofits, soil carbon work is geared to the “so-called carbon market.” And all organizations—this is a pet peeve of his—tend toward fragmentation, so that soil conservation and climate mitigation are seen as separate, even competing, campaigns. All this means that stories that don’t fit into a short time frame, aren’t linked to profitable ventures, and/or can’t be neatly tucked into departmental divisions may not get told.

from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom of

Alice James Books is a nonprofit cooperative poetry press, founded in 1973 by five women and two men: Patricia Cumming, Marjorie Fletcher, Jean Pedrick, Lee Rudolph, Ron Schreiber, Betsy Sholl and Cornelia Veenendaal. Their objectives were to give women access to publishing and to involve authors in the publishing process. The press remains true to that mission and to publishing a diversity of poets including both beginning and established poets, and a diversity of poetic styles. The press is named for Alice James—the sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher William James—whose fine journal and gift for writing were unrecognized during her lifetime. Since 1994, the press has been affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington. The press educates up to 14 interns per year through individual writing apprenticeships. Alice James Books also serves to train and advise the on-campus, bi-annual literary journal, The Sandy River Review. Alice James Books is one of the original and few presses in the country that is run collectively. Our cooperative selects manuscripts for publication through both regional and national annual competitions. The cooperative offers two book competitions a year: the Kinereth Gensler Award and the Beatrice Hawley Award. The winners of the Kinereth Gensler Award competition become active members of Alice James Books and act as the editorial board after their manuscripts are selected for publication. The winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award is exempt from the cooperative work commitment. Alice James Books recently established two new book series: the AJB Translation Series and The Kundiman Poetry Prize. The press partners with Kundiman, a nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion and preservation on Asian American poetry, to present The Kundiman Poetry Prize, a book-length manuscript competition open to all Asian American poets with any number of published books. The inaugural competition took place in 2010.

Some institutions are combining their buying power by forming purchasing cooperatives, or GPOs, to save costs. These units are also known as cooperatives, buying groups, and purchasing support groups. Generally, the term cooperative is used to describe nonprofit organizations, whereas the term group purchasing describes the relationship among for-profit organizations that pool their purchasing power.

In 2005, the Global Language Monitor—a nonprofit organization that does exactly what its name suggests—issued a tongue-in-cheek list of the year's most politically correct words and phrases. Top

The most important pillar behind innovation and opportunity—education—will see tremendous positive change in the coming decades as rising connectivity reshapes traditional routines and offers new paths for learning. Most students will be highly technologically literate, as schools continue to integrate technology into lesson plans and, in some cases, replace traditional lessons with more interactive workshops. Education will be a more flexible experience, adapting itself to children’s learning styles and pace instead of the other way around. Kids will still go to physical schools, to socialize and be guided by teachers, but as much, if not more, learning will take place employing carefully designed educational tools in the spirit of today’s Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that produces thousands of short videos (the majority in science and math) and shares them online for free. With hundreds of millions of views on the Khan Academy’s YouTube channel already, educators in the United States are increasingly adopting its materials and integrating the approach of its founder, Salman Khan—modular learning tailored to a student’s needs. Some are even “flipping” their classrooms, replacing lectures with videos watched at home (as homework) and using school time for traditional homework, such as filling out a problem set for math class. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills will become the focus in many school systems as ubiquitous digital-knowledge tools, like the more accurate sections of Wikipedia, reduce the importance of rote memorization. For children in poor countries, future connectivity promises new access to educational tools, though clearly not at the level described above. Physical classrooms will remain dilapidated; teachers will continue to take paychecks and not show up for class; and books and supplies will still be scarce. But what’s new in this equation—connectivity—promises that kids with access to mobile devices and the Internet will be able to experience school physically and virtually, even if the latter is informal and on their own time.

I will change my expression, and smile.” —Job 9:27 (NIV) When I was arranging a meeting with a woman I’d never met to talk about my nonprofit organization, I sent her a link that had a thumbnail picture of me smiling big. I typed, “I’ll smile, so you’ll recognize me!” On our meeting day, I arrived at the restaurant/bakery fifteen minutes early. I sat down in a seat facing the door. As the door swung open, I tried to gauge the likelihood that the person coming in was the woman I was meeting. This person seemed too old. This one was dressed like she’d just come from the gym. After a while the second-guessing became exhausting, so I gave up and smiled at every stranger who glanced in my direction. They, in turn, smiled back at me. The more I smiled in those fifteen minutes, the more I became aware once again that we're all God's beloved children, deserving of a smile from a stranger. At long last someone asked, “Are you Karen?” I nodded in relief. My fifteen-minute experiment in smiling showed me that it takes more energy to mentally separate people into categories of potential friend versus stranger than it does to briefly acknowledge everyone—all deserving---with a welcoming smile. Dear heavenly Father, may my deliberate act of smiling renew my awareness that we’re all beloved children of Yours. Amen. —Karen Barber Digging Deeper: 2 Cor 6:17--18

A report for the Police Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides research and training for law enforcement officers, found:   Since the early 1990s, over the same time period as legal and especially illegal immigration was reaching and surpassing historic highs, crime rates have declined, both nationally and most notably in cities and regions of high immigrant concentration (including cities with large numbers of undocumented immigrants, such as Los Angeles and border cities like San Diego and El Paso, as well as New York, Chicago, and Miami).193

The most prominent of these programs was SELGEM, created by the Smithsonian Institution. An acronym for “SELf GEnerating Master,” SELGEM was a replacement for an even earlier Smithsonian information management system, SIIR. Developed during the 1960s and first placed in operation at the Smithsonian in 1970, SELGEM was soon made available to nonprofit organizations free of charge. Composed of thirty-three unique programs, the package was issued as “a generalized system for information storage, management, and retrieval especially suited for collection management in museums.

Knowledge is key, without knowledge, leadership, and action plans that fit the actual challenges, all of our businesses and organizations are lost. By providing training, offering moments to come together and exchange best practices all of us can stay on top of our field.

two types of business organizations—profit and nonprofit.

two types of business organizations—profit and nonprofit. One makes money, the other does good.

This book was written by Armin Navabi, a former Muslim from Iran and the founder of Atheist Republic, a non-profit organization with upwards of a million fans and followers worldwide that is dedicated to offering a safe community for atheists around the world to share their ideas and meet like-minded individuals. Atheists are a global minority, and it's not always safe or comfortable for them to discuss their views in public.

Another important question is to ask why the problem your new organization is addressing has not been solved already, or won’t be solved in the future. Ask yourself: Why hasn’t this problem been solved by markets? Why hasn’t this problem been solved by the state? Why hasn’t this problem already been solved by philanthropy? In many cases, the answers to these questions will suggest that the problem is very difficult to solve, in which case it may not be the most effective problem to focus on. In other cases, the answers might suggest that you really can make good progress on the problem. If the beneficiaries of your action don’t participate fully in markets and aren’t governed by a well-functioning state, then there is a clear need for philanthropy. For example, we should expect the interests of future people to be systematically underrepresented because they don’t participate in present-day markets or elections. For-profit entrepreneurship can be even more compelling as an option than nonprofit entrepreneurship. Though it generally will be more difficult to focus your activities on the most important social problem within for-profit entrepreneurship, there is a much greater potential to grow quickly, and there is the additional benefit of larger earnings that can be used for good purposes later on in life. Economists also suggest that innovative entrepreneurship is undersupplied by the market.

Leonard grew up to be an activist, traveling the globe for Greenpeace. Along the way, she made a short film about pollution and garbage called The Story of Stuff in hopes of teaching people about the consequences of buying and discarding more things than we truly need. It struck a nerve, a big one, and the video has now been viewed online at least 25 million times. The film became a book and evolved into a nonprofit organization. Stephen Colbert had her on his show and referred to her film as a “craze.” Children eventually joined

In fact, Bopp’s law firm and the James Madison Center had the same office address and phone number, and although Bopp listed himself as an outside contractor to the center, virtually every dollar from donors went to his firm. By designating itself a nonprofit charitable group, though, the Madison Center enabled the DeVos Family Foundation and other supporters to take tax deductions for subsidizing long-shot lawsuits that might never have been attempted otherwise. “The relationship between this organization and Bopp’s law firm is such that there really is no charity,” observed Marcus Owens, a Washington lawyer who formerly oversaw tax-exempt groups for the Internal Revenue Service. “I’ve never heard of this sort of captive charity/foundation funding of a particular law firm before.

The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession.

…an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public,”33 had documented that legal abortion improved the health of Americans.34

A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, found the Kochs’ philanthropy self-serving. “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries,” it charged.

Since 1970, the number of nonprofit organizations that have crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier is 144.

Private foundations have very few legal restrictions. They are required to donate at least 5 percent of their assets every year to public charities--referred to as "nonprofit" organizations. In exchange, the donors are granted deductions, enabling them to re3duce their income taxes dramatically. This arrangement enables the wealthy to simultaneously receive generous tax subsidies and use their foundations to impact society as they please.

Private foundations have very few legal restrictions. They are required to donate at least 5 percent of their assets every year to public charities--referred to as "nonprofit" organizations. In exchange, the donors are granted deductions, enabling them to reduce their income taxes dramatically. This arrangement enables the wealthy to simultaneously receive generous tax subsidies and use their foundations to impact society as they please.

Families are finding that they are getting funding from a variety of sources. One typical family has counseling covered through their insurance for family counseling, and counseling funded by a federally funded adoption support program for their child. They receive respite care funded through the Division of Developmental Disabilities. They pay privately for Sibshop, a well-loved program for the siblings of their special needs children. Since the Sibshop is through a non-profit organization, it is particularly affordable. Their school district pays for tutoring. After they specifically requested a review, they received an adoption subsidy available to older children through their state. The cost of braces was partially reimbursed by the adoption support system, as well. The combination of resources and financial relief allowed the parents to enjoy some outings, plan a simple family vacation, and get some household help. They said, “Without this help, we would not have made it as an emotionally intact family. We would not have disrupted, but we would not have been the unit that we are today.

Nonprofit organizations exist to help people help others — through giving money, time, effort, or material goods.

A central economic problem of developed societies during the next twenty or thirty years is surely going to be capital formation; only in Japan is it still adequate for the economy’s needs. We therefore can ill afford to have activities conducted as ‘non-profit’, that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

Forever Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization aimed at helping those in grief, particularly parents who have lost children.

This is the biggest scandal in the story of Pat Robertson. Whatever one thinks of his religious or political views, the fact remains that he raised millions of dollars from his viewers, most of whom were elderly, and then took their money to create a business that was sold for almost $2 billion. What is most surprising about this scandal is that nobody cared. The evangelical world did not seem to notice, and the federal government was only concerned with legal actions, even if they were morally questionable. Democratic congressman Pete Stark said that the sale of the Family Channel was an example of 'transactions in which individuals have enriched themselves at the public’s expense while nonprofit organizations have been looted.

volunteer labor by individuals who supported themselves with day jobs. However, not everyone has the same day job. Some day jobs provide more resources and free time than others. If these organizations do not collectivize the resources from these day jobs, then a class structure develops in which those with better day jobs have more opportunities to engage and thus control the organization.

Be aware of age discrimination. If you are nearing retirement age but still want to work, beware of the difficulties your age may pose. Age discrimination is tough to prove, but many older job seekers know it as a fact of life. To find a job that feels like a good fit—not like something that fit you 20 years ago—you might look for smaller organizations, including nonprofits, that will take advantage of your experience and expertise.

Kathleen is an animal lover who supports rescue organizations and other non-profit organizations such as Friends and Vets Helping Pets whose goals are to protect and save our four-legged family members.

What swells the costs in enterprises carried on in the interlocking centralized systems of society, whether commercial, official, or non-profit institutional, are all the factors of organization, procedure, and motivation that are not directly determined to the function and to the desire to perform it....

It [facism] is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit making ones- so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers- so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers- so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking- so we vote against the interests of our own children; against their healthcare, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).

Colorado Springs can be traced to the city’s founding, but it was in the post-WWII era that the city began to emerge as a nerve center for a politically engaged, globally expansive evangelicalism intent on winning the country, and the world, for Christ. The entrenchment of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs coincided with the growth of the military in the region. In 1954, the United States Air Force Academy was established in Colorado Springs. The city would eventually house three air force bases, an army fort, and the North American Air Defense Command. In the 1960s, the Nazarene Bible College opened its doors, and soon an array of evangelical, charismatic, and fundamentalist churches, colleges, ministries, nonprofits, and businesses took root. Lured by local tax breaks and drawn to the growing epicenter of evangelical power, nearly one hundred Christian parachurch organizations sprouted up within a five-mile vicinity of the academy, including Officers’ Christian Fellowship, the International Bible Society, Youth for Christ, the Navigators, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Christian Booksellers Association, Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, Christian Camping International, and, most significantly, Dobson’s Focus on the Family. 2

First, healthy systems—whether ecclesial systems, nonprofits, or secular organizations—value and build up everyone in the system, maximizing the benefits for all without exploitation. In narcissistic systems, success benefits some and not others. The weakest within a staff or congregational system are subject to exclusion, abuse, and more. But

In the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to be single-issue oriented, framing their message around "deserving" people within the population they serve, and using tactics palatable to elites.

From the start, Obama’s adversaries on the religious right—from officials of the Catholic Church to leaders of antichoice organizations to evangelical celebrities—portrayed Obamacare as a socialist takeover that would force taxpayers to pay for coverage of abortion services. That was not true, but it proved a potent talking point, priming the base for outrage when the Obama administration, in early 2012, finalized a regulation under the act requiring employer-sponsored health plans to cover contraception without a copay. Even after the Obama administration exempted houses of worship from the requirement and offered religious nonprofits an “accommodation” that permitted them to opt out by signing a form that would put the onus of coverage on their insurers, the regulation triggered a series of overheated, Republican-led congressional hearings, activist protests, and years of protracted litigation.

a system of relationships between the State (or local and federal governments), the owning classes, foundations, and non-profit/NGO social service and social justice organizations.

Not satisfied with the status quo, fundraising leaders are change makers – they see ahead to what the organization could accomplish to fulfill its mission and set a path toward attaining it. They are influencers in the best sense of the word as they draw upon their communication skills to share their vision for the future.

Since the late 1970s, social justice organizations within the US have operated largely within the 501(c)(3) non-profit model, in which donations made to an organization are tax deductible, in order to avail themselves of foundation grants. Despite the legacy of grassroots, mass-movement building we have inherited from the 1960s and 70s, contemporary activists often experience difficulty developing, or even imagining, structures for organizing outside this model.

This anthology is not primarily concerned with particular types of non-profits or foundations, but the non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC, to be defined later in the introduction) as a whole and the way in which capitalist interests and the state use non-profits to       monitor and control social justice movements;       divert public monies into private hands through foundations;       manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;       redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;

Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner talks about the foresight of right-wing funders such as Richard Scaife, who saw the importance of political education. “Right-wing victories,” he notes, “started more than twenty years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America.…These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives.

In his germinal work, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, reprinted in part in this anthology, Allen documents how the Ford Foundation’s support of certain Black civil rights and Black Power organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) actually helped shift the movement’s emphasis—through the recruitment of key movement leaders—from liberation to Black capitalism.

So, essentially, foundations provide a cover for white supremacy. Reminiscent of Rockefeller’s strategy, people of color deserve individual relief but people of color organized to end white supremacy become a menace to society.

To radically change society, we must build mass movements that can topple systems of domination, such as capitalism. However, the NPIC encourages us to think of social justice organizing as a career; that is, you do the work if you can get paid for it. However, a mass movement requires the involvement of millions of people, most of whom cannot get paid. By trying to do grassroots organizing through this careerist model, we are essentially asking a few people to work more than full-time to make up for the work that needs to be done by millions.

Through the nonprofit Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a collaborative effort with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change—Zinn’s book and dozens of spin-off books, documentaries, role-playing activities, and lessons about Reconstruction, the 1921 Tulsa race riot, taking down “racist” statues, the “FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement,” the “Civil Rights Movement” (synonymous with the Black Panthers), the Black Panther Ten Point Program, “environmental racism,” and other events that provide evidence of a corrupt U.S. regime are distributed in schools across the country. According to a September 2018 ZEP website post, “Close to 84,000 teachers have signed up to access” ZEP’s history lessons and “at least 25 more sign up every day.” Alison Kysia, a writer for ZEP who specializes in “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States” and who taught at Northern Virginia Community College, used Zinn’s book in her classes and defended it for its “consciousness-raising power.”64 ZEP sends organizers to give workshops to librarians and teachers on such topics as the labor movement, the environment and climate change, “Islamophobia,” and “General Approaches to Teaching People’s History” (with full or partial costs borne by the schools!). In 2017, workshops were given in six states, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, Canada.

Nazi economic radicalism did not disappear, however. Private insurance executives never stopped fighting attempts by Nazi radicals to replace them with nonprofit mutual funds organized within each economic sector—“völkisch” insurance. While the radicals found some niches for public insurance companies in SS enterprises in the conquered territories and in the Labor Front, the private insurers maneuvered so skillfully within a regime for which some of them felt distaste that they ended up with 85 percent of the business, including policies on Hitler’s Berghof, Göring’s Karinhall, and slave-labor factories in Auschwitz and elsewhere. Generally, economic radicals in the Nazi movement resigned (like Otto Strasser) or lost influence (like Wagener) or were murdered (like Gregor Strasser). Italian “integral syndicalists” either lost their influence (like Rossoni) or left the party (like Alceste De Ambris).

Antonio Gramsci’s prescient reflection on the formation of the hegemonic state as simultaneously an organizational, repressive, and pedagogical apparatus is instructive: “The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class.”11