Kool Aid Talk

I’ve been slowly sipping the off-brand all-natural Kool Aid offered by the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” It’s made up of leftist scholarly essays that remind me of two things: that I hate the pretention of academia and that to some people I look like a friggin’ neo-con. Point in case? I don’t think the Ford Foundation is evil.  

But I found myself compelled by professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of the funding straight-jackets that confine nonprofits:

And generally the issues they [nonprofits] are paid to address have been narrowed to program-specific categories and remedies which make staff – who often have a great understanding of the scale and scope of both individual clients’ and the needs of society at large – become in their everyday practice technocrats through imposed specialization.

I’ve never thought of technocrat as a dirty word until now. Time for a good scrub...