Guest post: The nonprofit industrial complex in Vancouver
Guest post: The nonprofit industrial complex in Vancouver
Nonprofits are a private sector business model. So, why are they given a pass on the violence they produce?
This is a guest column from Jenn McDermid & Tyson Singh Kelsall ਤੈਸੋਨਂ ਸਿੰਘ, two co-authors of the new analysis “Situating the Nonprofit Industrial Complex in Vancouver,” outreach-based social workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and PhD students in the University of British Columbia’s interdisciplinary studies program and Simon Fraser University’s faculty of health sciences, respectively.
Vancouver police officers descended onto the Downtown Eastside (DTES) community in April, blocking off entire sections of the neighbourhood and displacing people already relegated to living on the sidewalk to nowhere.
Since then, police and pitchforks have returned to conducting daily street sweeps in what municipal government officials have described as attempts to “reset behaviour.” This is occurring only a year after the city formally apologized for the harm the practice had caused.
After the initial police blockade, some human service nonprofit organizations spoke out immediately. Others followed in objection to this acute display of state-sanctioned violence, which was statistically likely to be fatal for some and painful for many, including a Panjabi senior who was beaten by a group of police officers. As reported by the bind, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) later cited Gurdeep Singh ji’s “tenor of violence” as rationale.
A number of nonprofits, which generate revenue from the negative impacts of the political and socioeconomic violence in the community remained silent or took weeks to respond, including but not limited to CHEOS, PHS Community Services Society, and Coast Mental Health, whose board of directors features one current and one former police officer.
It is also worth noting that a written statement in opposition to police violence and displacement is a bare minimum showing of community solidarity. The apathy on display from several of these nonprofits demonstrates the prioritization of partnerships with funding bodies over the people and communities these organizations are intended to serve. In one case, 116 frontline workers took it upon themselves to break the silence of their organization they saw as complicit, and over 700 academics signed an open letter against the violent action. (We are both signatories of the latter, and one of us is a signatory of the former.)
And it was mutual aid and community members who showed up on shoestring budgets with material support.
Right-wing social media accounts have latched onto conflating frontline workers, or those who demonstrate any community solidarity, as fundamentally aligned with the nonprofit industry in Vancouver. This vein of discourse directs criticism toward a scapegoat for contributing to visible homelessness. It blames people living outside, and those attempting to provide support, for various societal ills that are, in reality, fueled mostly by poverty, growing inequality, a housing crisis, and prohibition — all of which are upheld in part by the apparatus of nonprofit and other public-private organizations. Terms like “poverty pimp” have re-emerged, and there exists a renewed backlash against the development of social and health programs in neighbourhoods outside of the DTES.
In addition to increasing austerity in the social services sector and growing inequality, Vancouver’s endless nonprofit landscape has a large role in gatekeeping the provision of support in the city. This landscape resembles a politically right-wing private sector network generating revenue off the management of public issues, rather than a movement for substantive equality.
In the 1960s, federal, provincial and municipal governments started allocating more funds to nonprofit organizations as a response to quell social movements demanding change. After a sharp international shift to neoliberal governance in the 1970s and 80s, the nonprofit sector began expanding rapidly.
Vancouver’s nonprofit sector and the political right both rely on the expansion of the carceral continuum, such as police integration into social service provision; private sector growth; they co-opt and neutralize radical movement work intended to contest the status quo; contribute to low taxation for the wealthy and keep democratic power out of reach of the working class; they both desire behaviours to be tightly monitored and controlled, so they can squeeze the most productivity out of workers using the fewest resources; and both buy into the myth of Canada as a benevolent state, rather than ongoing colonial project whose violent inertia needs to be resisted and undone.
Situating Vancouver’s Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC), which we co-authored with 20 other people, was published yesterday after peer review as the first in Social Sciences’ special issue on Racial Injustice, Violence and Resistance.
The review recognizes that a nonprofit framework can be used as one tool for positive social change, education and organizing, but shows how the designation has provided cover for a burgeoning, competitive industry that primarily prioritizes funding.
The analysis contests popular perceptions of Vancouver’s nonprofit landscape having a net positive impact on the safety and health of communities in the city. While there are some nonprofit organizations contributing positively to the city, the article provides a structural analysis of the sector’s overall impact. The review, like other political analysis, argues that in addition to the vast underfunding of social and health infrastructure, the NPIC pulls resources away from the individuals, families and communities that the industry is built off.
The analysis explores and critiques the city’s systemic dependence on the private nonprofit sector that operates within housing, healthcare, research, and social service sectors, as well as the added layer of carcerality through so-called “community” policing centers. Forty-five percent of community policing centers in Vancouver are located in and around the DTES, and are funded in part by a billionaire developer.
The review also challenges the nature of research tied to the agenda of political parties deeply intertwined with carceral expansion and the NPIC, including the Butler-Lepard report on “prolific offenders.” As prior analysis shows, the government-commissioned, grey literature report is political copaganda that the BC NDP premier-to-be David Eby seemed to feel was needed politically.
According to government correspondence retrieved by the bind via freedom of information request, then-attorney general Eby and his staff did not feel there was “a feasible option to not complete this work as set out at the announcement,” and promptly approved nearly doubling the pay of the two researchers when the former cop co-author Doug Lepard asked for it. Eby’s staffer expressed that they would simply “need to find the money.”
The report itself reminds us there is no single definition of “prolific offender,” and that the VPD criteria relies heavily on non-violent activity and officer discretion. Aside from one community group, the “experts” consulted in the report were mostly police, representatives of retail businesses, other staff of the carceral system…and a book titled Crime analysis for problem solvers in 60 small steps.
Despite glaring problems, the report has had an outsized influence on the BC government’s policy direction and from tired pundits with worn out takes.
This vein of research and media has contributed to the NPIC becoming and/or returning to being increasingly carceral in nature. Nonprofits tend to have VPD partnerships, collaborate with law enforcement bodies through community agreements, various boards, decampment planning, and colluding with the police as a response to behavioural concerns as frontline workers are put into increasingly precarious positions with little material resources to support the communities in which they work.
Jasmine Veark, one co-author of Situating the NPIC in Vancouver, says they “have witnessed executive directors collaborating with city staff to police how clients who use drugs and are unhoused can access spaces, even outside of their own physical nonprofit parameters.”
Politically, the NPIC is entrenched. The BC NDP and BCUP have both invested heavily into the NPIC and carceral expansion. The BC NDP continues to funnel money into “services” that lack standards, outcomes, or possibly even budgets, run by private sector nonprofits and public-private health authorities. BCUP has shown that they plan to lean into this no holds barred — and whose leader has been allegedly tied to using unpaid nonprofit client labour in a failed campaign.
We join others before us in calling on political actors to fund and build alternatives to these private sector solutions, and to pull apart the centralization of wealth and power in the city to redistribute it across impacted communities in a fair and just way.
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