The Limits of “By and For”
In an interview with Yana, a former youth in the organization who became a board member, I asked, “what were the limits of ‘by and for youth’ in those early days?” She replied that “basically there were none.” Or, perhaps more accurately, no one knew what they were. As she put it: “It was an experiment.”19 Many interviewees pointed to one incident in particular as the first challenge to the “by and for” commitment. Interviewees described “the poem,” assuming that I knew the events they were referring to, and indicating that this incident had become the core of the unofficial memory of District 202, a memory much more fraught and contested than the sanitized history found in holiday appeal letters. This excerpt from my field notes details an interview with Jax Alder, District 202’s program director from 2001-2004, in which we discussed how the story is circulated:
We spoke for a moment about “the poem.” She described how a young person, Joan, witnessing the turn towards corporate money and adult power, wrote a poem calling out adultism and the hypocrisy of the “by and for youth” mission. After the poem was put on the wall, the executive director at the time took some major donors through the space who “freaked out.” The executive director removed the poem in response, and there was a great deal of outcry among the “youth community.” Jax added that the youth made a proposal at their community meeting to put the poem back up. The staff agreed, apparently—but instead of being put back up where it was, it was painted on the wall outside the space, in the stairwell on the way up. Jax described how the executive director could usher major donors right past it on the way up to the space. So it sounds like a bit of a draw—youth made a proposal and got to put the poem back up, but adult staff limited their power and limited the impact of their intervention by pushing the poem outside the space.20
There are numerous aspects of this story that reveal both the contingency of the “by and for” youth model and the memory of it. At first glance it seems like a fairly straightforward incident in which a young person named and critiqued the dynamics of power at work in the space, hitting a little too close to home for the adults in power and her intervention was, in turn, censored. The sensibilities of major donors—and their expectation that youth should be grateful and appropriately empowered, but not politicized—prevailed.
Yet this moment also reveals a great deal about how “by and for” youth was imagined, for whom, and its limits. Not only did a young person feel enough ownership of the space and investment in its purported mission to protest what she experienced as hypocrisy, but the adult staff acknowledged the legitimacy of her critique in their willingness to compromise—they, too, believed in some version of youth power. What this reveals is not that “by and for” youth was a lie—or a marketing ploy, as it is now. Instead, this reveals the underlying and often faulty frameworks about youth at work at District 202: the youth’s expected gratefulness; what youth empowerment would mean and look like; and the idea that the power and leadership of youth would never interfere with the unspoken and largely invisible structure of the nonprofit itself—the board and its power, fiscal management, fundraising, budgeting priorities, and, perhaps most importantly, its understanding of itself in relation to its object, youth.
In another interview, Yana offered important context about District 202’s early years and the assumptions that its “by and for youth” mission were based on. Describing the poem’s author, she said:
I think Joan would say this about herself: she was a kind of embittered youth who came up in youth services, who used services provided to young people. She had been a part of Safe Harbors’ empowerment program. She wrote a poem that critiqued youth workers who think they are saving youth. So youth were painting walls and she decided to paint the poem on one wall. Paul [the executive director] felt personally attacked, like it was an assault on . . . staff. So he ordered it covered up. . .. He was dismayed that a young person would jeopardize our standing with funders. That’s where the question of what District 202 was first came into question. That’s where the first challenge of what “by and for” meant came up.19
Yana makes it clear that for the staff, there was an underlying assumption that the funders’ roles and sensibilities were not discordant with a “by and for youth” mission. Paul’s dismay suggests that, at least for him, part of appropriate youth empowerment meant developing allegiance to existing structures of capital and funding.
Yana was also very clear in laying out what she felt were the underlying political questions at stake in debates over how the “by and for youth” mission should be implemented. “Those three words were debated again and again. Whole board meetings were devoted to it!” I asked what the terms of the conflict were. She explained that it was the “classic savior, or I would say custodial, model. Like, ‘while youth were here doing their fun youth things at least there were still adults here who understood how the world really works.’ And ‘we like youth, but there need to be adults who understand what the world is like.’ So the crux of the conflict was around savior/custodial versus a radical vision of youth liberation.”21
Interestingly, Yana revealed that along with this conflict over the poem, there were two important shifts: an intensification of ongoing tension over the presence and role of youth on the board of directors and a move to a new, larger space. Yana characterized the early board as fairly naïve about the power traditionally held by boards of directors of nonprofits. Comprised largely of youth workers with political investments in youth liberation, “the board was practically irrelevant. The board had no idea. I don’t think the youth really even knew they were there.” Yana continued, “either they didn’t know [the power that they had] or it was a decision not to wield it.”21 At this early stage, Yana emphasized, when the board was made up primarily of people who had worked in nonprofits, rather than by wealthy gay and lesbian individuals, the board did not limit youth power to nearly the same extent as they would later.
As I will discuss below, however, the board underwent a profound transformation during the capital campaign to move to the new space. As fiscal demands became more central, individuals with deeper pockets replaced the youth workers on the board. This board, in the wake of the poem incident, became more resistant to youth representation on the board. Yana and others eventually prevailed, although the youth members were not accorded voting rights, as the board did not feel that youth could take fiscal responsibility for the organization, and were worried about unspecified liability issues. Although often described in interviews as completely separate questions, the role of the board and the invisibility of its power are key to understanding District 202’s ongoing struggle over the meaning and limits of “by and for youth” and the larger impact of the nonprofit structure on queer politics.
“Corporate Networks of Gays and Money:” The Capital Campaign
At some point their concern with the bottom line became more important than the young people and their day-to-day lives. That’s what’s shameful—you can see the connections. How do we explain that to the youth?
—Yana21
In 1997, after six years of operation, District 202 moved from a small storefront space into a new home, renting a renovated loft space in a trendy neighborhood on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Despite the hype that is evident in the District 202 archives, and the important attachment that many people—both youth and staff—have to that space, the move emerged in interviews as a critical period of organizational transformation, a transformation that facilitated but continues to haunt the new, space-less District 202.
Yana described the build-up to the move:
[District 202] was growing, had hired more adult staff. . . . Then the idea of expansion was raised, because of the numbers coming through the door and that there was more adult staff. Three to four adult staff sharing one office was untenable. With growth came more nonprofit structure. To me this is one of those turning points. When we moved to the new space there was a huge capital campaign, a lot of money invested, and the board had been changing—less youth workers, more corporate—people who had ties to corporate networks of gays and money. Paul [the first executive director] worked that really well as a cute gay white man can do. He was able to elevate and get District 202 to a place financially of stability and . . . desirability. People wanted to fund District 202! There was a volunteer backlog! When they did their first mailing—you always lose money on those things, but they made money, which is practically unheard of when you’re buying a list. What I really loved about District 202 at that point, it must have been . . . what was it ’98? ’97? Everybody loved District 202, [saying] “I want to put my money, I support this vision.”21
What Yana captures here is the excitement, the feeling of community and possibility that District 202 offered and which it was literally able to capitalize on. And given this general environment, by all accounts, the capital campaign happened fairly swiftly for a nonprofit and District 202 moved into its newly renovated, 7,000-square-foot space in 1997. In interviews, the capital campaign and the move to the new space emerged again and again as pivotal moments of change. I want to highlight two aspects of this important transformation: the changing relationship to space and the ways that District 202’s discursive representations of itself shifted as it shifted its orientation towards capital.
Yana shared that in the new space the power dynamics that had been less visible in the original space emerged in stark relief. She remembered:
So with the move to the new space there was a desire for respectability, a desire for structure—the coffee house had new strictures [as well as] new equipment. It wasn’t the rundown storefront so people had to take care of the space differently. There was a new conference space, new [executive director] office, a new development director office. Space became an issue for the first time. . .. You had a doorway to offices [for the first time], you heard first grumblings about feeling like there were spaces where youth couldn’t go.21
Implicit in Yana’s description are the ways that unspoken, and presumably even unconscious ideas about the way respectable nonprofits are supposed to look were incorporated into the new space. Importantly, the poem was written on the walls of the new space, which is critical to understanding how it emerged as such a flashpoint. It made explicit the ways that the “by and for youth” mission stood in marked contrast to the slick, sanitized world of corporate networks of gays and money that were called on to fund the new space. In counterpoint to the removal of the poem, Teresa, who later became a grant writer but at the time volunteered at District 202 leading a writing group, recalled that in the new space, painted over the doorway between the youth space and the staff offices, were the names of the major donors who had “made the new space possible.” When donors were given tours of the new space, she recalled, they would look for their names on that doorway. Moreover, she remembered that when she began working in development, the painted names over the doorway were “part of how [she] learned about who the ‘gay elite’ major donors were in town.”22 The space was literally remade in order to appeal to major donors, while the possibilities of youth power were diminished.
I want to highlight briefly one additional aspect of this moment of change: the way that District 202’s infrastructure—particularly its board of directors—shifted as the organization changed its orientation towards capital, and the impact that those changes had on the possibility of youth power. Paul described this change: “I think as you grow, and as you get formal structures of funding, your funders ask for more credentials and you look for experience and skill sets that aren’t common among youth.” Furthermore, as the board ultimately became responsible for raising more and more money, they became more attuned to the needs and desires of donors. The donors could pick up and leave in a way that the youth never would.
Despite this seemingly successful capital campaign, the organization’s financial stress only increased. In fact, underlying all of the structural transformations—and the youth resistance to those changes—was a fundamentally unsustainable relationship to funds and fundraising. Jaime, who became the program director after Jax’s departure, felt that after the move to the new space District 202 never regained its financial footing. In fact, 10 years later, fiscal instability was cited as the primary impetus for the organization to give up its nonprofit status and merge with a large social service. The fiscal unsustainability experienced by District 202 ever since the capital campaign and move highlights the difficulty of reliance on the kind of affect-based, good-feelings funding that Yana described. Such capital campaigns rely on people’s excitement to support new and innovative programs; individuals are invited to live out their feelings of community, inclusion, and being part of something that matters. However, this is understood and experienced as a one-time gift—anything more than that begins to feel uncomfortably like dependence, which, of course, it is, given that the entire nonprofit sector relies on the largess of the wealthy.
These one-time gifts, which are the hallmark of capital campaigns, cover the initial cost of a building or move, but once an organization is housed in a larger, more expensive space, financial needs intensify even though grant-based income and annual individual-donor gifts often do not. This invites a widely observed cycle in which organizations chase grant funding to make up for this budget gap, whether or not the program it would fund directly relates to the core mission of the organization. Nonprofit professionals call this phenomenon “mission drift.” Although consultants make a living touting various solutions to mission drift, its underlying cause is the untenable funding structure on which the nonprofit sector relies. This sector-wide precariousness tends to produce a crisis-like atmosphere, which in some ways mirrors and intensifies the crisis experienced by the organization’s participants.
