At the Limits of “By and For”: Space, Struggle, and the Nonprofitization of Queer Youth

“Moments of Insurrection”

In an interview, Reina described a situation in which the real transformative possibilities of “by and for youth” came into direct conflict with the limited vision of empowerment solidified by the capital campaign and subsequent move. This example highlights both the conflict between the discourse around empowerment used by many nonprofits and the realities of policing the limits of that empowerment. It also highlights the possibilities created within nonprofit spaces for those objects of empowerment to exceed the discourses about them, to turn their empowerment back on the organization itself.

Reina, a black queer person, had previously worked at an HIV/AIDS organization for men of color, and had begun working in collaboration with District 202 as they were ill-equipped to deal with the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on young queer men of color. When Reina was hired at District 202, she described putting together youth leadership programming that dealt directly with issues of difference and oppression, and that encouraged youth participants to assert their power to influence the space itself. She noted that the desire to have a strong and political youth community at District 202 preceded her, and that the desire on the part of young people to influence the space often developed in response to the policies and politics of the organization. Reina described how, following the capital campaign to raise funds for a new space, youth were aware that they were being newly positioned as at risk in order to appeal to corporate funders.

Reina described the programming she put in place to transform the existing youth employment program into a comprehensive, “empowerment-based leadership development program that coupled job skills training with political awareness.” It was a multi-tiered program that allowed young people facing various kinds of barriers—for example, housing instability, heavy policing, and poverty—to engage as workers in the space in any way that was accessible to them. Some of the youth could develop job skills working as baristas at the coffee bar in the youth space while others who had been there longer and begun to develop more leadership skills could organize events, emcee, work security, or staff the drop-in space. Reina described how a core group of youth, many of whom had been youth staff for more than two years, became increasingly aware of the pay discrepancy between youth and adult staff. Possibly more important was their growing recognition that, as youth staff, they were understood to be targets of empowerment, not real staff with the power to influence or change aspects of the organization itself. In response, youth began to openly discuss and strategize about the issue of pay discrepancy. Reina supported their work, bringing in someone to help them learn to read budgets, and as they learned, they became more and more frustrated that youth who had worked there from the beginning, who worked all day to staff the center, were paid on a completely different pay scale than the professional staff.

Finally, the youth staff brought the issue to a youth community meeting, the official voice of youth in the center in which the “by and for youth” mission was most closely approximated. The actual power of the community meeting was always fairly vague and remains so today. For instance, during a community meeting, youth made a proposal to place the poem back on the wall, and it was, but on a wall outside of the space. On another occasion, youth in a community meeting voted to ban smoking in the center, and it was banned.²⁸ Youth were under the impression that what they decided at community meetings would be instituted. But, paradoxically, their demands were circulated in the form of proposals, although the audience of the proposals was, again, vague. Adult staff were the most likely targets of such proposals, from the perspective of youth participants, although in the overall structure of nonprofit organizations, the power of the staff is limited by the board—in this case, wealthy gay and lesbian individuals who wanted to help the youth. Once again, the invisibility of underlying structures of power within nonprofits limits the kinds of politics that can be enacted from within them.

In the example that Reina described, the outcome of the proposal made by the youth made the limits of their power clear, and in so doing, also clarified the limits of the “by and for youth” mission. After the youth staff described their concerns at a community meeting and shared the research that they had compiled on the budget of District 202, the youth voted to make a proposal to equalize pay throughout the entire organization. Reina recounted that when the proposal was presented to the board, the board members, unsurprisingly, “said no way in hell.” In many ways, it is remarkable that there was enough support from the staff for the proposal to even go to the board. The vagueness around the extent of the youth council’s power is fascinating in this way. It offers clear evidence of the paternalistic understanding of what youth leadership would mean—that it would be directed outward, at becoming successful citizens, not at transforming the hierarchies of power within District 202. On the other hand, the language around “by and for” invited youth and staff alike to believe its promises. This again reveals the messiness of nonprofits, especially as stand-ins for movements: spaces of policing, yes, but also the production of intense aspiration and resistance.

Interestingly, the board did not quash the proposal outright, but instead asked the youth representatives to rework the proposal numerous times, while Reina, who was the staff person held responsible for letting the youth get so empowered, was increasingly shut out of meetings and cut out of key communications until, after a few months, her position was terminated as a cost-cutting measure. The ultimate denial of the youth council’s proposal and Reina’s subsequent termination caused another firestorm among the youth. The youth staged a lock-in in which only Reina and another former youth staff member were allowed into the center. The youth clearly recognized the denial of their proposal as an insult and as an offense to the organization’s purported belief in “by and for youth”—a belief that had been shared by Reina, who responded to my cynical question about whether she really thought that such a change in the hierarchy was possible by explaining that she truly did. She believed that “by and for” youth meant just that. Meanwhile, the board simply waited for the firestorm to settle and for the youth to get back to the business of becoming appropriately empowered. The realities of young people’s lives, and their profound need for and investment in a space like District 202 almost guaranteed that young people would return and, although angry, would continue to invest in a vision of “by and for youth” that was discursively encouraged but structurally prohibited. Ultimately, there was no infrastructure in place at District 202 that would have enabled true youth decision making and power over the space. Youth were never more than tokens in fundraising, in strategic planning, in hiring and firing, or in board recruitment. They were the objects of this work, the targets of empowerment.

In her book, Logics of Empowerment, Aradhana Sharma writes that “these questions get to the heart of the ‘dangers’ and murkiness that empowerment presents.”²⁹ Building on the work of Barbara Cruikshank, she goes on to describe the “messy interplay between depoliticization and repoliticization, surveillance and subversion, and regulation and unruliness” that is inherent in empowerment programs.³⁰ As Sharma and Cruikshank contend, there are reasons that corporate funders like Target and General Mills supported District 202’s capital campaign and responded to empowerment and leadership programs targeting at-risk youth—such models function under neoliberalism as tools of governance. Empowerment dovetails nicely with the personal-responsibility logic of neoliberalism, producing self-governing subjects, oriented toward the market, who understand freedom to be connected to certain kinds of self-management. However, as Sharma and Cruikshank also show, empowerment and leadership-based programs are also inherently political and unwieldy, and are spaces in which subjects can and do exceed governance tools—they actually become empowered. And, as such, they speak back to and challenge the organizations that seek to manage and direct their power.

On Community in Late Capitalism; Or, Off the Streets and onto the Web

It is unique, and I can’t decide if its unhealthy or magical, but the magical part that looks at District 202 felt so strongly connected to an idea, and through an idea to each other. And the physical space had something to do with it as well. It gets into your blood. A room of one’s own. You’d see the lights on, young people would see the lights on. And from the lights people would come up and you could see something shed off of them. I don’t know, it’s just huge! I’ll probably never experience something like that again.
—Jaime³¹

In 2007, District 202 was at a crossroads. After years of inaction, the fiscal situation had become dire, and the number of youth participants had begun to wane. In response, the interim executive director championed a strategic planning process, packaging it in language appealing to the largely corporate board. In an interview, one of the consultants hired to conduct the assessment described the way they intentionally proposed this assessment to the board “from a change management perspective” that they felt would appeal to the business sensibilities of most and the progressive politics of a few.³² Among the staff and consultants this was a strategic review intended to address the failure of the organization to live up to its social justice “by youth for youth” mission; for board members it was intended to figure out how to reduce costs and address the fiscal crisis. The consultants hired to facilitate this process, both of whom are local, progressive queer activists, engaged a wide array of key stakeholders, especially youth, and produced a report that described the current conflicts and recommendations for moving towards a truly “by and for” model.³³ These recommendations included moving to a smaller space, developing key relationships with other grassroots organizations to ensure that homeless queer youth continued to have their basic needs met, and working to move away from a services framework and toward leadership of young people at every level, including management and fundraising.

However, following this review and the development of recommendations based on community feedback, the board instead hired—and then fired due to mismanagement—a new executive director whose approach to these recommendations, according to interviewees, varied between hostile and indifferent. The organization then fired all of its youth staff, ended programs targeting trans and homeless youth, and ultimately closed the community center and went into a cocooning phase of reevaluation.

After being closed for six months, District 202 reemerged as a web-only presence—a “mobile delivery system”—with a new narrative and marketing strategy.³⁴ They announced that another executive director had been hired, this time a marketing professional with no experience working in nonprofits. The new executive director, Carl Dunn, the author of the email suggesting that coming out is no longer political, was previously the chair of the board of directors at District 202. In an interview with an LGBT news blog, Dunn detailed major changes to the structure, mission, and programs of District 202 and proclaimed, “We’re shifting the organization from being a social justice organization to being a social entrepreneurship organization.”³⁵ Although this rhetoric of social entrepreneurship quickly became the defining language of District 202’s website, Facebook page, and newsletters, there was little explanation for the transition. Perhaps the new leadership of District 202 believed that this change would be self-explanatory, as it reflects an increasingly powerful set of symbolic and material shifts that are central to the changing imagination of contemporary queer social movements in the United States.

The language and framework of social entrepreneurship, which might seem to be antithetical to the history and mission of District 202, or, at the very least, to queer social movements, in fact mirrors a broader shift in the nonprofit sector. Particularly in the past ten years, there has been a notable and explicit turn towards neoliberal business models of efficiency, flexibility, and value within the nonprofit sector.³⁶ When District 202 describes turning toward social entrepreneurship and “building better relationships with the corporate community in Minnesota,” it is echoing a larger neoliberal transformation, a marketization of the nonprofit sector. Social entrepreneurship relies on discourses of individual ingenuity, entrepreneurs who recognize a social problem and use business models to make social change. A well-known example of this strategy—the microloan—seeks to develop cultural capital in individuals in order to ameliorate persistent poverty, rather than developing movements of people who act together to contest capitalism. In this logic, the nonprofit-state-foundation nexus is transformed into a corporate remaking of the social according to market logics of value, including which kinds of bodies are valuable and which are expendable. This then begs a troubling question, and one that is especially significant in analyzing the shifts that took place at District 202: How can market logics solve problems they created? At least in the case of District 202, they could not. Of course, if the goal is to facilitate homonormative politics that centralizes identity rather than inequality, and to seek access to wealth and corporate power rather than critique them, then social entrepreneurship makes perfect sense for a queer youth organization.

In Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change, which its editor, Alex Nicholls, intends as a “research primer” for the field, Nicholls describes a sea change in approaches to social change. Driven by what Nicholls characterizes as the “failure of the social market” to alleviate problems like persistent poverty, the lack of affordable housing, climate change, and a host of other social issues, this response is informed by the “outstanding success” of the multinational framework of Walmart and other corporations. These corporations offer examples of “how to scale operations internationally and to maximize value creation through innovation and technology.”³⁷ Relying on the logic of financial markets, as well as their rhetoric—flexibility, deliverables, metrics—this model also assumes that social problems exist simply because no one with sufficient ingenuity and creativity has come along to solve them. These kinds of problems can be solved through the actions of a business hero, the entrepreneur, who is characterized throughout the text as an “innovator,” an “unrelenting, disruptive change-agent,” who can “move easily across sectors, often diversifying from their core mission to expand overall social impact and increase resource flows.”³⁸

This logic has been widely taken up by nonprofits, individualizing systemic inequality and transforming justice as the goal of social movements into social value as the goal of the social economy. This illustrates one key mechanism in which the existing disciplinary technologies and logics of the welfare state, already at work in nonprofits, are wedded to neoliberal biopolitics in which the social is remade through the production of valuable bodies, subjects, and subjects of knowledge. The transition to a fully corporate rationale of value production—even within organizations that are funded in part by the state—fundamentally transforms the kind of social world and political imaginary enabled and produced through nonprofits. Despite the rhetoric of innovation, creativity and social change, such logics are fundamentally not intended to reduce the inequities caused by capitalism or to significantly redistribute wealth and resources. Instead such logics represent tools of management, technologies for the discursive and material supervision, policing, and control of populations made surplus by capitalism.

“I Am Gay and I Am No Different Than You”

In the narrative District 202 has produced about its shift toward social entrepreneurship, District 202 repeatedly called on a story of progress, acceptance, and mainstreaming.³⁹ District 202 pursued this homonormative turn with a vengeance. In its new life without a physical space, District 202 existed primarily on the web as a “lean, tech savvy” social media tool.⁴⁰ But it also partnered with other organizations to create “mobile safe space”⁴¹ —District 202 basically subcontracted programming to other organizations that wanted to be queer-friendly and used District 202’s brand as a substitute for safe space—anything with their logo apparently became a safe space. Instead of having a safe space where they could express political realities of their lives through drag shows or attempt to exercise youth power through community meetings, youth could now go to yoga classes and do résumé-writing workshops. This, of course, assumed that the youth could access the various suburban locations where these programs were held. As an example, take this email sent to members of the District 202 donor database. Notice the tone—District 202 is neither raising awareness about an issue or a program intended to address an issue, nor is it soliciting contributions to address an issue facing queer young people. Instead, it is advertising the services of one of its collaborative partners. The email read: “District 202 Makes January Hot! Yoga Begins January 23.” It continued, “The yoga kickoff workshop starts this weekend! It’s a great time to meet new people and get started on your yoga classes. By attending the workshop you will receive 10 free coupons for yoga . . .. Normally these classes cost $150!”⁴² The targeted audience for this program is primarily interested in networking and getting a good deal on a luxury product—a far distance from the targeted audience for the kinds of emails donors would have received jut a few years before.

In transforming its mission and closing its community center, District 202 dramatically shifted away from its previous mission of serving youth who were homeless, involved in street economies, or just plain poor—youth for whom a place to go was paramount. This also meant that District 202 dramatically shifted away from serving trans/genderqueer youth and youth of color. In Minneapolis, and nationally, the majority of homeless queer youth are people of color. Instead, District 202 reoriented their programming toward suburban youth, youth with access to computers, and youth who had their basic needs met. Again, this meant a whiter, wealthier group of young people. In this context, District 202’s appeal to mainstreaming produced a community of LGBT youth—in this case, a community of white(ned), (homo)normative subjects. These subjects have the resources and desire to participate in District 202’s online and outsourced programs, which work to produce and perfect normalized capitalist subjects: self-supporting; employed; having particular kinds of sex in particular kinds of arrangements (meaning safe, monogamous, and unpaid); and on track toward, if not true social and political empowerment, then at least limited, seemingly voluntary mobility within the unquestioned constraints of continued racism, classism, and heterosexism. This, of course, is also a central aspect of the homonormative shift of District 202 because, as Kwame Holmes has reminded us, “homonormativity is a racial formation.”⁴³

Through my analysis of the shifts undertaken by District 202 and the stories told about those shifts, this racializing project of homormativity becomes clear. Mainstreaming, as Carl Dunn terms it, is clearly only accessible for those queer young people with a certain amount of privilege—young people who are often white, gender-normative, and with some level of class privilege. It is these young people who can disaggregate LGBT identity from queerness, marginality, policing and discipline.⁴⁴ The young people who can mainstream—according to a homonormative project of inclusion, equality, and privatization—are folded into and oriented toward life. For those who are not invited into the mainstream, but who continue to be policed as a threat to it, District 202 is part of an apparatus of regulation and discipline that orients their bodies toward incarceration, poverty and shortened lives.

It is not surprising, then, that the narrative District 202 produced about itself in this new incarnation—its official history—had telling absences. Any mention of race, was, of course, gone, as was any reference to homelessness, poverty, or even homophobia—except in the past tense. For District 202 in this new homonormative age, queerness was no longer cathected to oppression—it had become a vehicle through which certain subjects, conversely, were folded into life. It was only within this context that Dunn, as the executive director of District 202, could claim that coming out was no longer political—as he did in the email quoted at the beginning of this article. District 202 now saw itself as a social media marketing tool for those youth and corporate donors for whom LGBT identity is no longer political, instead of seeing itself as an organization working to change the systems that make coming out for some youth always already political because they are policed because of it, kicked out for it, or broken because they cannot hide it. This progress narrative—which District 202 certainly is not alone in embracing—is a ghost story, haunted by those who are fundamentally outside this mainstream, those threatening others who cannot be folded into life. For District 202, this narrative was also haunted by the specter of its space and the struggles over youth power and social justice that were undertaken within it.

Conclusion

After its cocooning and reemergence, District 202 existed for two years in a mainstreaming-through-social-entrepreneurship format. In this incarnation, the organization was barely more than a web-only trace, although it invoked the idea of youth power and physical space—almost as if the space had become its brand. All of the gimmicks they employed online to produce the effect of youth voice and to mobilize the affective project of youth empowerment had no referents in real life—they were phantoms intended to be bought and sold. For instance, on the District 202 website, there was a tab entitled “youth voice” that led to a blog that was updated by the adult staff. The website’s animation flipped through photos that mixed old quotes about youth empowerment and safe space with new narratives about “marketable skills to actualize their potential in the world.”⁴⁵

Importantly, District 202 used the ideas of youth voice and youth power— which at one time did exist at District 202, however partially, and which were intentionally and forcefully silenced—in order to raise money. The website prominently displayed a slideshow of black-and-white photos of former youth and youth staff with quotes superimposed that said things like: “District 202 is an organization that works hard to understand youth empowerment. –Supporter,” and “It’s a safe space where many young people can relax and be themselves. –Amy, donor.” These pictures showed youth staff members who were fired, young people who lost access to a space and community, and who were now being used as props to raise money. Of course, right next to these photos was an icon: “Click here to support District 202.”

Although this shift felt like the final word on the question of the limits of “by and for youth”—and, perhaps, on the larger question of the relationship between nonprofits and social movements—this story has an interesting, and unfinished coda. In 2011, following an offensive fundraising appeal in which District 202 exploited the recent suicides of gay teens in order to raise money, an anonymous group of individuals circulated a letter and online petition calling for Dunn’s resignation.⁴⁶ People found a way to speak back through Facebook, blogs, and email, forcing District 202 to confront the conflict between the narrative it was selling and the work the organization was actually doing. In a searing indictment of District 202, the letter that was circulated exposed the way that the new organizational structure, which the authors termed a “hollow marketing scheme,” disproportionately affected poor queer and trans youth of color. They wrote: “The new structure of District 202 is inherently classist: by forcing queer youth to access District 202 via internet only, you have made the organization’s limited services utterly inaccessible to poor queer youth.”⁴⁷ Indeed, Dunn did step down, and, after a yearlong process of evaluation, District 202 gave up its 501(c)(3) status and became a program within a large social service organization, The Family Partnership.

Now housed within an organization founded more than 100 years ago as a social service charity, District 202 has made quite a transformation—from youth liberation to social entrepreneurship to charity. Its “by and for” mission—a direct critique of the savior model of charity—is now subsumed within a charity, co-opted and used as a way to refresh the disciplinary function of charity in the new neoliberal age of empowerment and community.

Despite the best intentions of many liberation-oriented activists, including those at District 202, the nonprofit structure wields its own power, and it arcs towards the maintenance of existing systems of inequality. While this outcome is certainly not inevitable, the power of the nonprofit structure must not be ignored. For queer organizations, the convergence of the power structure built into nonprofits with the neoliberal equality politics of homonormativity is acutely debilitating. In particular, maintaining a critique of capitalism—a critique that is necessary in order to combat the structural causes of racialized poverty—is very difficult when your continued existence is dependent on those who benefit from the capitalist system, whether individual donors, corporations, or private foundations. It is no wonder that District 202 and the movement as a whole have gone from “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” to “I am gay and I am no different from you.” It is only through truly grappling with the power dynamics built into the nonprofit system that we can attempt to build social movements capable of creating real change.

28. Youth Community Meeting notes, 2003, Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota. [↩]
29. Aradhana Sharma, Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in Neoliberal India. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008) xx. [↩]
30. Sharma 2008. [↩]
31. Jaime Alexander, personal interview, 2010. [↩]
32. Bev Roberts, personal interview, 1 Oct. 2010. [↩]
33. One of the consultants hired to conduct the evaluation of District 202 has generously shared the products of a year-long assessment with me, including a compilation of the task force recommendations and findings from interviews and focus groups, which are described in this way: “Interviews were conducted with: 18 adults—including LGBT community leaders, current and former donors & funders, former board members, youth workers, Twin Cities civic/political leaders, and former District 202 staff. Of these adult interviewees, 6 are people of color and 12 are white. 19 youth—all of these youth are, or have been, members of the District 202 community. Of these youth interviewees, 13 are people of color and 6 are white.” [↩]
34. Carl Dunn, in an October 20, 2010 Facebook post responding to the question, “Where are you all located now?,” wrote, “After the community assessment, transition planning included District 202 becoming a mobile delivery agency.” [↩]
35. James Sanna, “District 202 Names New Executive Director,” Colu.mn 26 Oct. 2009. [↩]
36. See Raymond Dart, “The Legitimacy of Social Enterprise,” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 14 (2004): 411-24; and Howard Husock, “Nonprofit and For-Profit: Blurring the Line,” Chronicle of Philanthropy 18 (2006): 51-52; as well as the rise of such phenomena as venture philanthropy, in which wealthy but socially conscious individuals invest in particular projects in order to achieve a particular social value, or social return on investment as a strategy to literally quantify the costs and benefits of various social programs. In other words, this strategy—now required by the State of Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development for all applicants for federal stimulus funds—asks organizations to quantify how much money each dollar the state invests in their program will save the state in costs of incarcerating, sheltering, feeding, and providing health care by diverting individuals and empowering them toward employment and self-sufficiency. [↩]
37. Alex Nicholls, Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change. (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2006): 2. [↩]
38. Nicholls 2006: 11. [↩]
39. Carl Dunn, the executive director of District 202, often comments on how the goal of LGBT youth organizations, now mostly accomplished, is “mainstreaming.” For this reason, he says, there is no longer any need for a physical space, as LGBT youth are fully incorporated into the mainstream, and are therefore safe. [↩]
40. District 202 Newsletter, “In the Cloud,” 2009, Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota. [↩]
41. Ibid. [↩]
42. District 202, email to author, 13 Jan. 2010. [↩]
43. Kwame Holmes, “What’s the Tea: Gossip and the Production of Black Gay Social History.” Radical History Review, Vol. 122 (2015). [↩]
44. In a comment on a post on the Bilerico Project website by a local progressive queer author and activist, Carl Dunn, wrote on March 18, 2010: “As a gay-for-pay youth worker, I’m seeing more LGBTA youth mainstream these days when they have a supportive network of family and friends.” Carl Dunn’s comment in response to the blog post “When Queer Politics Meant No War and Fighting the Body Police,” is available at http://www.bilerico.com/2010/03/when_queer_meant_no_war_and_fighting_against_the_b.php#comments. [↩]
45. District 202’s website was formerly available at www.district202.org; No longer available, this website can still be investigated via the wayback machine and other internet archives. [↩]
46. The fundraising appeal was entitled “On the Ground in Anoka Hennepin” (the location of a recent suicide in Minnesota). It came complete with a new graphic and described the actions District 202 was taking, including “dedicating an intern” and “reaching out to their national partners.” It ends with the entreaty that “by supporting District 202 you will directly impact the lives of many LGBT youth in our community.” [↩]
47. “Concerned Community Letter,” 4 Nov. 2010. [↩]