Nonprofits, NGOs, and “Community Engagement”: Refiguring the Project of Activism in Gender and Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies

Democratizing Promise: A Return to “Community”?

We are by now familiar with the activist roots of ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies programs and departments at colleges and universities across the United States. These programs resulted from prior challenges to the institutional production of knowledge, emerging from oppositional social movements of civil rights movements, ethnic power and women’s movements, and antiwar and anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Students of color called attention to their marginal condition as Third World subjects, as well as their status as objects but not authors of inquiry in the First World. They joined to form the Third World Liberation Front on the campuses of San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley to demand representation and transformation at these and other institutions of higher education. Central to their demands was an ethnic studies curriculum that challenged Eurocentric and colonialist knowledges, and that would be rooted in the production of new scholarship that would “serve the people.”¹ Similarly, beginning in the late 1960s, feminist agitation across college campuses resulted in the development of women’s studies courses as an emergent field of study. Today, ethnic and gender and women’s studies are established—at times precariously—as institutionalized fields of interdisciplinary inquiry, boasting professional associations, peer-reviewed journals, tenure lines, and degree-granting programs. However, in their consolidation as fields establishing race or gender as a rigorous inquiry into power and knowledge, and in campaigns for institutional legitimacy in doing so, these programs are sometimes accused (by activists both within and beyond the academy) of abandoning the communities they were presumably intended to serve. Academic pursuits, divorced from community concerns, at least in this narration, become arcane, exclusive, and even useless.

Emerging from student protests as well as renewed postwar interest in volunteerism, particularly evidenced in national youth service programs such as the Peace Corps and VISTA, the concept of service learning sought to connect curricula with community service in order to challenge the institutional production of knowledge as well as the practice of information retrieval.² In the following decades, service learning increasingly departed from such concerns to take a professional turn, focusing on career preparation and prospective job placement. In the 1990s, the academy began to reevaluate service learning, both as an alternative research pedagogy but also as an object of critical inquiry. A 19-book series on service learning published by the Association for Higher Education documents this turn in disciplines from women’s studies to biology.³ This recent revival of service learning and nonprofit internships in gender and women’s studies and ethnic studies programs sought to negotiate the uneven relations of power that historically construed communities as “in need” in relation to troubling norms of race and gender, through a renewed commitment to correct these failures by returning to these fields’ origins.⁴

The community-engagement internship is often couched in this tension and the call to return to roots. One gender and women’s studies description for the internship narrates this return (notably as “field work”): “In recognition of the activist roots and goals of Women’s Studies, the major includes supervised field work in an advocacy or service organization for women.” Other advocates argue, “Community service can help women find their voices as leaders and advocates, their position in the history of women’s activism.”⁵ Similarly, descriptions for community-engagement internships housed in ethnic studies programs and departments suggest that, “Students will develop knowledge of the cultural and intellectual contributions of people of color.” These internships share some recurring features. The internship foremost entails a semester-long, unpaid placement at a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization that is often engaged in service provision (e.g., for women escaping domestic violence, for Southeast Asian refugees requiring mental health assistance) and sometimes in political advocacy. Course credit further requires establishing certain program and personal objectives (such as maintaining a newsletter, or as one internship guide lists, “becoming sensitive to people’s feelings and values”) with a site supervisor, as well as completing supplemental readings and short reflection papers or a journal with an academic supervisor. Such an internship provides the student with an opportunity not only to apply “abstract theories” to “real-life settings,” as the premise goes, but also provides an education in democratic citizenship, with an emphasis on volunteerism and, perhaps more specifically, nonstate enterprise or labor.

In short, such practices aim to bridge the so-called theory and practice divide. Yet these transactional categories, we argue, are distinct but not disconnected—distinct because theory and practice are not equivalent forms of action or deliberation, but not disconnected because these are mutually constitutive labors. There are several problematic aspects of this presumption that there is a divide between theory and practice, and that the community-engagement internship is a bridge between the two, but we will limit ourselves to what are for us the most troubling.

First, the community-engagement internship works through a highly mystified substitution, in which the nonprofit or nongovernmental organization is understood as the same as “community.” This is both a dangerous and disingenuous slippage.⁶ Understood as less corrupt, nobler, and more closely attuned to needs on the ground than corporate for-profit or state agencies, nonprofits and NGOS claim an organic and authentic connection to the populations who are the objects of their work. As noted, community engagement as pursued through the internship is defined as a short-term period of unpaid labor undertaken most often with a nonprofit or non-governmental organization that addresses a particular population (occasionally, the internship might be with a private business or in the educational sector). A typical list of organizations in which students find placements includes women’s crisis centers and shelters, sexual and reproductive health and education programs for women and youth, tutoring programs targeting “at-risk” youth of color, and ethnic-specific nonprofits that promote cultural preservation or community health. As such, the nonprofit both stands for community as an alternative to the academy, even to capital, but also targets community, often understood through categories of crisis, as needing help or intervention.

These discourses together constitute nonprofits and NGOs as necessary instruments of care in global civil society. These understandings of community bear significant consequences. As we well know, community is not an obvious or organic designation. Feminist and critical race theorists throughout the last decades have observed that invocations of community are often disciplining and exclusionary. The invocation of community can presume homogeneity or consensus where there is none, and in doing so enact relations of domination, policing as well as forgetting difference. For instance, Sharmila Rudrappa’s study of two nonprofit organizations serving South Asians in Chicago—a domestic violence women’s shelter and a general social service and cultural organization—reveals how these organizations stifled racial or cultural discord, as well as gender and sexual antagonisms, to instead reify elite Indian (and decidedly non-Muslim) gender and cultural norms among its diasporic clientele.⁷ Nor is community divorced from political or economic production (and indeed, nor are nonprofits divorced from capital). From this and other examples too numerous to mention here, it is all too clear that community is both a complicated referent and a complex practice.

Second, the nonprofit or nongovernmental organization and the community it presumes to stand for do not reside outside the relations of capital. As Miranda Joseph has argued so well, “community—the Romanticized ‘other’ of modernity—supplements capital, [such that] community is deployed to shore it up and facilitate the flow of capital”.⁸ Joseph observes that community involvement via the nonprofit or nongovernmental organization allows volunteers (including students) to “enact longing for something other than capitalism.”⁹ Nonetheless, as she persuasively argues, nonprofits are “the institutional form in which community complements capital.”¹⁰ Despite their “not for profit” status, nonprofits are a vital contributor to a for-profit political economy and work force. In 1998 the nonprofit sector employed about 11 million people, making up over 7 percent of the U.S. workforce.¹¹ In a profile of nonprofits in the United States, Lester Salamon notes:

This means that paid employment alone in nonprofit organizations is three times that in agriculture, twice that in wholesale trade, and nearly 50 percent greater than that in both construction and finance, insurance, and real estate. … With volunteer labor included, employment in the nonprofit sector, at 16.6 million, approaches that in all branches of manufacturing combined (20.5 million).¹²

Third, the nonprofit does not operate apart from the state, or its art of governance. The substitution of community with nonprofit reflects larger shifts in political economy and the deployment of civil society—not apart from apparatuses of the liberal state, but as crucial scenes for constituting neoliberal subjectivity and personhood. We trouble the notions of “service” and “helping the community” when under neoliberalism, the nonprofit is recruited to manage the otherwise almost ungovernable, targeting and training those populations to transform their conduct as well as their sensibilities so that they manage themselves as proper (civic, sexual, or laboring) subjects, thereby ensuring broader social security. Barbara Cruikshank, for instance, observes that poverty-oriented nonprofit organizations sought to intervene on the poor following the presumption their of failure or incapacity to adjust to the demands of capital. She writes:

During the War on Poverty the powerlessness of the poor was posited not as an objective fact, but as a subjective ‘sense of powerlessness’ . . . [The] subjective causes of powerlessness became the object of intense governmentalization in these programs, primarily because the poor often chose not to participate and failed to constitute themselves as a constituency for antipoverty policy. Their “apathy” and political inaction become the central target of programs and was posited as the most significant cause of poverty.¹³

To the extent that intervention became the objective of such programs of “empowerment,” these programs pursued forms of discipline that targeted individuals first for calculation and administration as a knowable constituency (or community); and second for development into self-governing subjects equipped with the right skills or capacities to then voluntarily contract their labor. Through operations in governmentality, community programs and nonprofits enjoin their “deserving,” “helpless,” “powerless” subjects to exercise their will correctly. In this manner, these nonprofits that address communities in crisis—women, the poor, communities of color, queer youth, and so on—might be described as voluntary contracts between citizens to guide others considered less capable toward governing themselves properly, thereby assuring the social order.

The community-engagement internship thus may fail to understand the role of these types of nonprofit organizations as partners of neoliberal state governance. Scholars and activists use the term “non-profit industrial complex” to name the institutional linkages and practices through which the nonprofit sector is called upon to fill (or at least to manage) a void as neoliberal capital recruited the welfare state to transform into a market actor.¹⁴ The rise of civil society to provide direct services (and often securing proper governmentality by doing so) that state agencies once delivered reorganized the voluntary sector, forming what Jennifer Wolch dubs a “shadow state.”¹⁵ Gilmore characterizes the nonprofit sectors’ envelopment and regulation of some of these programs in this way:

They have had to conform to public rules governing public money, and have found that being fiduciary agents in some ways trumps their principle desire to comfort and assist those abandoned to their care. They do not want to lose the contracts to provide services because they truly care about clients who would otherwise have nowhere to go; thus they have been sucked into the world of non-profit providers, which like all worlds, has its own jargon, limits (determined by bid and budget cycles, and legislative trends), and both formal as well as informal hierarchies. And, generally, the issues they 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.¹⁶

We trouble, then, the ways in which an undergraduate intern may uncritically engage in the nonprofit organization as an assumed social good that is somehow removed from the state, capital, and its mode of governmentality. As Nikolas Rose observes, emergent here is a “new relationship between strategies for the government of others and techniques for the government of the self, situated within new relations of mutual obligation: the community.”¹⁷ It is the unquestioning understanding of and obligation to this community that we question.

Furthermore, we find troubling the ways in which the concept of the political and the cant of activism are diminished in community internship practices. As feminists scholars such as Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, and Sonia Alvarez have shown, feminist nongovernmental organizations and activism are deeply implicated in colonialism, empire, and capitalism. Alvarez looks closely at how Latin American feminist NGOs have been drawn into troubling relationships with state power as gender experts (rather than feminist advocates), surrogates for civil society, and service subcontractors (advising and executing government women’s programs). Alvarez argues that the increasing demand for technical-professional skills from feminist NGOs is shrinking the scope of their political agendas and “ghetto-izing” their efforts.¹⁸ We find these demands and their subsequent responses stated quite clearly in one of the descriptions of a gender and women’s studies internship program:

Increasingly, corporations, colleges and universities, and personnel firms are hiring specialists in women’s and gender studies trained in understanding the complex demands of diverse communities. State and federal agencies need people who have special understanding of the problems that different women face in society, industry, and the professions. Educational institutions need specialists to develop and administer women’s studies programs, multicultural community centers, LGBT organizations and other groups designed specifically to deal with diverse gender and social issues.

In the contemporary political moment, nonprofits and NGOs operate in a depoliticized landscape and serve as mediators of neoliberal governance, yet we often encourage our students to engage uncritically with these organizations as a form of returning to the community and inciting activist inclinations.

Our last key concern about the community-engagement internship is the recruitment and production of students as certain kinds of subjects and citizens within neoliberal modes of government and capital. Perhaps most obviously, the community-engagement internship promises to empower the student who engages. One typical internship description hopes that the student will “become actively engaged in personalized research and discovery.” We might also perceive this argument for the community-engagement internship in one of the assignments shared by many of these independent studies—the personal journals or short papers through which the student engages in a self-narration of his or her enlightenment. Such literary technologies are central to the achievement of liberal personhood; through self-reflection, the student comes to understand himself or herself as an autonomous individual who is an actor and bearer of rights in a global civil society. As Cruikshank observes of self-esteem programs, self-narration is a central technology of liberal personhood: “Self-esteem program goals include getting clients to write and tell their personal narratives with an eye to the social good. Narratives bring people to see that the details of their personal lives and their changes for improving their lives are inextricably linked to what is good for all of society.”¹⁹

This self-reflective articulation of political consciousness and empowerment is tethered to visions of progress inherent in liberalism, multiculturalism, and capitalism, and that are exemplified by the West, and the United States in particular. Indeed, internships partake in a modernist description of self-making through participatory citizenship and bourgeois interiority. For many gender and women’s studies and ethnic studies students, internships also stand in for opportunities to affirm and authenticate their connections to communities as markers of selfhood. Furthermore, such self-making might recruit the student as an abstract observer of others’ suffering (which might also be perceived as a lack of capacities) through a concept of help that obscures the structural inequities that sustain suffering. As such, internships viewed as volunteer ventures outside of relations of capital (as an authentically “grassroots” experience) register what Joseph calls “capitalism’s subjectivity gap.”²⁰ In naming this gap to reflect contemporary conceptualizations of civic duty as practices of individual consumption, charity, and service, Joseph writes, “The promotion of nonprofit nongovernmental organizations as instruments of hegemony-building depends on the notion that, despite the fact that these organizations are actively and instrumentally encouraged, participation in such organizations is voluntary, is an authentic expression of real ‘grassroots’ communities and their interests.”⁹ In the same vein, Inderpal Grewal describes the emphases on charity and volunteerism as neoliberal “humanitarian citizenship,” enabled transnationally by nongovernmental organizations, as a further surrender of practices of well-being and care by the global North.²¹

What is elided in such a story of personal discovery through interaction with “community” is the production of the ethnic studies or gender and women’s studies student as a particularized worker. Most obviously, the community-engagement internship allows students to develop human capital that can translate into entrepreneurial skills in a neoliberal economy. For instance, some internships call for students “to develop oral and written communication skills in their professional fields,” “prepare a resume,” “develop employment-related skills,” and hope that the internships will “provide valuable experience for future career considerations.” Another internship description observes (perhaps erroneously), “This experience is usually the student’s first exposure to a professional work setting and we encourage students and agency supervisors to discuss work-related problems during the course of the internship.” Thus the internship borrows from a set of discourses and practices that elide the structuring violences of neoliberal governance and capital in favor of a liberal ideal that celebrates individuality as personal responsibility, but also as employability.

Furthermore, the internship also emphasizes the assistance and education that students might supply to the nonprofit, the NGO, and the community: “The [internship] program also benefits the internship site because students can provide an extra pair of hands to tackle a variety of needs,” and “the proposed research will benefit the community served.” Indeed, the systematic dismantling of the welfare state and deep slashes to social services and community programs have forced nonprofit organizations to seek university-student interns as a strategy for filling organizational gaps. Yet, more often than not, these relationships tax and strain these programs and their personnel, who are left with the ancillary labor of training student interns in the professionalizing skills that, as we earlier observed, universities and colleges presume are constituents of the internship (and for which, to state the obvious, personnel are not compensated). Also erroneously embedded in these statements is an argument about the equal exchange of labor and power between the university and the community. University-community partnerships are traditionally fraught with these tensions, as universities can dictate programs through their privileged positions and their ready access to resources and knowledge.²²

We are alarmed at the conversion of a gender and women’s studies or ethnic studies education into a capitalist state system of neoliberalism that consigns “service” and welfare concerns to the nonprofit domain. Given that our programs are often regarded by the neoliberal university as service provision to minoritarian student populations, so, too, do the community-engagement internships replicate this extraction of doubled or trebled labor as our students are inserted as particularized workers into the neoliberal economy in which the nonprofit as “community” complements the state and capital. Internships that target specific populations as requiring help provide a rationalized outcome for interdisciplinary programs of ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies.

Joseph warns that the emphasis on practice manifested through internship programs (as the central component of community-engagement internships) disguises the exploitative, unpaid labor our students provide for nonprofit organizations.²³ Indeed, universities are increasingly coming under fire for their complicity with corporations in exploiting students’ unpaid labor through the proliferation and institutionalization of internship programs with little regulation or protection of students’ rights.²⁴ She further observes that, given the predominance of women in nonprofit administration, through these practices “we act as an ideological apparatus generating particularized subjects for the workforce.”²⁵ Community-engagement internships thus double as both proletarianizing and professionalizing processes and provide skilled, low-wage labor as part of a managed civil society.

In such a schema of help and its troubling histories, the community-engagement internship may reify and replicate uneven relations of power and knowledge. Given this, we want to disrupt and problematize this involvement in a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization as community or activism. Our concern is that the community-engagement internship is emblematic of the neoliberalization of our programs and departments, providing technical-professional expertise and labor to nonprofits and NGOS as managers of “difference,” especially as states increasingly cede welfare concerns to these institutions as surrogates for community. The rationalization of our programs and departments under the corporatizing university through the narrow scope of service provision to communities under fire from state and capital initiatives furthermore focuses our attention on the immediacy of crisis rather than the longue durée, which is exactly when and where rigorous inquiry and imagination is required. For all these reasons, we are deeply troubled by the shrinking of the political, as we linger in the shadow of a shadow state.

1. See Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992); and Carlos Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London, New York: Verso, 1989). [↩]
2. Susan Ellis and Katherine H. Noyes, By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990); Patricia Washington, “Women’s Studies and Community-Based Service-Learning: A Natural Affinity,” By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers, eds. Susan Ellis and Katherine H. Noyes, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990) 103-16. [↩]
3. Edward Zlotkowski, “About This Series,” Cultivating the Sociological Imagination: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Sociology, eds. James Ostrow, Garry Hesser, and Sandra Eno, (Washington D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 1999) v-vii. [↩]
4. Barbara J. Balliet and Kerrissa Heffernan, eds., Practice of Change: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Women’s Studies (Washington D.C: American Association for Higher Education, 2000). [↩]
5. Trigg and Balliet 2000: 97. [↩]
6. See Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002). [↩]
7. Sharmila Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004). [↩]
8. Joseph 2002: xxxii. [↩]
9. Joseph 2002: 111. [↩] [↩]
10. Joseph 2002: 70. [↩]
11. Lester Salamon, “The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America,” The State of Nonprofit America, ed. Lester M. Salamon, (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002) 3-61. [↩]
12. Salamon 2002: 7. [↩]
13. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999) 73. [↩]
14. INCITE!, Women of Color Against Violence, ed. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007). [↩]
15. Jennifer R. Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: The Foundation Center, 1990). [↩]
16. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007) 46. Reprinted in this issue. [↩]
17. Nikolas Rose, “The Death of the Social? Re-Figuring the Territory of the Government,” Economy and Society 25.3 (1996): 331. [↩]
18. Sonia Alvarez, “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom’,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1.2 (1999): 181-209. [↩]
19. Barbara Cruikshank, “Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem,” Economy and Society 22.3 (1993): 329. [↩]
20. Joseph 2002: 92. [↩]
21. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke UP, 2005). [↩]
22. Esther Prins, “Individual Roles and Approaches to Public Engagement in a Community-University Partnership in a Rural California Town,” Journal of Research in Rural Education 21.7 (2006); Yolanda Suarez-Balcazar, Gary W. Harper, and Rhonda Lewis, “An Interactive and Contextual Model of Community-University Collaborations for Research and Action,” Health Education & Behavior 32.1 (2005): 84-101. [↩]
23. Miranda Joseph, “Analogy and Complicity: Women’s Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism,” Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader, ed. Robyn Weigman, (Durham: Duke UP, 2002) 267-292. [↩]
24. Ross Perlin,”Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges,” The New York Times 2 Apr. 2011. [↩]
25. Joseph 2002: 282. [↩]