"Not for profits" / Native values

Cornet writes on RBB and I respond:

"The tax-exempt sector has not been cramped by the IRS. In the first decade of the century, the number of nonprofit corporations has grown by 25 percent. In 2010, nonprofits accounted for 5.4 percent of GDP, and 9 percent of wages."

From Hunter:

First, as we all know, there are a vast number of organizations -- many of them social justice advocacy -- that do not formally incorporate and seek 501(c)(3) status and depend on voluntary financial contributions and other versions of their own fundraising.  Foregoing IRS "certification" does, at least in some cases, enable maximum freedom of operation.

I used to keep up with the basics of this pretty well and still do to a limited extent.  I'm willing to see most non-profits as reputable and altruistic in nature.  But there's very often a major problem area: "central operating expenses."  In a good number of cases, a significant amount of "altruistic" money goes into that --  disproportionately.  This is especially true if bureaucracy has proliferated.

Our Training Center was on the opposite end of that. Its facilities were in a large and unpretentious storefront on the edge of the low income Uptown district of Chicago where most of the city's 20,000 Indians (from about 100 different tribes) resided. Central operating expenses were relatively minimal.  Our director, Bill Redcloud, lived modestly with his family, and his salary was -- adequate, but no more.  Trainees received modest stipends.  The Center's officers, including myself, received no salary and drew no expense monies of any kind at any point.  Bill, though not a CPA, had been well trained in accounting via a long ago BIA program and handled "the books" very well.  Volunteers handled some of the clerical duties which were pretty minimal.  Legal services were pro bono via good persons such as Tom Hanson.  Occasionally, the many outside speakers and visiting workshop leaders would receive a modest honorarium but usually contributed their services.

This did strike positive resonance with our funders.  During my sojourn in Chicago, and for a quite awhile thereafter, a good friend was the director of one of the larger regional foundations which had a consistent record of funding social justice groups.  I occasionally helped him, voluntarily, in making assessments of Southside groups -- and, as most know, my regular job was grassroots community organizing in that tough region. From him, and from a couple of other foundation executives, I learned a good deal.  "We always look very closely right away at the central operating expenses (real at the time and/or proposal projected), he would say.  "And we also take a reading on the measure of bureaucracy involved."

The time-honored basic ethos in any Native tribe or organization with respect to leadership remains quite intact:  Good leaders are those who serve their communities rather than serve themselves.  An unduly materialistic focus is antithetical to basic Native values. (Veblen would find little to shoot at in the Native world.) Bureaucracy inevitably draws Native wariness. Admittedly, there are individual exceptions to that -- but, generally speaking, and for the greatest part, those solid values endure and always will.  The casino situations of the last generation or so have often been a test of those basic values but, after a certain amount of confusion, and even some chaos, the tribes so involved have gotten the casino thing under control on the terms of the tribal societies as a whole -- and in accordance with their basic values. 

Hunter Bear

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org  (social justice)

See the new expanded/updated edition of my "ORGANIZER'S
BOOK." It's the inside story of the rise of the massive Jackson
Movement -- careful grassroots organizing, bloody repression, sell-out 
and more.  It also covers other organizing campaigns of mine through
 the decades since Mississippi. It's replete with grass-roots organizing
examples and "lessons."  And it has my new 10,000 word 
introduction.  Among a myriad of positive comments and reviews:
 ". . .a local activist's important account of the deleterious effects
the involvement  of national organizations can have on indigenous
protest movements."  (Historian David Garrow.)
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

See the related:  http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm