One issue that’s becoming increasingly important to me is the concept of working in silos. This is an oft criticized quality of non-profit work: non-profit organizations, driven by competition for public and private grant funding and donations from many of the same individuals, begin to “sell” their organizations as the best combatants of the social ill de jure. For that reason, we categorize and compartmentalize issues that are actually inextricably intertwined. We duplicate services; we reinvent the wheel all the time. We focus on community needs rather than community assets because we must prove that the crisis is ever-worsening and that we need an increasingly large pool of funding to do our jobs well. We create strategic partnerships but in so doing create artificial separations between issue areas and unhelpful competition between organizations that should otherwise be working collaboratively.
The concept of the silo is not new, but the thing of which I was not aware before coming to Arizona is how, in addition to working in issue silos, the non-profits of Arizona are also working in what I would call cultural silos. Non-profits have further partitioned themselves on the basis of race/ethnicity. For the most part, that bifurcation is one of white vs. Hispanic/Latino/Chicano.
And, honestly, the segregation is understandable if I’m considering carefully the kinds of barriers to effective partnership we might face looking across ethnic lines. Organizations would likely need to agree broadly on immigration issues. They would need to hold meetings in both English and Spanish (which is not to say that many Latinos can’t speak English well). They would need to involve and respect the role of faith-based organizations far more than they do in the white non-profit community. They would need to be sensitive to the issues of undocumented immigrants.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that white groups are largely out of touch with the culture, interests, concerns and importance of Latino-focused groups. People doing “racially neutral” work—-fighting poverty, for example, without an explicit focus on people of color in poverty-—are woefully disconnected from people doing expressly anti-racist anti-poverty work. When I make calls to other anti-poverty organizations with a largely Latino constituency or client base, they are (very) cold calls despite the fact that our organizations work on the same issues, often (nominally) for the same people.
I haven’t found the answer to this problem, but it is something I’m convinced impacts the effectiveness of all race-neutral non-profit groups. Because the poor are disproportionately people of color, race-neutral groups will do things ineffectively without buy-in and leadership from groups led by and for people of color. We need to (1) realize that we are working in cultural silos, (2) identify this as a large factor in our inability to move the needle on poverty, and (3) commit to working together (or rather largely white groups need to do internal anti-racism work and make a public comitment to find ways to enter into Latino or other POC non-profit networks.) Incidentally, race-neutral groups are often headed by whites and often have a disproportionately high portion of the available resources for non-profit work. This means that lacking or nonexistent collaboration also negatively affects anti-racist groups due to lack of funding and access to social and political capital
If we truly believe that everyone is tied up in the plight of the poor, we need to begin looking more closely at who is in our staff meetings, board meetings, neighborhood coalitions, advocacy committees, legislatures. Though we say that we as a society have made large strides in eliminating segregation during the past several decades, it is surprising, frustrating and hypocritical that the non-profits who claim to be aiding in the process of poverty alleviation and social justice are still so completely and ironically isolated on the basis of race.
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