Your millions are not worth more than our humanity.

“Your millions” are how we got here to begin with.

— ST. BERNARD PROJECT ORIENTATION LEADER, speaking to a Fortune 500 CEO volunteer who had come to work in New Orleans for a day in March 2011; the orientation leader was telling the CEO to stop answering emails on his Black-Berry in order to hear the story of the family whose home he would be working on

In 2010, New Orleans civic leaders boasted a conference in which they would host the “largest gathering of service and volunteer community leaders ever in the United States.” The conference scheduled for the summer of 2011 was sponsored by the HandsOn Network. The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, had this to say about it:

Perhaps no other city in America understands and appreciates the power of community service and the value of voluntourism1 to a community …. Our city, indeed our entire region, would not be as far along in our post-Katrina recovery without the time, talent and treasure of all those who were so generous in helping us in our time of great need. It is a distinct privilege to welcome this gathering to our city, where we have created a new roadmap for community service, and where the good work continues to this day, and will continue well into the future.2

Recognizing that a second major disaster had struck the Louisiana coastline with the 2010 bp oil spill, HandsOn New Orleans (a local branch of the national HandsOn Network) described its conference this way:

With the Gulf Coast reeling from its second economic blow in five years, Patrick Corvington, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and Michelle Nunn, CEO of Points of Light Institute and Co-Founder of the HandsOn Network, declared that the region’s largest city was not just the natural choice to host the 2011 gathering—it was the only choice. Not only is the Gulf Coast once again front-and-center for America’s volunteer and service community because of the BP oil spill, but both conference conveners already have a strong presence there due to recovery efforts from Hurricane Katrina.

Large amounts of funding were being poured into the marketing for the 2011 conference as early as 2010, with glossy advertising campaigns showcasing examples of people who exemplified success in an economy in which volunteering was able to replace the state in order to take care of people in need. The conference invited people who were previously poor and needy who had now parlayed their causes into sustainable charities of their own. The first conference, held in 2010 in New York City, had taken up large advertising space at Times Square, with LED posters containing logos that read “It’s Up To YOU!”

HandsOn New Orleans is a good example of the kind of corporate-run public-private partnership that has grown under market-driven governance in the United States as more and more of the responsibility for taking care of those in need is shifted back onto a willing and sympathetic public. HandsOn leverages federal resources to respond to growing levels of poverty and need nationwide by, in some sense, capitalizing on the surplus labor that has emerged in and through volunteering. It also works as a private corporation. It is a good example of the ways that the private sector for-profit market, charity organizations, and the federal government are now entering into new arrangements that should raise questions about not just the benefits or disadvantages of shifting safety-net responsibilities to the private sector but also the role played by “those in need” in our economy.

The hopeful possibility that the work of volunteering will cross entrenched lines of inequality between rich and poor and redistribute the burdens of recovery and responses to poverty onto a wide group of differently privileged citizens holds an enormous amount of political promise in the United States. Post-Katrina New Orleans offers evidence that such promises might be fulfilled. At the same time, New Orleans offers much less salubrious indications that even in a world where wealthy Fortune 500 CEOs might get their hands dirty by helping disaster-stricken families on the road to recovery, the work of volunteering and the economic infrastructures that are now in place to support it are by no means eliminating social inequalities. In some ways, they are only making it worse.

Of course, the idea of local grass-roots social service groups has a long history in New Orleans, and this history shaped the recovery economy as well as its grass-roots contours. Before turning to the contemporary arrangements of affective labor after Katrina, it is worth briefly exploring the larger context of grass-roots social aid in the city.

Social Aid and Grass-Roots Movements

New Orleans, even before Katrina, offered an amazing example of social aid organizations that emerged from grass-roots community efforts to care for those in need. For over a hundred years the many social aid and pleasure clubs, some of which were formed by free people of color who intermarried with Native American Indian tribes who took them in, have long served as welfare institutions for poor African Americans in the city. These clubs were formed initially to ensure that their members could receive proper funerals. Resources were pooled and used to honor and bury the dead and also to celebrate their lives in second-line events. Beyond that and over time, social aid and pleasure clubs grew to be more than social welfare organizations. They became social clubs that sponsored other celebrations, community activities, insurance funds, labor organizing, and even small businesses.3

Not surprisingly, New Orleans witnessed an unprecedented spontaneous rise in locally organized social movements in the aftermath of Katrina, some of which were supported by national organizations and others of which are entirely homegrown. The growth of these is well chronicled by Jordan Flaherty, Rachel Luft, and Ronald Lewis (in the case of social and pleasure clubs). These groups, many of which constituted new social movements, spawned the birth of numerous nonprofit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which became important conduits for volunteer labor, legal support, and financial aid.

Many organizations targeted their interventions not just to help people recover but also to revisit the past contexts of structural inequality and social justice issues in New Orleans. They focused not just on rebuilding but on a socially “just” rebuilding. Some of these NGOs emerged from the ground up, like the Common Ground Relief Collective started by the former Black Panther and well-known community activist Malik Rahim. Common Ground was a grass-roots community center with the slogan “solidarity, not charity” that expanded its mission, from running a volunteer-based community health clinic; to gutting homes; to providing legal resources, job training, and home-building assistance; to conducting programs on soil quality and environmental toxicology; and to generally supporting those trying to rebuild. Other organizations emerged as community groups, like the one Caroline (see chapter 6) started, with the explicit goal and purpose of rebuilding neighborhoods with volunteer support and donations from churches, volunteers, or individual donors in order to do the job that the government and its subcontractors, insurance companies, and FEMA did not do.

As Luft found, organizations that were tied to social justice created a groundswell of political activism by addressing long-standing social injustice issues that were made even more visible in Katrina’s aftermath.4 Some of these groups were associated with, or spawned by, churches, not surprisingly. Although nearly all of these organizations focused to some extent on providing practical help for returning residents focusing on survival and rebuilding, some emerged to fill a vacuum created by other preexisting gaps in infrastructure in various public sectors, from health care to education.

It is impossible to catalogue all of the nonprofit NGOs that came into existence in post-Katrina New Orleans, but a representative sample would include organizations like Emergency Communities, which provided a communal space—a kitchen, laundry, computer systems—for members of a community to use as they returned and rebuilt; the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF), an African American-led coalition for a just reconstruction; and Community Labor United Coalition. The latter group’s mission statement included the following: “The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattered across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants, and the wealthy white districts of New Orleans.”5

Some of the social justice-oriented groups even helped spearhead local community tribunals and truth and reconciliation commission-style hearings to “try” the Bush administration for what the community perceived as crimes committed against them. The U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of more than one hundred U.S.-based organizations working on human rights issues, including the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (defending human rights and promoting African American self-determination) in coalition with PHRF, actively documented abuses and worked with the United Nations in investigating and reviewing Katrina-related offenses by the police, including the Danziger Bridge incident (which occurred in 2005 but only received national media attention in 2010).

These groups were joined by other grass-roots organizations such as the now-defunct ACORN, which had provided homeownership and antidemolition advocacy, and the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, a private, nonprofit civil rights organization established in the summer of 1995 but that had grown larger in scale after Hurricane Katrina. All of these organizations worked to eradicate housing discrimination throughout the greater New Orleans area through education, investigation, and enforcement activities, particularly on behalf of previous renters in New Orleans. Groups like Survivors Village created temporary tent cities that still existed five years after the floods so that displaced public-housing residents who were struggling for justice after the majority of public housing was destroyed would have a place to stay. UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a collaborative of sixty agencies that worked with homeless people, continues working tirelessly on behalf of the one in four people who remain homeless in the city.

New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice was started up to build worker power, advance racial justice, and organize to build a just social labor movement in the post-Katrina city. Groups like this remained committed to eradicating the increased abuses surrounding workers (both those who were native to New Orleans, as well as migrant laborers) and eliminating policies that allowed outside contracting companies to use imported labor. Other groups focused on finding people in what is locally often referred to as “the Katrina diaspora”: one such group was Finding Our Folk, a large-scale grass-roots initiative that spent time after the storm speaking directly to survivors throughout the diaspora, listening to their issues, and giving form and voice to their outrage.

Some organizations, such as the Broadmoor Improvement Association, formed as a reaction to news that their neighborhoods had been turned into “green dot” areas (that is, neighborhoods that New Orleans city planners identified as ones they would not rebuild after the storm and floods). Initial and successive planning efforts on the part of city officials, done largely behind closed doors with little public input according to the Louisiana Justice Institute, were organized around recovery models that would eradicate neighborhoods with high crime and low incomes in order to create investment opportunities for developers and commercial interests. In response to the news of these plans, some neighborhoods organized to fight back.

The Limits of the Private Sector

On an optimistic note, Luft argues that the growth of nonprofit grass-roots organizations in post-Katrina New Orleans offers a good example of a shift in American neoliberal politics. These organizations have fueled the growth of political movements that are committed to local sociopolitical and structural action aimed at rectifying previous inequalities and injustices. They have, she notes, created a new “playing field” in the world of disaster responsiveness and preparedness and have, in many cases, given voice to local political concerns and effective social activism.

Organizations like the Broadmoor Improvement Association have been extraordinarily successful in garnering public recognition and private-sector funding from foundations, charities, and philanthropies. They have protected and rebuilt communities that were essentially slated for abandonment. These groups reveal a sense of an ongoing antagonism and mistrust of local and regional government, and they embrace the private sector as a radical and plentiful alternative to what they see as the social, governmental neglect of the poor and underresourced sectors of the city. In other words, these types of organizations are a response to what are seen as governmental failures to protect citizens. Rather than calling for better government policies, these groups are turning to the private sector to solve their problems.

Many other social justice groups that emerged in the aftermath of Katrina have also embraced private-sector opportunities for growth, recognition, and fiscal support.6 The celebration of grass-roots social movements should not be overlooked or underestimated, but it is important to remember that such movements often adopt the same views as those who may be responsible for creating problems of disenfranchisement to begin with. In other words, unregulated private-sector opportunism created the problem of the green dot areas, which would have eliminated poor neighborhoods and replaced them with higher-income property. By turning to the private sector, however, these groups now find themselves in competition with for-profit businesses, government subcontractors, and a growing number of competing NGOs that vie for available resources. The belief that the private sector will do what government has failed to do is accompanied by an unfortunate new set of dependencies on not just the for-profit market but also a growing intermediary infrastructure that is profiting from the partnership between government and grass-roots groups. As we will see, this growing intermediary sector has also nurtured dependency on corporate donations, philanthrocapitalism, and venture philanthropy as mechanisms for capitalization.

The seductive notion that private-sector movements will rectify or redress and respond to the larger problem of disenfranchisement of the poor and the underrepresented in America is powerful, especially for those who see their participation in such movements as a radical alternative to conventional infrastructures of social inequality and who reap the rewards of such action. The allure of independence from government and public sources of funding, however, can soon fade when organizations are faced with competition over available donor resources and also when new forms of accountability to fiscal priorities and sustainability through the adoption of business models begin to overshadow commitments to local problems.

In fact, many of the small grass-roots organizations that were formed after Katrina found themselves having to merge with much larger institutions in order to stay in business. Small organizations operating as private NGOs found they had to reconstitute as partners with larger umbrella organizations that could fund them, even when they had slightly different priorities and practices of distribution.7

The Beacon of Hope, for example, started as a neighborhood organization. Caroline Reeves worked hand in hand with the original founder to support rebuilding efforts in the Lakeview area. The Beacon used volunteers and ran on a shoestring budget with help from anyone and anything it could get. When volunteers arrived and offered money, it would be used to buy cleaning and construction materials for homes. When they arrived with carpentry skills, they were put to work using those skills, whether it was with plumbing, sheetrock, drywall, painting, or weeding and gardening. Eventually, the Beacon of Hope tried to get funding to support its growing caseload and finally got larger donors, such as United Way, to support it.

After four years of operation, the Beacon of Hope found itself having to scale up many of its operations in order to sustain its funding stream from larger donors. In particular, it found that it had to hire fund-raisers and think about business models and ways of accounting that would enable it to “show” its donors that it was using the money well and developing self-sustaining fiscal practices. At the Beacon, this meant changing how it counted outcomes. Rather than helping communities one house at a time, the Beacon found that it had to count each house or homeowner it helped for one day as a “credit.” It was not long before the Beacon of Hope figured out that in order to meet target goals set by its largest funder, United Way, it would have to scale back on its commitment to each homeowner. Because the Beacon got one credit per house or homeowner it made more sense to take on small and time-limited jobs for each household rather than a long-term commitment to any one household. That is, because landscaping the front yard of a home conferred the same “credit” as getting someone back into a home from beginning to end (starting with gutting a flooded house and eventually turning it into a livable home complete with landscaping), it made no sense for the Beacon to do long-term volunteer work for any single resident. The scaling up to meet donor demands entailed a scaling back on commitments to residents in need.

Caroline eventually broke off from the Beacon for this reason. She felt that commitments to families like the Bradlieus, whom she took from living in a FEMA trailer a full five years after the hurricane to moving back into a completed home, were her primary concern. She did not have time to scale up her operation in order to meet the Beacon’s or United Way’s accounting demands, and she did not have the moral fortitude one would need to leave these families behind. The more time the Beacon had to spend on fund-raising, the less time and money it could commit to the projects of rebuilding it was involved with. The transformations within the Beacon looked and felt to Caroline too much like a for-profit business. “Their way of doing things changed dramatically,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t help people this way.” Donors’ demands to match their funds with returns on investment in quantitative reports about what were essentially inefficient distributions left people like Caroline feeling as if it was counterproductive to the goals of the people who needed it the most, people like the Bradlieus. In a word, it reminded her of the Road Home Program. The problem wasn’t with the Beacon, however, but with the infrastructures of funding that had begun to govern this sector of the volunteer charity world, in which accounting methods that were focused on raising funds to sustain the business overshadowed accounting methods that simply suggested a net outflow of resources to homeowners in need.

Organizations like United Way, HandsOn Network, and Points of Light Institute are good examples of large monopoly organizations in the humanitarian disaster enterprise sector. They offer a double-edged sword for local grass-roots movements. On the one hand, they offer funding and recognition and a way to work one step removed from what gets called cumbersome government bureaucracy. On the other hand, moving into the private sector has not guaranteed that they are sheltered from the more serious burdens of market accountability. In the worst cases, the move to work in and with the private sector creates conflicts over how time and money are spent for the organization, with increased time and money spent on fund-raising efforts and developing business models for income streams, and sometimes these conflicts threaten to undermine the commitment and ability for these organizations to do locally effective work.

As the private sector takes on more responsibility for funding this sector of the economy, accountability is increasingly calibrated to meet for-profit standards of success, and the question might be raised of how much better the nonprofit world might fare under the banner of a strong public sector that refuses neoliberal accounting and ethical agendas. Caroline’s experience with HandsOn is exemplary of these challenges.

The Big Business of Charity

New Orleans offers numerous examples of the way in which neoliberal policies allowed market forces to leverage profits from the recovery process. The most striking examples were with companies like Halliburton, Blackwater, or ICF. What is more surprising is how a whole new set of promissory capitalizations and profits emerged in the nonprofit charity sector in a strikingly similar way. The HandsOn Network offers a good case study.

HandsOn describes itself as a locally focused, nationally supported volunteer networking organization whose purpose has been to provide network services and organizational and infrastructural support for grass-roots, volunteer-based efforts across the country. It grew out of another set of social service-oriented programs that were designed to operate in and through an “insider-outsider” relationship with government; it functions as a public-private partnership, meaning it acts like a private corporation but with a stream of federal funding, thus somewhat like a government agency without the regulations that usually accompany public-sector work and with more freedom to use free-market fiscal strategies with government funds.

In 2010 HandsOn boasted that in New Orleans it was “assisting 16 community organizations and neighborhood associations to address community issues through its retooled Volunteer Leader Program. Volunteer Leaders make a weekly or monthly commitment to help manage volunteer projects for community partners that tackle issues including homelessness, hunger, animal rescue, disaster recovery, environmental protection and more.”8

HandsOn New Orleans is considered a model of a nationally based, federally funded, public-private partnership that uses federal support, corporate philanthropy, and partnerships with multiple local, grass-roots, volunteer-based organizations to help communities in need. Its largest funder is the Corporation for National and Community Service, an independent agency of the U.S. government founded under the direction of Stephen Goldsmith during the term of George Bush Sr. in his mission to create a thousand points of light through charity.

HandsOn’s ability to advocate for and provide solutions to local communities seems, at first glance, promising. A quick look through its website suggests a well-organized effort in which people wanting to volunteer, and make donations, can do so and in which needy organizations at the local level can get manpower and visibility. In September 2010, Caroline was asked to be part of the 2011 HandsOn conference as a representative local New Orleans community leader. Caroline was eager to see what sort of benefit participating in this national-level organization might bring. She couldn’t tell yet how it would translate into being able to help the Bradlieus or the hundreds of others who had been left behind who were still hoping for help and still trying to get out of their trailers. HandsOn had not offered her any real money or material support, only the chance to be part of the movement. She’d gotten a call from a woman in HandsOn who said she had sixty volunteers who wanted to come to New Orleans, and could Caroline find work for them? She did, but it ended up being more work for her because she didn’t need more volunteers per se. She had plenty of volunteers who had found her through word of mouth or through her website. What she needed were funds to pay for rebuilding materials. Still, HandsOn New Orleans wanted to showcase her center as a model for community-organized, volunteer, faith-based recovery. She would be a featured community leader at the 2011 conference.

The conference was sponsored in part by the University of Phoenix, a for-profit online university, which posted its name on all available wall and brochure space. At the conference, Caroline presented the story of her organization and told about rebuilding efforts along with a few dozen others. She never received funding for her participation at the workshop, but she did get brought into HandsOn’s organizational network. As a result of the conference, she worked alongside and received small amounts of funding to help in the restoration and replanting of three public parks in New Orleans. The effort involved a partnership between Rebuilding New Orleans (another local grass-roots nonprofit), HandsOn, Red Cross, and her group. She received $15,000 from HandsOn for the project, and HandsOn provided a team of volunteers.

Afterward, Caroline continued to work with HandsOn in other ways. One of the most promising, she said, was the opportunity to gain access to a team of permanent AmeriCorps “volunteers” who could provide sustained work. In this arrangement, volunteers did not receive payment but did receive a stipend for their living expenses. Caroline was asked to pay roughly $10,000 to each worker, and to this amount HandsOn offered a matching sum that was paid to each “volunteer.” The model, she noted, was “more corporate” in its orientation, but it was useful to have workers who were not only long-term but also skilled at the work itself. The only drawback, she said, was having to train a new crop of volunteers each year. She also noted that HandsOn set up a “tool-lending library” in the city and this worked well for her because, for a small monthly fee, she was able to borrow tools for her volunteers that her organization didn’t own but needed.

HandsOn operates as a nonprofit organization but it looks and feels like a company that is in the big business of charity. It is not clear whether or not it is a publicly traded corporation, but it uses a language of investment portfolios and return risk rewards to describe its work in part because it partners with large for-profit corporations. Some of its large corporate sponsors include Target, Disney, UPS, JP Morgan, and Fidelity Investments.9 Large volunteer organizations, like AmeriCorps, operate under and alongside the umbrella of HandsOn, and HandsOn partners with numerous volunteer NGOs, such as the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster and AL!VE (the Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement).

In fact, HandsOn Network merged with Points of Light Institute in 2007, the private-sector foundation that was initiated with federal support under Bush Sr.’s administration to grow charity and the church’s role in public service. In fact, HandsOn seems to operate in name only under the auspices of its headquarter organization, Points of Light Institute. The juggernaut of a free market in volunteer charity businesses is one that apparently requires companies like this to remain incredibly active in absorbing and catalyzing the reach of its networks. A positive spin on this would be that such activity helps stimulate and capitalize on innovation in this growing sector of the economy. A less positive spin would note that because this sector is not regulated, companies like this must continually absorb competitors in order to achieve a prominent position, and they must frequently rename themselves in order to stay ahead of the investment opportunities that seek to fund only the most innovative and new framings of this type of business. That this is happening in the world of relief and recovery work is both exciting and promising but also terrifying.

Since its merger with the Points of Light Institute, HandsOn Network has become one of the largest businesses in the world involved in redistributing resources from the government and for-profit companies, and putting those resources to work for humanitarian causes in communities of need. It claims to have mobilized more than 30,000,000 volunteer hours, which it calculates as $626 million “in human capital toward our nation’s critical problems” (although the figures change regularly). Of course, “volunteer” is a somewhat ambiguous term to use for this work that is unpaid but still makes money for the parent organization.

Most of the volunteers with HandsOn do not get paid, and those committed service workers called “interns” who do, such as with AmeriCorps, HealthCorps, or Teach for America, are paid far below minimum wage, although this varies depending on the payment structure (and who is paying) for the “volunteer/intern.” Considering that one of HandsOn’s big campaigns is in advocating corporate philanthropy, offering a streamlined way of enabling corporations to “give” online, this arrangement sheds light on the notion that the private sector might be able to generate support for those in need largely outside of the government while still using government funds. For the time being, merging government resources with those of corporate giving has enabled HandsOn to sustain itself as a rather large corporate, public-private entity that operates in and through the redistribution of surplus wealth that is generated in part by the volunteer and underpaid workforce.

On the positive side, organizations like HandsOn may actually be more suited to helping people in need than government subcontractors like the Shaw Group or Halliburton, whose performances in the postdisaster period were nothing short of abysmal. At the same time, the shift toward more private-sector oversight of public-sector activities, following the lead of former military subcontractors, opens up the space for a new sort of capitalization on the problems of need in America. Organizations like HandsOn Network and the Points of Light Institute are, in one sense at least, in the business of making capitalist sense of charity, even while they fill in the gaps left open by capitalist and market-oriented forms of governance. They offer a new kind of public-private model of social service infrastructure—one that runs obliquely across the market but not in step with it. The fact that they must be fully operational within a for-profit market means that they must at some point organize themselves as businesses that must be sustained, even while keeping an eye on the nonprofitable problem of humanitarian relief and rebuilding efforts they attend to. Sometimes organizations hover uncomfortably in the zone between being private nonprofit and corporate-like for-profit, because to stay in business as a nonprofit they must compete for increasingly stretched resources from both private and public sources.10 Surely, stock portfolios and publicly traded IPOs are just around the corner, just as they were with ICF International. Evidence that charity (and particularly disaster-relief charity) is now itself profitable is nowhere more visible than in the return of ICF International, which, as you may recall, was given the contract to run the Road Home Program during the first three years of post-Katrina recovery.

The Return of ICF International

ICF recognized the growing investment in volunteer and faith-based movements as a growth sector in the global economy. Thus, in 2009, ICF decided to get in on the action. It acquired a company called Macro International and began to invest in faith-based community initiatives by creating faith-based community organizations (FBCOs), which, as ICF leadership had noted, had recently received greater attention from policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels.11 Here, the direct link between federal funding of local faith-based organizations and the for-profit sector that offers up its management services is yet another example of market-driven governance,12 and therefore it is not surprising to find ICF resurfacing.

Founded in 1966, Macro provided research and evaluation, management consulting, marketing communications, and information services to key agencies of the federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and the Departments of State, Education, and Veterans Affairs. It is headquartered in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.13 The chairman and CEO of ICF, Sudhakar Kesayan, said of the merger with Macro, “This transaction illustrates an important element of ICF’s growth strategy—to acquire profitable, high-quality firms that provide significant growth potential and cross-sell opportunities in our key markets …. Macro is an excellent strategic fit for ICF, adding capabilities and clients in one of the largest of our market segments—health, human services and social programs—which is among the most important areas of the Obama Administration’s focus.”14 In its presidential transition mission statement of 2010, spokespersons for ICF noted that among its acquisition strategies, like with Macro, it hoped to take advantage of the growth of faith-based initiatives in the social services sector, stating that although faith-based and neighborhood partnerships are not new in America,

what is relatively new is the direction taken by federal, state and local governments over the past 15 years in creating partnerships between government and private programs to deliver public services. From the passage of welfare reform in the mid-1990s to the creation of the first federal Faith-Based and Community Initiative by the Bush Administration to the announcement by President Obama of an Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership …, the federal government has been fashioning a new relationship between the programs it funds to benefit needy Americans and the grassroots organizations that are often on the front line of service delivery …. Currently, ICF is working with a wide range of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships throughout the country, providing expert training and technical assistance in an effort to help these programs improve their programming, build their capacity, and enhance their ability to promote self-sufficiency for individuals, families, and communities.15

The specific configuration of the public-private partnership initiated by ICF with faith-based volunteer organizations is interestingly positioned within the market. ICF makes a good business of helping those in need, while reconfiguring the needy as the new workforce at the same time: “These FBCOs are recognized as valuable partners, based primarily on their local networks and relationships, especially among cultural and linguistic minorities and other hard-to-reach populations. ICF Macro has been involved in helping government programs, such as local workforce development agencies and other anti-poverty programs, to develop effective linkages with local FBCOs.”16

One of the mechanisms for FBCOs is the “workforce board.” Workforce boards consist of public-sector and private-sector members who are providing workforce development leadership in their communities. Workforce efforts essentially mobilize volunteers in order to turn needy people into entrepreneurs who can turn their need into a visible target for the charity market. But this charity goes to work! Workforce boards are seen as instruments for instilling in communities a work ethic that will bring market solutions to their community problems. The National Association of Workforce Boards says, “Services are designed to help Board volunteers advance the public-private model among key policy makers, secure the role of the business sector in workforce development, enhance members’ capacity and effectiveness, and learn from networking opportunities with the nationwide job training community.”17

In hopes that the market will serve as a model for even the nonprofit, volunteer sector, advocates of market-driven governance are turning even the neediest of communities into sites for entrepreneurial growth and profit making, even though we know that such practices exclude large numbers of potentially worthy recipients.

We should not miss the irony here in the fact that ICF International, formerly in charge of the Road Home Program, had repurposed itself as an agency devoted to faith-based community organization partnerships nationally and internationally. The business of “staying in business” sometimes merely requires a rebranding of the mission statement, with little transformation of one’s corporate infrastructure, leadership, or even stock portfolio goals. If ICF’s performance with the Road Home Program is any indication of the inefficiencies of profit and poor performance that are possible in this new public-private arrangement, it is worth questioning what its involvement in faith-based neighborhood volunteer projects will produce. Inserting itself into the interface between government and citizen once again, ICF got itself into a position to generate large corporate fiscal rewards from the government for what was essentially already being done at the grass-roots level. It is what Caroline called, when I told her about this arrangement, “enough to make [her] sick.”

As the private sector is asked to take on more and more of the social services work that people in need in America have come to depend on, something happens to the public sector. The government, and the political process that is waged to ensure care for the most vulnerable, becomes a partisan bystander—a sort of sleeping partner—to a set of institutions that functions with federal support but by a logic that is governed almost entirely by private-sector business and corporate principles, where competition for resources and market accountability reign and where hoards of unpaid or poorly paid laborers are now asked to do the work of providing a safety net essentially for “free” or at rates far below minimum wage.

Here is where questions about the benefits and limits of neoliberal policies and the turn to private-sector solutions begin to haunt those who work in this sector. Those who are in need and those who are trying to help the needy undertake a mission that gets awkwardly tangled up in problems of marketing, resourcing need, mobilizing unpaid labor, becoming self-sustaining, and marketing charity by foregrounding its affective entailments. As extraordinary as grass-roots movements and organizations have been in rebuilding New Orleans, they have inevitably been faced with complicated questions about their own survival in an environment where it appears that they must be accountable both to a corporately structured for-profit market and to those whom they hope to serve. The ability of organizations like HandsOn Network and Macro International (ICF) to remain focused on caregiving while simultaneously developing investment models for survival is a challenge at best, a contradiction at worst, and, in between these outcomes, a slippery slope in which needy populations are themselves the commodity that keeps the market going. This becomes more visible in the story of ICF International’s return.

Large companies like ICF are able to jump into the mix alongside HandsOn as infrastructural clearinghouses that corral federal and corporate funds to further these grass-roots volunteer activities. Questions about who is responsible for oversight and for ensuring that the public benefits from such resource allocations more than its corporate executives need to be raised, along with a host of other questions about accountability. The new infusions of private and corporate sponsorship to charity nonprofits, often called a form of philanthrocapitalism, pose even more compelling questions about accountability and goals as the safety net is shifted over to the private sector.

Philanthrocapitalism

Philanthrocapitalism inspires book titles like Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green) and websites like The Capitalist Manifesto. Philanthrocapitalists note that “corporations now realize that they can do well by doing good.”18 Indeed, the merging of charity and business philanthropy offers new financial opportunities for the corporate sector as well as for those who run social service and volunteer aid organizations. “Philanthrocapitalism” and “venture philanthropy” both hail a glorious future in which corporations will recognize how much profit can be made by doing good. Corporate giving is no longer structured around opportunities for tax shelters. Now, corporate philanthropy is being organized as a new type of profit-investment opportunity. This means several things. First, in the venture capitalist world, venture philanthropy posits that investing in social capital (people) can be parlayed into actual capital, augmenting market share while conscripting even the poorest to become profit makers in a network of market-based formulations of personal success. It also means that the new sorts of accountabilities and obligations that dependency on philanthrocapitalism arouses have to be factored into the machinery of charitable work. Through organizations like HandsOn, Points of Light Institute, and Macro International, we are just beginning to see how this process works.

One of the mechanisms of philanthrocapitalism is that of jumping on the bandwagon of public-private partnerships in which federal and state resources are used to leverage private investments. Like with HandsOn, using a combination of corporate philanthropy, government funding, and nongovernmental infrastructures to put funding into public areas of need is an ideology and a practice that cuts across political party lines in the United States. In 2010, the Obama administration invested $50 million of public funds in the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), which philanthropic organizations then matched with $74 million: “Although the SIF accounts for a tiny fraction of the federal budget, the fund embodies an approach that the administration plans to spread throughout government. The fund is one of several efforts to promote new partnerships of government, private capital, social entrepreneurs and the public, pushed by the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.”19

Presented as an exciting new solution to some very old problems, this infrastructural shift in essence gives responsibility for social services, from recovery to welfare, back to the private sector and potentially to those companies that benefit most from the for-profit market already. This innovation, again, was inspired by Stephen Goldsmith, the advisor who helped devise George Bush Sr.’s plan to “hand provision of some services to faith-based groups” in the Points of Light Institute.20 He was also the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, set up at the same time to oversee the distribution of SIF. Goldsmith, a former Harvard professor who became a Republican mayor of Indianapolis, is also known for having fired 40 percent of the city’s nonuniform workers and for providing contracts to private-sector firms to take over these jobs.

SIF has a lot of targets of opportunity. It funded a public-private partnership with the Center for Economic Opportunity and the mayor’s office in New York City in order to “help lift people out of poverty.” In this arrangement, small organizations competed for SIF funding and the winners were those who ostensibly showed their merit by having proven they were capable of, not surprisingly, earning money. One reporter described the process this way:

[SIF has] backed a controversial set of experiments to encourage the poor to be vaccinated or to pass exams by rewarding them with cash. The CEO [of one organization], with the Mayor’s fund to Advance New York City, received one of the first grants awarded by the SIF: $5.7 million to replicate five anti-poverty programmes in seven other cities …. Indeed, the CEO inspired the SIF, says Mr. Goldsmith, who influenced the SIF’s design. There is however a difference. New York’s scheme emphasizes taking risks, with the expectation of the high failure-rate typical in a venture-capital fund.21

Despite the overt gesture toward putting capital to socially worthy purposes, money has become the instrument of governance in this arrangement. It rewards those who behave like fiscally responsible citizens and punishes those who do not. (Remember that this was the fundamental problem faced by many returning residents of New Orleans who could not make themselves visible as fiscal opportunities; these people were overlooked in the slow march toward recovery.)

Less perceptibly, but perhaps more important, organizations like SIF, which dole out fiscal rewards for companies to solve social problems through financial incentives, have a way of transforming public money into private business. The recruitment of philanthrocapital in this arrangement is one in which the investors from the private market end up having a lot of power to set the agenda in ways that reward their companies for what should be public goods. Here is where things get tricky. Public service-oriented nonprofit groups must show that their businesses can be managed like good businesses; they can become risk takers in the search for self-sustainability and even profit. They must operate like any recipient of venture capital and thereby show that they can eventually pay for themselves. The people they serve, or the services they provide, become not only the index for profit making but also the concealing mask for it. The participants in this system who cannot become successful entrepreneurs (whether they are NGOs or victims of disaster) become excluded from participating in the rewards even while their need circulates as a productive resource in the system.

Bryn Jones notes that the trend toward corporate giving is not unprecedented in the history of Euro-American civil society: “In the United States and Britain, a new set of institutional relationships is emerging to fill a vacuum in tackling social and environmental problems. In this new institutional field, large corporations are taking on the role of patrons to a variety of clients among public and civil society organizations. This social relationship parallels similar episodes of patronage when systems of community and public welfare disintegrated during the rise of capitalism.”22 Jones cautions, however, that corporate philanthropy often involves new regimes of patronage in which those groups that cannot calibrate their charitable acts to the audit needs of the market (or the sponsoring business) are left behind. Even the neediest recipients of aid must learn how to become entrepreneurs and potential business clients (e.g., customers) for the corporation that donated.

Jones notes that recipients who depend on philanthropy become wedded to a system in which donor philanthropists “may still donate wealth gratuitously, but in which many super-rich patrons of the ‘new philanthropy’ using strategic CSR [corporate social responsibility] demand calculable returns on their ‘investments.’ Under these constraints, corporate social contributions, in particular, entail an inherent risk of dependency for recipients.”23

In his critical book Small Change: Why Business Can’t Save the World, Michael Edwards notes that philanthrocapitalism requires a specific type of accounting, a rigorous commitment to the notion that investments in future market opportunities will generate profits alongside social good, even in disaster situations where public need seems to defy the logic of for-profit economies. Sometimes the marriage of profit with social service can work. Other times, it can’t. Auditing and accounting practices that place self-sustainability and fiscal bottom lines above those that are used by the communities in need ensure that some goals, and some people, will drop off the aid map, like they did with the Beacon of Hope and like they did in ICF’s management of the Road Home Program. Aid recipients must continually refigure their aims and goals to funders’ priorities, as funders become task masters of accountability. In the end, Jones says, “Corporate support for nonprofits has a tendency to evolve into corporate dominance over them.”24 In most cases, organizations are forced to use accounting practices that make sense in the business world but not in the world of humanitarian relief.

In some cases, the philanthrocapitalism investment is explicitly justified by the notion that corporate giving can result in the production of more consumers for the donor’s corporate products. Christina Gold, the CEO of Western Union, suggested in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that corporate giving should be aligned with the business interests of the company. In other words, worthy causes are those that will provide opportunities for the needy to become customers, or that will, in the end, help the fiscal bottom line of the donor company.25

In the end, the growth of a nonprofit NGO industrial complex that is sustained not just by government but also by high-net-worth individuals offers opportunities for things like recovery and rebuilding to occur without the overt participation of government interference when it comes to public accountability, even while the groups often benefit from government subsidies alongside corporate philanthropy. This structural arrangement creates a type of streamlined patronage capitalism,26 in which large patrons play the dominant role in determining not only the types of opportunities available and the types of needs that will be met with the capital generated by this privatized system but also the outcome measures that are used to determine success.

Using philanthrocapitalism and venture philanthropy to care for the needy, just like disaster capitalism, reveals what can happen when we turn the business of caring for those in need over to the private sector. Sometimes, private-sector solutions seem to work well. For many advocates of neoliberal policy, this is a win-win scenario. The for-profit private sector pays for the charity sector. For others, however, it is a scenario that creates further divides between rich and poor, and it creates silos of opportunity in which money continually flows up into fewer (usually corporate) hands while more and more go without. A privately organized recovery infrastructure fails to account for the possibility that for-profit governance creates opportunities for bureaucratic failure, as was seen with the Road Home Program, and for the fact that some people cannot meet corporate measures of success or fiscal responsibility. Some situations, like recovering from disaster, simply require unfettered, unrestrained giving and streams of funding that favor the victim over the company that distributes funding.

What is clear is that even where the volunteer sector has grown the most—with faith-based groups—the simultaneous growth of organizations like HandsOn and ICF/Macro, which are now in the business of finding ways to profit by way of the largely unpaid labor sector, reveals how the pull of the private sector is simultaneously a gravitational pull toward the for-profit market and the widening of poverty in the United States. The move returns us, like a snake eating its own tail, to the root source of the problems of inequality and profit-driven inefficiency that caused the disaster of Katrina in the first place.

The Affect Economy

The experiences of New Orleanians reveal a coalescing of interests and institutional arrangements in which charity, faith, patronage, and for-profit capitalism are knitted together in an affect economy. Humanitarian “networks” that form in this coalescence are called on to fill the material, social, and political gaps created by both disaster and disastrous policies that, in the case of New Orleans, had ironically created the problems of ongoing need from failed recovery in the first place.

Affect calls for emotional responsiveness and generates an inducement to action, and as such it generates new business investments and free labor for a struggling socio-economy. Ongoing need becomes a marketing tool and the circulating site for value in the ever-growing infrastructure of the charity NGO market.27 Affect that is generated by the people who lived through Hurricane Katrina and lost so much from it becomes in some sense unmoored from its sites of origin in people as it circulates among the agencies that hope to profit from it.

Charity and philanthrocapitalism appear as new mechanisms of redistribution for taking care of those in need: sometimes they do just that. Along the way, however, companies like ICF International are able to capitalize not once but twice on the disaster, first from their own failed interventions through Road Home and subsequently by becoming a clearinghouse redistributor for faith-based volunteer NGOs. The hopelessness experienced by the people of New Orleans circulates in this economy as a new product and as a producer of the recovery industry’s growth.

For those residents who were still hoping to get back into their homes in 2010 (100,000 were unable to return, and 860 families were still living in FEMA trailers at the time),28 the process of recovery through these arrangements of capital, public-private partnerships, and neoliberal policy has produced an emotional surplus in which need has become a circulating resource defined by its affective registers. Needs are not necessarily being met or eliminated faster, but participation in this market has enabled quite a few profits to be made. We are all asked to participate in this affect economy in new ways, with new demands on our time—both paid and unpaid—in the effort to take care of those who are in need.