In the early 2000s, I was a reporter for The Nashville City Paper, a free weekly newspaper that circulated in Nashville until 2013. As part of my beat, I covered homelessness. I distinctly remember one event in 2004 held at Room In The Inn, where then-Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen announced the creation of the Governor’s Interagency Council on Homelessness.
Besides the governor’s office and state commissioners, Phil Mangano, who served as executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness under the George W. Bush Administration, was present, as were representatives from the Mayor’s Office, Charlie Strobel, the founder of Room In The Inn, a lot of other local nonprofit leaders, businesses representatives, nonprofit frontline staff, activists, people with lived experience, and reporters like me.
In short, everyone who was working on homelessness issues back then seemed to be at this event at Room In The Inn. The message was bipartisan and everyone seemed to pull in the same direction. Until one person with lived experience stood up and announced that if everyone in this room, especially Nashville churches, wanted to end homelessness and were serious about it, they could have solved it already.
I watched from my back row seat and stayed put until after the official program was completed and most of the invited dignitaries had left. Mangano stayed. He talked patiently to everyone — mostly frontline staff, advocates and activists who came up to him and literally yelled at him. He stayed and responded patiently.
But this scene has remained with me for over 20 years. That day I learned that when the cameras are on, everyone is on the same page. Even when people with lived experience speak up, the people in power nod politely and tune the message out immediately. But when the cameras are off, the true discontent and disconnectedness become visible, and the frontline staff and people who usually are silenced dare to speak up to whoever is willing to listen to their frustration about the current, fraught system.
The main question that has haunted me ever since is, why is there such a disconnect between people who all claim to have the same goal, namely ending homelessness?
Occasionally, someone brings up the term Nonprofit Industrial Complex as an explanation for this ongoing dissonance. But I think nonprofits, government, business and everyone who controls how resources are deployed avoid talking openly about it. I realize that the term is widely ignored as it makes us understandably uncomfortable to speak about the roles we play in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Furthermore, I doubt that many of us truly understand or have taken the time to learn what it means with all its implications.
Yet, without understanding and talking about what the term even describes, are we able to keep our different missions truly focused on serving the most vulnerable people in our communities? Can we, as we like to claim, put the people we try to assist truly before the organizations we serve? I believe we cannot.
Here is how I came to that conclusion. I recently wrote a column about The Village, a local incubator that supports grassroot nonprofits headed by Black leaders to help increase capacity, access and resources. In the same issue (Feb. 11, 2026) I also had the privilege of interviewing Erika Burnett, the executive director of The Village.
Burnett used the term Nonprofit Industrial Complex in one of her responses and said, “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex is real. Once we understand what fuels that machine, we also gain clarity around its limitations.”
When asked about how she would define the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, she responded as follows:
“I think of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex as a machine. And the main components of this machine are: local/state government/agencies, federal government, private business, private foundations and nonprofits. Historically the requirements, pressures and allegiance necessary to satisfy funders, donors, policy/decision makers has existed in tension with the mission-aligned outcomes for the nonprofits, the nonprofit professionals, and the populations they serve. At a super high-level, I use it to make meaning of the tension that has been created as service becomes a commodity.”
In my conversation with Michael Durham (on page 4), we did not discuss his role as the founder of an unincorporated national organization called Anti-Capitalist Solidarity for Nonprofit Workers, which is a coalition of nonprofit workers “whose burnout is [connected] with the reinforcement of capitalism and state violence that nonprofits are complicit in.”
Durham gave me the following definition for the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, which he uses for his coalition members, “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex is the modality by which the state and the ruling class align to control dissent and suppress mass movements under the guise of the public good in order to expand the power and profits of the corporate elite.”
He elaborated on that, explaining that the 501(c)3 designation is a tax exemption from the government, which essentially serves as a grant itself. When we look at it from that lens, a nonprofit can be viewed as a company that would ordinarily be paying taxes as a corporation, but because it serves the public good, the government is waiving those taxes.
“So it’s like a reverse grant in a certain sense,” Durham said. “And by ascribing to the 501(c)3 infrastructure, you are functionally submitting to the will of the state.”
Ultimately, this is how the state – or government – controls what any kind of dissent looks like. It seems apparent to conclude that governments will never fund anything that threatens their own powers. We know of examples, even at the local level, where outright intimidation was used by government officials to rein in advocates from the nonprofit sector.
This is exactly why we need to further discuss what the Nonprofit Industrial Complex ultimately is. While I mention intimidation tactics by governments, the largest funders of nonprofits, the reality is that even philanthropy is built on the wealth and power amassed through historic exploitation.
“All philanthropy traces the origins of its wealth, at least in the broadest sense, to the origins of this country, which are chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous people,” Durham told me in our recent conversation. “So, I often remind folks in other talks that it is no wonder that the United States became the richest country on earth because they got free land and free labor through violence and exploitation.”
Essentially, foundations are also not likely to fund anything that threatens their power. Which in essence means that the Nonprofit Industrial Complex is about protecting the power of the people in charge of the resources.
Why does it matter when the folks in charge still do so much good?
For one, status quo and doing good enough is not sufficient when we know we can do better. Secondly, we still leave grassroots folks, like the organizations that participate in The Village, out of the conversation. They do not have the same access as the established and approved nonprofits in our communities.
Teen Vogue published an article in 2022, that compares the term Nonprofit Industrial Complex to similar terms like the Prison Industrial Complex or the Military Industrial Complex, “which describe how the private and public sectors partner to profit off human suffering under the guise of safety and national defense, respectively,” according to Sophie Hayseen, who penned the article called The Nonprofit Industrial Complex: What Is It and How Does It Work? in the Sept. 7, 2022-issue of Teen Vogue.
Remember when I described the event at Room In The Inn that took place in 2004 at the beginning of this column? Coincidence will have it that this was also the year when the Nonprofit Industrial Complex framework was popularized by INCITE!.
INCITE! describes itself as “a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities. They organized a conference in 2002, in which they defined the Nonprofit Industrial Complex the following way (copied from https://incite-national.org/beyond-the-non-profit-industrial-complex):
The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:
- the State (or local and federal governments);
- the owning classes;
- foundations;
- and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.
The state uses non-profits to:
- Monitor and control social justice movements;
- Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;
- Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;
- Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;
- Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work;
- Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.
If you, like me, do not identify yourself as a radical, you may join me in feeling a little uncomfortable, cautious, and/or defensive of current systems. For me, the reason for this discomfort lies in the fact that I have been working in the existing system for years. I know the people who are trying to work within it and do their best to serve people in need of assistance. I support philanthropists in their quest to do good.
At the same time, I have also grown increasingly frustrated with the silence from the nonprofit and philanthropy sectors when government actors start to behave like little, controlling dictators who waste money that could be used to help more people we all are dedicated to serving.
I hope this column gives you an incentive to further explore with me what the Nonprofit Industrial Complex means, where it originated, and what possible ways are to continue our work despite it. My goal is to no longer look away because doing so will enforce the continuation of the status quo.
And if data — including the stories from people with lived expertise and experience — show us anything, it is that the status quo is not good enough!
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocate for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.