We Are Breaking Up With Our Non-Profit Status...
… and we want to tell you why.
Funding
Our hope was to make our work sustainable via grants and donations. Although we have received support from our generous community, we haven’t secured funding through our grant applications.
Grant applications and communications take time and energy to complete, which has affected our capacity to develop and provide programs and services in alignment with our mission.
We also wonder about the colonial and neoliberal structure of the non-profit system, and the ability of people within those systems to understand the importance of our work and their commitment to anti-racism and BIPOC liberation.
Capacity and Sustainability
We have identified the bureaucracy the system requires within the non-profit structure to consume our resources and capacity.
Our sole staff member, Lala, a disabled queer woman of colour, has been negatively impacted by the stress and weight of doing this work. It’s clear that we need to change our conditions in order for this work to be sustainable and to align ourselves with our own values.
Our board meetings were structured in accordance with our non-profit status, which stifled our collaboration and creativity.
We found ourselves most excited and nourished by the work when we were able to connect and collaborate organically, outside the non-profit structure.
Values and Ethics
Non-profits are neoliberal, hierarchical structures that attempt to address inequities allowing the state to avoid accountability.
We are not aligned with this values-wise and feel that a collective and collaborative model is more aligned with our anti-oppressive and anti-colonial practices.
We firmly believe that having the freedom to do our work in sustainable, nourishing, and radical ways, can bring us closer to our vision and better support our BIPOC community.
Research on non-profits in Vancouver highlights the lack of sustainability of non-profits as they grow, and the problematic pieces attached to the bureaucratization of care work. We want to prevent going in this direction and feel that pivoting to a social enterprise model is more aligned with our values, mission, and vision.
Why a social enterprise?
When restructuring, it was important for us to find a model that centers our mission of supporting individual and collective healing for BIPOC. It was equally important for us to lean towards a model that makes certain the labour poured into this work is compensated.
The Collective and Social Enterprise assures that we upkeep the social objectives that centre our mission, and that the profits generated will be poured back into the programs we will be providing.
Pivoting to this model will allow us to put our values into practice by supporting the wellbeing of those who arduously work to sustain Healing in Colour.
We are committed to making this shift in ways that are transparent and accountable, and will maintain this commitment to accountability in our new structure.