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Once
again, Max Cadji of Phat Beets in Oakland (who recently wrote about
urban ag and gentrification) challenges us to think painfully honestly
about our relationship with the communities most directly and negatively impacted.
Am I a poverty pimp?
Am I a Poverty Pimp? by Max Cadji
Am I a “Poverty Pimp?” I heard Davey D, a local media activist and
political hip hop host, use the term, and I was really taken aback by
it. The phrase really says it all, someone who is getting rich by riding
the moving story of the nation’s poor, or as one urban
dictionary defines it, “Any social worker, do-gooder, social service
agency, or faith-based organization who comes into a hood not their own
and plays at being the savior to folks that don’t need savin’.” I am an
urban horticulturalist and organize around food sovereignty and food
justice locally in Oakland as well as in Madagascar. Being that most of
my work falls under the non-profit umbrella, I realized that if I wanted
to get projects “for the community” funded, then I needed to learn how
to tell a story and beg for the crumbs fallen off of the corporate
plates of foundations such as Rockefellers, Gates’, and others. This
begging is also known as grant writing.
So after finding a mentor and reading a book, I was capable of
telling the story of the “urban poor,” who disproportionately suffer
from diet-related diseases such as type II diabetes, heart disease and
hyper tension, in contrast to our more affluent brothers and sisters.
Recently I read a book about environmental justice and added to my
repertoire asthma, cancers and the whole gamut of afflictions that the
urban poor face. I got my rhetoric down for the communities that I was
trying to advocate for: “53 liquor stores, 14 fast food restaurants and
no grocery store”; “One out of three children in California suffers
obesity and the percentage is higher for children of color”; “There is
approximately one liquor store for every 450 people in West Oakland (The
Flatlands) and one for every 7,000 in Piedmont (The Hills)” and so
on. So now all I needed was a camera and some shots of overweight kids
eating Hot Fries, a few poor folks pushing shopping carts and rummaging
through garbage bins, and footage of freeways and neighborhood liquor
stores. Then, finally, my portfolio would be finished.After scouring the web for foundations, I narrowed down my list, wrote my outline and summed up the harsh conditions of the poor people of Oakland and digitally put out my cardboard sign and started begging for money for a story that wasn’t my own. All the people I interact with on a daily basis in North and West Oakland became a statistic, and to the foundations they were all the same “poor people of color.” That is when I knew that I was what Davey D was talking about: a Poverty Pimp. The wealth, passion, history and diversity of the communities I thought I was advocating for was summarized in a five-page document with charts, metrics and statistics with no humanity nor humility. In fact, I was asking the same corporate foundations whose founders became rich off of the exploitation of the poor for crumbs to help mitigate .05% of the social mess they caused (urban pollution, intense extraction of natural resources, exploitation of the working class, etc). One thing lead to another and I found myself writing grants to General Mills, reading requests for proposals for community food security projects from ConAgra, and asking for obesity prevention money to put in clinic-based garden programs from Dryer’s Grand Ice Cream.
So what does this mean for me? I have recognized that I may be a Poverty Pimp, which is the first step toward turning my life and career around. My second step was to buy some flip cams and have the people I work with and for tell their own stories via digital media. Finally, my last step was to educate myself about the history of foundations and how they operate by reading American Foundations: An Investigative History by Mark Dowie.
After reading this thorough critique of American philanthropy, the
game and hustle that I’m engaged in makes a lot more sense when you
realize the power and control, secrecy and sheer lack of democracy that
American foundations operate under. In fact, did you know that
foundations only operate on the interest they earn on their original
endowment? Their portfolios, decision-making process and investment
strategies are hidden from the American people and shrouded in secrecy
and hypocrisy. Take for example the investment portfolio that the Gates
Foundation has in oil-rich Nigeria. The 35 billion dollar Gates
endowment invests heavily in an Italian Oil firm ENI. This firm’s oil
flares in the Niger Delta have caused, as one local doctor puts it, “an
epidemic of bronchitis in adults and asthma and blurred vision in
children.” So as the Gates Foundation tries to immunize Nigeria’s poor,
they also fund these efforts through investments in external corporate
entities that blanket their target communities in environmental
injustices, polluting the air and the ground water and creating fertile
grounds for disease to spread. This is just one example of foundations’
sleight of hand.
I don’t like to unfairly focus simply on the negative, as I often get
my kicks as a pure pessimist. Through further research I learned of
some innovative foundation leaders and granting models such as “flow
funding,” which allows people working on the ground and in the streets
to recommend programs for foundations to fund rather than having
communities that may have not mastered the grant writing language have
to jump through the hoops. I also learned of foundations such as Aokandi
that fund racial justice initiatives, as well as funds that are
distributed by community-guided granting boards.
I feel like we need to bite the (foundation) hand that feeds us and
ask more questions and point more fingers, but then again we all want to
get paid. When we really get down to it, the money is right in the
neighborhoods we are working in. Pimpin’ for six-digit grants can be
partially averted by communities canvassing and raising money to meet
community needs. Just look at the most successful self-funded
institutions in a good portion of the affected communities, often the
religious centers. Take look at the facts and see who really gives a larger percentage
of earned income and you may not need to look further than your next
door neighbor. There is a tremendous amount of wealth and social equity
to build independent community-driven institutions outside of the
foundation funded, non-profit industrial complex.
“Hello my name is Max Cadji and I am a Poverty Pimp.” Though I have
come to say this, I have been challenged by counterparts in the movement
with another, slightly different definition from an urban dictionary of
a poverty pimp: “Any self-appointed minority leader, who extols the
perpetual poorness of their ethnicity, yet is quite well off stemming
from their efforts.” In this context, however, I am not a poverty pimp-
just a misguided, privileged do-gooder. A former coworker told me, “I
love you Max, but you’re not rich. Is making any money at all off of
this process poverty pimping?” These are great questions and things to
chew on while in the game. I have taken my first step towards my
recovery, and I challenge those working as advocates and allies in the
non-profit sector to look in the mirror and ask themselves “Am I a
poverty pimp?”
A note or thought from LGAFJ:
This is especially relevant for SubSaharan Africa where nonprofits and foreign government and domestic ngos are promoting gardening as a solution to gross structural inequity, exploitation and oppression, going back centuries, e.g., "urban gardening in the slums" . All the while failing to address how the people were and are still run off the fertile land, global warming which has continued to drive Africa's small farmers off the land (which is how the vast majority of the people once lived productive, healthy, abundant lives) and other systematic oppression and exploitations of the people.
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