Beyond The State: Creating A New Social Saftey Net

I’d like to talk about the non-profit world and the way that we approach charitable giving in America. I know some non-profit professionals who have been in that arena for up to 30 years. I know many passionate advocates for several different causes and I love their fire and passion for the people they advocate for. But despite their efforts, the world continues to slip further and further into chaos and disorder. It’s time to re-examine this sector of our society because what we are doing is in no way working.

As the founder of a non-profit that never broke through the funding barrier, I’ve seen, first hand, how the biggest beneficiaries of the grant money that is supposed to help those less fortunate are the organizations that make up the non-profit industrial complex.

I know that term, “industrial complex,” has been overused, but everything in our society has become this way. If it can’t be done for a profit, nobody wants to pay for it. I have mad love for the non-profits out there trying to do the good work, but they have to invest so much time and effort into promoting what they do to attract funding that their capacity to serve becomes greatly diminished.

These people, who have a genuine drive in their hearts to help people shouldn’t be made to bow and scrape, and prove that they can speak professionally and press all of the right social buttons to be able to get a small amount of money.

All that most of them really need is enough to provide them some breathing room from the day to day grind, to put together a valid plan and goal. The people who come up with the ideas to create a better society are intelligent, passionate people who see enormous problems and have solutions for them, but survival in the late stage capitalistic landscape (hellscape?) demands so much of us that putting together what is required to get funding is difficult in the extreme, leaving a huge amount of potential relief unrealized.

$5,000 grants should be commonplace, as a starter, to see what they can accomplish with that. Showing the motivation to register as a non-proft and get your 501c3, coupled with no more than three pages on what you would do with the money should be a baseline to get enough to work on it.

Instead the grant process takes months to happen and takes weeks to prepare (for the grantee) or thousands of dollars for a professionally done grant proposal.

Think of all of the ideas that are passed over that could revolutionize some segment of our world, or at least change some people’s lives for the better, if only they could get over that initial hump and get the time to devote to their idea? Isn’t that what one was supposed to aspire to success for…to make the world a better place?

Once grant money is given, there are all kinds of stipulations on what you can do with the money. I’ve seen $10,000 granted to an organization for a sustainability report. Something they have to hire a firm to prepare and it costs $10,000. If that $10,000 were given to a person who has shown to be motivated and putting effort forth to building a new life, it could mean…

• An apartment

• Possibly a car

• Move to another city

• Get out of an abusive relationship

• Start a business

It opens up a world of possibilities, that otherwise they’re cut off from. We have programs, classes, groups, outreach programs and all of these things, yet all of our problems continue to escalate at a rate that is obviously impossible to keep up with. The money that circulates within the non-profit arena seldom actually makes it to the people that need it the most. And let’s be clear.

People don’t need classes, or programs. They need money, or at least their basic human needs met. No amount of effort or money will matter if it’s not going towards that.

I started a non-profit to connect people in the Federal Bureau of Prisons with reentry resources upon their release. Local organizations wouldn’t fund it because of its national scope and the large, and national criminal justice organizations “don’t fund direct support work.”

I looked at the financials of the organization whose employee told me that, and found that of the millions of dollars they manage (give away in grants), most of it goes to three main sectors:

• Universities

• DC Think Tanks

• Local Governments (police forces)

This person, who worked there, is a formerly federally incarcerated individual (convict), I might add. Upon pressing him further about some path to funding that might be able to help these people, I was told that he didn’t know of anybody who funded that kind of work. When asked if there was someone he might could point me to, to help me further down this path, he said he’d “see what he could do.”

This isn’t my only experience with non-profit work. From 2021-2022, I helped administrate an emergency homeless shelter as a Certified Peer Support Specialist. What I saw there was disgusting. They wanted the homeless people off the street so they gathered them up from the camps, and put them in a hotel, for about a year.

There was a plan to buy the hotel and set up transitional housing. It was all done with settlement money from the opioid settlement that resulted from the deaths of over 700,000 people. They took them from their camps, installed them in a hotel and hired us to babysit them, with no support, training or help. They called it a low-barrier shelter, but in reality, it was a no-barrier shelter.

We experienced overdoses on a regular basis and lost four of our residents in the close to a year that we were there. I was there the night they moved them in, and although I had quit a month or so before the end, I was there on the last day, as I watched people that I’d gotten to know over that year be kicked back out to the streets, no more capable of survival than they were when they came there. Of course there were successes, but they were few and far between.

The entire non-profit structure isn’t set up to help people. It’s set up to create jobs, and to keep the money circulating within it. There aren’t many places out there just giving people cash grants to help people get on their feet. But there are all the hygiene kits you could possibly need.

I’m suggesting that we start exploring ways to create a new social safety net, as the first step in creating a different social model that steers us in a direction of putting people’s true needs above the interests of the few.

The Aquarius Collective is an organization that seeks to unify the different groups and individuals that see a crumbling establishment that is past saving. While it served us well for many years, it has turned into a detrimental hindrance to our progress. Old people are trying to hold on to old ideas, but the way forward is through encouraging new ideas and helping to bring them to fruition.

It’s time for us to adopt new ways of thinking. We all know what an efficiency-killer bureaucracy is. And that will be our strength. We’re going to have to come together, collectively to solve the problems that we face. Our government no longer serves the people, therefore we must create a new way, or at least new ways.

We’ve all heard the old get rich quick idea, get a millioin people to give you a dollar each and you’d be a millionaire. A dollar, to people who are engaged in the system, is nothing. It won’t even buy you a cup of coffee. But imagine, really, if a million people pledged one dollar per month. A million dollars a month to go towards a social safety net, without the bureaucracy.

Through that safety net, we could empower and uplift people into a stable environment, and give them space to find ways that they’ll be able to contribute. This starts getting into specifics of how the system operates and needs to be discussed. Not by people getting paid to discuss this, but by people who have a vested interest in it.

There are ways to set this up with very little, or no overhead. We can empower strong people who have shown community organizing success and free them from the time suck that is survival in our current social paradigm. Those people will become the pioneers of this new system that could start growing up around us.

We need a major re-forming of community and getting out and telling people about what we’re trying to do. There are places that are actively planning actions, having meetings. Start searching for things that resonate with you and find a group. If there’s not a group, form your own. Rent a booth at a flea market and print up some flyers.

Money makes the world go around, almost literally. Our government has made it known that they have but one agenda, and that is to set up the world the way the elites want it. I’m not saying we can abolish money, in fact without a pool of money to work with, we’ll never get a movement going. But moving to a place where people don’t want to hoard so much wealth, while so many struggle just to survive, is a goal that we should all strive for.

The methods and means are there to start creating this new reality. They just need the right kind of eyes to put the pieces together to create something that will start to catch the people that society is failing the most.

Alex Glass

I have a “cliff notes” version of a book that I’m writing called The Human Dilemma. I’m giving it away for free and will be writing articles that delve into the ideas in the book even more.

It can be found here!