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by Leroy Moore/Illin n' Chillin
In 1967, a Black disabled leader was born into an
independent thinking and radical Black family. My
mother was very independent and blazed new grounds on
how to rise her children. My father, an ex football
player and Black Panther, who worked with Push,
rainbow Coalition and was a revolutionary. Our family
saw him going to house meetings and groups he helped
start for Black youth, and his involvement in the
Black Panther Party. My mother dragged me to disabled
meetings, school's PTA's and protests on many issues.
In my early days I tagged along with my father
at house meetings on issues concerning the Black
community. Many youth at that time witnessed our elders
doing everything under the sun in the community;
children programs, home schooling, opening up stores,
providing in-home-support services to elders,
community doctor's office etc. This all took place by
people coming together at friends houses over some
soul food to lay out what needed to be done and how to
raise funds for the work. What happened?
Very slowly my father and others got involved
with organizations outside the Black community and
found the concept of receiving money outside the
community from the government and white foundations to
do work in the Black community. In my view this was
the downfall of the extraordinary work youth like
myself saw in my community. The first element that
was scraped was the environment my elders met in.
Slowly the structure of house meetings became ridge
and people had to fit into this strange uniform that
restricted our progress, conversation and created an
hierarchy with president, vice president, treasury and
secretary. All-of-a-sudden people had their hands out
for a piece of the money that flowed in from outside
of the community and the work we, youth, saw every day
by many was cut back drastically and the house
meetings were no longer popular in the community.
You would of think my generation would learn from
what we viewed when we was younger? Just like my
father, I got involved with my community and activist
groups. Carrying what my mother showed me by
attending all of those white disabled groups and that
was learn from them but always remember you cant
relay on them to carry out your agenda. She used to
say to me. Just like what I saw in those house
meetings I saw in many new groups today including
Disability Advocates of Minorities Organization, DAMO,
that got together to work on their own agenda. The
same thing has happen to these groups compare to the
groups my generation grew up in. Much incredible work
was done in the early days of these groups and it was
a family affair until outside pressure began to
influence the group. However in these days the amount
of time between a loose collective group to a
structure official uniform of non-profits is very
short and this is unfortunate.
The tight straight jacket of non-profits most of
the times suck the creativity, friendships, vision and
dedication of the group who started out with thinking
and working from their hearts but on the other hand in
our capitalist society very few of us can or will work
for free. So where is the middle stage? How much
some of us would love to turned back the clock to my
youth, seeing our communities totally ours without
strings attach to foundations, the red tape and paper
work and hierarchy of non-profits! But we must charge
onward into the future to find out new models of
community activist work that has a mixture of the two
models mentioned above or is it time to come up with a
whole new model.
Today, after five years of building Disability
Advocates of Minorities Organization we've felt the
straight jacket of fitting a collective group with
strong like family ties into a cold, informal and
culturally insensitive non-profit structure in the
last two years. This has turned my stomach inside out
so much that I'm taking time off and really answering
the question, are non-profits the way for
activists\revolutionaries like myself?
Just think about it, every group that turns into
a non-profit has to go down the same avenue. About
the time we have come out of this tunnel in getting
our non-profit status, do we have our same vision and
individuality and commitment to our community or are
we too wrapped up in bureaucracy culture of the
non-profit machine? Is this diversity? Hopefully we
know by now that there has to be another way to
continue to do our work as activists!
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