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March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1

Sexuality Research & Social Policy
http://nsrc.sfsu.edu

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Trans Resistance

Rickke Mananzala, Dean Spade

Abstract: Trans politics are gaining visibility and momentum and, increasingly, trans activists are form-
ing projects and organizations focused on promoting political change. Given this context, this article
examines how critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex might be incorporated into trans political
analysis and how they could inform this moment of trans political institutionalization. Taking tools and
lessons from antiracist and feminist scholars and activists and recognizing widespread critique of the
co-optation of the lesbian and gay rights movement by neoliberalism, this article highlights alternatives
to traditional nonprofit structures. The authors provide an in-depth look at 1 trans organization that
employs a collective governance model and encourages the leadership of trans people of color, offer-
ing it as a potential model for emerging trans organizations.

Key words: transgender; racism; organizational development; neoliberalism; co-optation; gay; lesbian

“The person who says it cannot be done should not

interrupt the person doing it” (Feinberg, 1998, p. 61, quot-

ing a Chinese proverb).

Since the 1990s, trans politics have decidedly

emerged on the national scene in the United States, with

the visibility of trans issues reaching new heights. This

change is apparent in many sectors: Nine states and almost

100 cities and counties have passed gender identity and

expression-inclusive antidiscrimination laws, trans char-

acters and stories have appeared in popular media, key

institutions have begun considering and adopting policies

addressing fair treatment of trans people, and trans

activists have fought to be heard in a wide variety of social

movements. These events have precipitated important

controversies about who should represent trans politics

and who should be included under a trans political

umbrella; what the priorities of trans political change

work should be; and what relationship trans liberation has

to feminism, gay and lesbian rights, antiracism, disabil-

ity politics, and other key areas of anti-oppression work.

Emerging trans struggles are often closely associ-

ated with struggles against discrimination based on sex-

ual orientation, in part because U.S. culture often conflates

sexual orientation and gender expression and in part

because of a long history of sexual and gender outsiders

finding community together, resisting oppression

together, and often understanding their identities through

or against each other (Valentine, 2007). Since the 1980s

or earlier, this connection between lesbian and gay rights

and trans rights has been fraught with controversies about

the inclusion or exclusion of trans people from lesbian and

gay rights movements that were increasingly institution-

alizing and striving for legitimacy. Exclusions of trans

people and trans issues from lesbian and gay rights orga-

nizations and political struggles have caused significant

community rifts, most recently evident in the controversy

over trans inclusion in the national Employment Non-

Discrimination Act (2007) legislation. Nonetheless, trans

politics remain closely aligned with lesbian and gay poli-

tics overall and trans activism, now increasingly visible,

is often seen as an offshoot of lesbian and gay politics.

Because of the relationship of these identities and his-

tories of struggle, many people assume that trans work

should occur within lesbian and gay organizations and mir-

ror the strategies of those organizations. For that reason, the

majority of people doing paid work on trans rights or trans

Address correspondence concerning this article to Rickke Mananzala, FIERCE!, 147 West 24th Street, 6th Floor, New York,
NY 10011. E-mail: rickke@fiercenyc.org; Dean Spade, Williams Institute, UCLA Law School, Box 951476, Los Angeles, CA
90095. E-mail: deanspade@gmail.com

Sexuality Research & Social Policy, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 53–71, electronic ISSN 1553-6610. © 2008 by the National Sexuality
Research Center. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp

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SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 54

politics in the United States work in organizations whose

missions focus on gay and lesbian rights—although trans

people also have a role in some cities as outreach workers

at HIV/AIDS organizations due to increased awareness of

the significant rates of HIV in trans populations. At this writ-

ing, very few trans-specific organizations exist in the United

States; of the ones that are trans-specific, most are small and

have low or nonexistent budgets. Trans individuals work-

ing on trans-specific projects within lesbian and gay or

HIV/AIDS organizations often are the only trans employee

(at most, they are one of two) and are working on lower

rungs within hierarchically structured organizations. Many

lesbian and gay organizations have no trans staff at all,

instead assigning a nontrans person to work on trans issues

as some part of her or his duties.

However, this state of affairs is undergoing significant

change as we write this article. Many lesbian and gay orga-

nizations that devoted no or few resources to trans concerns

a few years ago now have trans-focused work and some-

times even a trans staff member. A few trans-focused orga-

nizations have sprung up in the last few years—namely, the

National Center for Transgender Equality, the Sylvia Rivera

Law Project, the TGI Justice Project, and the Transgender

Law Center—all of which have had a significant impact on

the national conversation about trans politics and have

increased pressure on lesbian and gay organizations to

include trans concerns in their work. As these organizations

and others work to educate funders, donors, and commu-

nities about trans issues, we anticipate growing support for

work focused on trans liberation, as well as growing insti-

tutionalization of this work, including increased funding for

nonprofit programs engaging in it.

In the context of this emergence of trans political work,

we have become interested in considering how trans politics

and emerging trans organizations can benefit from critical

analyses of the nonprofit industrial complex and of neolib-

eralism’s co-optation of activism that has been developed

by feminist and antiracist scholars and activists. We want to

ask key questions about how, in many ways, the most well-

resourced organizations in the gay and lesbian rights arena

have fallen into the worst traps of the nonprofit industrial

complex and have used structures and tactics that have

resulted in neoliberalism’s co-optation of lesbian and gay

political aims. We are interested in starting a conversation

now, while trans organizations are forming and institution-

alization is at an early stage, about what it might look like

to build trans resistance that meaningfully engages anti-

racist and anticapitalist politics in its structures, strategies,

and visions. We are interested in using a critical analysis

of how movement organizations’ missions, ideology,

governance structures, financial resources, and impacts are

interconnected to examine the terrain upon which emerg-

ing trans organizations are being and will be developed.

This conversation is particularly meaningful because

of the futility for trans communities in building organi-

zations modeled on lesbian and gay rights frameworks that

centrally benefit and concentrate power in the hands of

people with race, educational, and class privilege. From

our viewpoints working in nonprofits that organize and

provide services to trans people, we see trans communi-

ties suffering severe economic marginalization and per-

vasive state violence, particularly at the hands of criminal

justice, immigration, and so-called poverty alleviation

systems (Agathangelou, Bassichis, & Spira, 2008; Arkles,

2005; Daley, 2005; Gehi & Arkles, 2007; Marksamer,

2005a, 2005b; Minter & Daley, 2003; Spade, 2005;

Xavier, 2000).

Given the strong trends of poverty, homelessness,

incarceration, and downward mobility in trans commu-

nities, we are deeply unsatisfied by the idea of a movement

that centralizes leadership in the hands of the few trans

people who maintain economic and educational privilege

and builds strategies for change that primarily affect those

people. Instead, we think that trans politics should use a

model based on the concept social justice trickles up, not
down, prioritizing the needs and concerns of those facing
the worst manifestations of gender-based marginaliza-

tion and exclusion, as well as using a model for social

change that centralizes the leadership of trans people of

color, trans low-income people, trans immigrants, and

others facing intersectional oppression.

This article describes critiques of the nonprofit indus-

trial complex and of neoliberalism’s co-optation of social

justice work and looks at those critiques in relation to

lesbian and gay politics. It then offers tools for thinking

about alternative strategies for structuring social justice

work and examines a specific model, the Sylvia Rivera Law

Project—a trans political organization striving to resist co-

optation and trying to build democratic, sustainable,

accountable infrastructure. We offer this model with the

belief that building a trans movement based on broad

anti-oppression values and mirroring those values in the

structures, strategies, and visions of our organizations

not only is possible but also represents a more politically

viable, winning strategy than traditional models of hier-

archical governance and professionalization.

Neoliberalism and the Nonprofit 
Industrial Complex

Although the history and impact of neoliberalism

are rarely discussed in the context of the most well-

resourced strategies of the gay and lesbian rights



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 55

movement, examining the rise of neoliberalism is essen-

tial to understanding the context of equality struggles in

the United States. Angela Harris (2006) explored the lim-

itations of recent legal victories for gay rights in her arti-

cle “From Stonewall to the Suburbs?: Toward a Political

Economy of Sexuality.” Harris contextualized Goodridge
v. Dept. of Public Health (2003; granting marriage rights
to same-sex couples in Massachusetts) and Lawrence v.
Texas (2003; abolishing sodomy statutes) in an under-
standing of the law’s role in preserving the status quo of

power relations. Harris argued that when faced with social

movements opposing oppression, the law will adapt to

allow limited changes that reduce the urgency of social jus-

tice movements but retain the underlying oppressive

power differential. For this reason, Harris says the law

engages in preservation through transformation. Harris

looked at comparisons of Lawrence and Goodridge with
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), tracing
the history of the implementation of Brown and the sub-
sequent suburbanization that undermined its potential for

integrating public schools. She noted that public schools

are currently as racially segregated as ever, although not

through the overt race-based policies that existed prior to

Brown.
Harris (2006) argued that the history of Brown’s

(1954) failure to eliminate racial segregation in schools

demonstrates the law’s tendency toward preservation

through transformation whereby, when social movements

obtain enough political power to successfully push for

change, any granted legal change maintains the status

quo to the greatest extent possible. She described the rise

of neoliberalism and examined how racialized economic

policies leading to White flight and suburbanization

replaced prior overtly race-based segregation policies to

maintain the status quo of segregation and to co-opt the

concept of race neutrality as further legitimization for

that status quo. Harris cautioned queer activists to look at

recent litigation victories with this history in mind in

order to recognize the limits of the social change such

victories may promise. Harris explained the context of the

rise of neoliberalism to examine how the policies and

practices of neoliberalism can, and do, make room for

limited claims for equal rights that can be co-opted as

part of maintaining the status quo of maldistribution.

Harris (2006) provided this apt characterization of

neoliberalism:

Beginning in the late 1960s, and reaching a consol-

idation of sorts in the 1980 election of Ronald

Reagan, political conservatives took advantage of

racial resentment, growing economic suffering and

vulnerability, and suburban politics to mount a

formidable campaign against the New Deal, the

American welfare state, and to some extent gov-

ernment itself. Neoliberalism entails a commitment

to the dismantling of the economic arrangements

sometimes called “Fordism,” and their replacement

with an economy driven by substantially deregu-

lated markets (themselves driven by the interests of

corporate and finance capital), an economy in which

capital’s upper hand over labor has led to dramat-

ically increasing inequalities of income and wealth.

Neoliberalism also entails the dismantling of state

institutions meant to cushion citizens against eco-

nomic risk, and an approach to governance that

favors “privatization,” “deregulation,” and other

policies that transfer political power from govern-

ments to markets. (p. 1542)

The rise of neoliberalism from “state project” to “state

strategy” (Tickell & Peck, 2003, ¶ 20) in the last 30 years

has presented social movements and progressive non-

profits with two interconnected challenges—challenges

leading to more pressing questions on the political direc-

tion of queer and trans political resistance.

First, social movements have had to absorb the

impact of neoliberalism. If the impact is a two-sided

coin, the first side includes rollbacks on economic safety

nets, such as welfare and public housing, that have dev-

astated low-income communities, which dispropor-

tionately comprise people of color. As Ruth Gilmore

(2007) described, the rise of neoliberalism from the

1970s to the present has pushed nonprofit organizations

to morph into what she called a shadow state, filling the
gaps the government left in meeting people’s social ser-

vice needs. The political, economic, and social condi-

tions resulting from neoliberalism—including throwing

low-income communities into increased crisis due to

cuts in survival services — have presented significant

challenges to social movements trying to build leader-

ship and power among oppressed communities. The

other side of the coin is that social welfare has increas-

ingly become dependent on business: Business charity

essentially has replaced government funding in pro-

viding resources for social welfare and has become the

so-called answer to social problems. The outcome is

the privatization, or the United Wayzation, of social
welfare.1 With communities having much deeper eco-

nomic and social crises and thus needing more service-

based help from movement organizations, social

movements are simultaneously less capable of provid-

ing resources to support their own work. This situation

1 Gihan Perera, personal communication, October 4, 2007.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 56

translates into organizations’ overreliance on income

from corporations and accumulated wealth stored in

foundations and often leads to a disconnect from the

driving forces behind the organizations’ work: the com-

munities themselves.

Second, social movements are forced to grapple with

questions of co-optation and how to challenge the neolib-

eral order in the context of increasing upward distribution

of wealth and a growing number of communities in crisis.

As seen throughout the height of social movements in the

1960s and 1970s, neoliberalism not only had economic,

political, and social impacts on oppressed communities

but also significantly curbed the efforts of social move-

ments—especially labor movements—that challenged the

fundamental profit logic of capitalism and neoliberalism.

As we will argue more fully, this second question has been

underaddressed in gay and lesbian rights work, demon-

strating a departure from the movement’s radical roots.

As is evidenced by the priorities of the organizations with

the most resources, the focus of this work has shifted to

issues primarily based on narrow individual rights often

relating to property and responsibilities rather than on col-

lective and community well-being.

This article explores these two challenges, particularly

in light of their relationship to the growth of the non-

profit industrial complex and the potential of queer and

trans organizations to challenge power relations based in

wealth and property, race, gender, and sexuality. First, we

define the nonprofit industrial complex and review cri-

tiques of its impact; then, we examine how those critiques

apply to the gay and lesbian rights movement and ques-

tion how emerging trans organizations might depart from

that model. Finally, we provide a case study of a trans orga-

nization working to do so.

Defining the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

In his presentation at The Revolution Will Not Be

Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

Conference, Dylan Rodriguez (2004) defined the non-

profit industrial complex as a “set of symbiotic relation-

ships that link together political and financial technologies

of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance

over public political intercourse, including and especially

emergent progressive and leftist social movements, since

about the mid-1970s.” He called for a critique of the state-

corporate alliance and its efforts to keep the lid on “what

is left of the alleged U.S. Left.” He asserted that “a popu-

lar and institutionalized law-and-order state has reached

symbiosis with its liberal foundation allies,” a symbiosis

that helps prevent sites of potential radicalism or collapses

them into nonantagonistic social service and pro-state

reformist initiatives, thereby facilitating functioning of

the state and helping to reproduce it. Rodriguez suggested

that philanthropic vision “explicitly marginalizes radical

forms of dissent that articulate irreconcilable antagonism

to civil society’s and the state’s multiple structures of

domination or co-optation.”

Philanthropic control of resources for social justice

organizations, Rodriguez (2007) argued, makes growth

impossible for emerging radical political work that refuses

to participate in the shared values of U.S. society and

instead sees the United States itself as an entirely violent

and racist project. In this context, unless a project seeks

to reform its institutions in ways that preserve those insti-

tutions, it cannot be supported. Rodriguez (2004) sug-

gested that philanthropic support is so limiting and

controlling of the growth of social justice movements that

more radical projects can never get funding from the pro-

gressive liberal foundations; furthermore, demands for

what he calls radical freedom, as opposed to White bour-

geois freedom, cannot occur in the context of the nonprofit

industrial complex. Therefore, he argued, the nonprofit

industrial complex ultimately maintains politics and insti-

tutions of oppression, keeping a lid on radical political

work while pushing organizations to provide basic services

that quell unrest.

Many scholars and activists join Rodriguez in raising

concerns about the growth and functions of the nonprofit

industrial complex (INCITE!, 2007). Explicating the key

concerns raised by critics of the nonprofit industrial com-

plex is useful for examining the role of nonprofits in exist-

ing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)2

activism and emerging trans liberation work.

Key Concerns With the Emerging 
Model of Nonprofits

The Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector as the
Location for Social Justice Work Has Separated
Survival Services From Organizing

One critique that has emerged about the effect of the

nonprofit model on current social justice movements is

that it has separated the provision of direct, survival-

based services from organizing (Kivel, 2007). In part

because funding streams usually focus on either overtly

political organizing work or direct service work, these

two kinds of work have been segregated into different

2 The most well-funded organizations in this realm gener-
ally use the term LGBT to identify this work now, yet bisex-
ual and transgender activists remain critical of the work of
these organizations, pointing out the continued marginal-
ization of their issues.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 57

types of nonprofits that often operate with little con-

nection or communication among them. Consequently,

services are depoliticized, offering little opportunity for

communities experiencing the effects of systemic oppres-

sion (e.g., poverty, homelessness, unemployment, health

issues) to build networking relationships for analysis

and resistance of this oppression when seeking services

to meet their immediate needs. Instead of survival ser-

vices being a point of politicization, a locus from which

people can connect their immediate needs to a commu-

nity-wide issue of injustice or maldistribution, services

are provided through a charity or social-work model

that individualizes the issues to the particular client and

too often includes an element of moralizing that casts

clients as blameworthy for their need. This dynamic

reflects our previous argument about how the nonprofit

sector emerged, in part, to fill the gap in government ser-

vices that occurred under Reaganomics. By ameliorating

some of the worst effects of capitalist maldistribution,

then, these services became part of maintaining the

social order, in part because they primarily operate

through a depoliticizing charity framework rather than

a social change model.

The Nonprofit Structure Undermines and
Contains the Radical Potential of Social 
Justice Work, Leading to More Policy and
Service-Based Work and Less Organizing

Critics (Ahn, 2007; Pharr, 2004) have also pointed

out that the increase in nonprofits has been accompanied

by a greater prevalence of service-based and policy reform

work, rather than base-building organizing, in social jus-

tice movements. Some have argued that because social

justice nonprofits are funded through philanthropy —

frequently directly by wealthy individuals and corpora-

tions — the strategies of this work have become more

conservative to better fit those funders’ capitalism-

maintenance and reformist goals than the base-building,

visionary organizing goals that might emerge more

directly from communities facing oppression. Funders

favor policy work and services over base-building, result-

ing in lost opportunities for building political power

among those directly affected by oppression. Instead,

service and policy reform organizations typically engage

in change where those directly affected are clients but

educated elites (e.g., lawyers, administrators, social work-

ers, public health experts) create and implement reform

agendas. Overall, the aims of these organizations, and the

breadth of their political demands, are far narrower and

less radical due to the incentives provided by philan-

thropy to pursue service and policy reform goals.

Racism, Educational Privilege, and Classism
Within Nonprofits Mirrors Colonialism Because
the Direction of the Work and Decisions About
Its Implementation Are Made by Elites Rather
Than by People Directly Affected by the Issues
at Hand

The governance of nonprofits has been subject to

critique as well. Critics (Kivel, 2007) have argued that the

governance structure of most nonprofits, characterized by

boards consisting of donors and elite professionals

(sometimes with tokenistic membership for the commu-

nity members who are directly affected by the organiza-

tion’s mission), perpetuates dynamics of dominance.

Nonprofits serving primarily low-income and dispropor-

tionately non-White populations are frequently governed

almost entirely by White people with college and gradu-

ate degrees. Staffing follows this pattern as well, with

most nonprofits requiring formal education as a prereq-

uisite to working in administrative or management-level

positions. Thus, the nature of the infrastructure in many

social justice nonprofits often leads to concentrating deci-

sion making power in the hands of people with race,

education, and class privilege rather than in the hands of

those bearing the brunt of the oppression. Consequently,

the priorities and implementation methods of such orga-

nizations frequently do not reflect the perspective or

approach that would be taken by the people most directly

affected by oppression. For people who hold self-

determination as a goal of liberation struggles or who

believe that people struggling under oppression possess

unique understandings of the operations of that oppres-

sion that are not shared by others, this concern is especially

significant.

The Philanthropic Funding of Nonprofits Takes
Direction of the Work Out of the Hands of the
People Affected and Concentrates It on the
Agendas and Time Lines of Funders, Preventing
Long-Term, Self-Sustaining Movements From
Emerging

Part of the reason that decision-making power in

nonprofits becomes concentrated in the hands of elites

is because of how the organizations secure funding.

The process of successfully applying for funding, includ-

ing having 501(c)(3) status or a fiscal sponsor, research-

ing applicable grants, writing formal funding requests

using specific jargon, having an awareness of current

trends in funding, and having personal relationships

with philanthropic professionals requires skills and

relationships that are concentrated in people with



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 58

educational, class, and race privilege. Being able to

direct work and spin it to a funder’s vision is, more

often than not, the key to success. Furthermore, as

Suzanne Pharr (2004) has pointed out, the use of short-

term funding cycles (often 1 – 5 years) and the focus on

producing deliverables has meant that nonprofits have

been encouraged to operate on short-term vision rather

than build long-term sustainable structures. Under this

model, similar to investment in the private sector, fun-

ders seek to see concrete returns (e.g., statistics about

numbers of clients served or clear evidence of policy

change) on their investment within a limited grant

period. Base-building work that involves less tangible

returns like the growth of shared political analysis

within a community or relationship building is under-

valued. This model encourages organizations to iden-

tify goals that can be achieved quickly, not to envision

the long-term strategies necessary for more radical

changes to politics and culture.

The Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector Has
Created a Cultural Shift in Social Justice
Activism, Including Professionalization,
Corporatization, and Competition Between
Groups for Scarce Resources

This funder-driven elitism has also included a pro-

fessionalization of social justice organizations such that

corporate business models are increasingly used to man-

age these organizations. This trend is evidenced by a rise

in nonprofits’ use of such terms as CEO (chief executive
officer) and CFO (chief financial officer) for top-level
staff (Pharr, 2004); a hierarchical pay scale in which

people are compensated at very different rates based on

valuations of skills and abilities that are similar to those

used in the private sector; and other labor practices that

reflect business values more than social justice values.

Many critics (Hawk, 2007) have lamented that young

activists increasingly look at social movement work as a

paycheck, with the expectation of professional salaries

becoming central to decisions about what kinds of

activism and organizing to pursue. Business models of

management that focus on top-down decision making,

coupled with organizational structures in which educa-

tional, race, and class privilege often correspond to high

positions in the hierarchy, mean that not only decision

making but also compensation and quality of life at work

are concentrated in the hands of White people with grad-

uate educations (e.g., lawyers, social workers, people

with degrees in nonprofit management). Literally, more

philanthropic dollars end up in the pockets of those with

race, class, gender, and educational privilege.

Nonprofits Are a Way That Wealthy People and
Corporations Avoid Tax Liability, and Most of
That Redirected Money Does Not Go to Social
Justice

Finally, some critics caution that social justice move-

ments should be weary of the centrality of the nonprofit

model because of its role in the maldistribution of wealth

in the United States. Christine Ahn (2007) has provided

an analysis that encourages taxpayers to recognize that

money funneled into nonprofits by philanthropists is actu-

ally tax money diverted out of the government and into

focused causes. The vast majority of that money does not,

she points out, end up in social justice organizations fight-

ing inequality and oppression. In fact, most tax-exempt

giving benefits the nation’s wealthiest people by going to

institutions and programs such as conservative think

tanks and foundations; upper-class cultural institutions

including museums, operas, art galleries, and elite schools;

and private hospitals (Kivel, 2007). A large amount also

goes back into the pockets of the wealthy through trustee

fees, where wealthy people are paid hundreds of thousands

of dollars to sit on the boards of foundations (Ahn). Only

a tiny portion of the money ends up in social justice orga-

nizations and even then, it comes with many strings

attached that allow wealthy philanthropists to have a hand

in directing the work. Ahn’s analysis instructs social jus-

tice activists to remain critical of the nonprofit industrial

complex—even while making use of nonprofit structures

in their work—because of its broad role in reducing tax lia-

bility of the wealthy and putting decisions about wealth

redistribution that could be made through governmental

use of taxes into the hands of the wealthy. Ahn encourages

social justice activists to view redirected tax money as

their money—money that has been taken out of govern-

ment revenue that can (theoretically) be directed through

electoral process by the people and instead directed into

handpicked causes by the rich.

Case in Point: LGBT Organizations

These concerning characteristics of nonprofits are

prevalent in organizations that have emerged as part of the

gay rights or so-called LGBT movement.3 Looking at these

3 We have reservations about whether movement is an
appropriate term for the advocacy, policy, and law reform
work that has been engaged over the last 25 years seeking,
for the most part, lesbian and gay rights or rights of same-
sex couples. The co-optation of the word movement itself,
to signify work that does not engage in base-building or
bottom-up strategies or promote leadership of those vul-
nerable to the most severe manifestations of heterosexism,
is a concern of this article.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 59

critiques in the context of this specific area of activism is

useful not only because doing so can illustrate the critiques

but also because trans work is often seen as a subset of les-

bian and gay rights work and thus is expected to follow

similar strategies—an assumption that, given these con-

cerns, may be worth questioning.

Countless scholars and activists have critiqued the

direction that gay rights activism has taken since the

incendiary moments of June 1969 when criminalized gen-

der and sexual outsiders fought back against police harass-

ment and brutality at New York City’s Stonewall Inn.

What started as street resistance and nonfunded ad hoc

organizations, initially taking the form of protests and

marches, institutionalized in the 1980s into nonprofit

structures that became increasingly professionalized.

Critiques of these developments have used a variety of

terms and concepts to describe the shift, including charges

that the focus became assimilation (Barnard, 1996; Cohen,

1997; Sycamore, 2004); that the work increasingly

marginalized low-income people (Blum, DeFillipis, &

Perina, 2000 – 2001), people of color (Farrow, 2004;

Sycamore, 2004), and transgender people (Minter, 2006;

Rivera, 2002; Spade, 2004); and that the resistance

became co-opted by neoliberalism (Harris, 2006) and

conservative egalitarianism. Critics have argued that as the

gay rights movement of the 1970s institutionalized into the

gay and lesbian rights movement in the 1980s—forming

such institutions as Gay and Lesbian Advocates and

Defenders, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against

Defamation, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Lambda

Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Gay

and Lesbian Task Force — the focus of the most well-

funded, well-publicized work on behalf of queers shifted

drastically (Harris; Padilla, 2004; Vaid, 1996).

From its roots in bottle-throwing resistance to police

brutality and radical claiming of queer sexual public space,

the focus of gay rights moved toward the more conservative

model of equality promoted in U.S. law and culture through

the idea of equal opportunity. The thrust of these organi-

zations’ work became seeking access and equality through

dominant U.S. institutions rather than questioning and

challenging the fundamental inequalities promoted by those

institutions. The key agenda items became antidiscrimina-

tion law focused on employment (e.g., the federal

Employment Non-Discrimination Act [2007], as well as

equivalent state statutes), military inclusion, decriminal-

ization of sodomy, hate crimes laws, and a range of reforms

focused on relationship recognition that increasingly nar-

rowed in the last decade to focus on marriage.

Critics have charged that the social justice focus was

erased from the movement and replaced by a focus on

formal legal equality that could produce gains only for peo-

ple already served by existing social and economic arrange-

ments (Spade & Willse, 2005). For example, choosing to

frame equal access to health care through a demand for

same-sex marriage rights meant fighting for health care

access that would affect only people with jobs that include

health benefits they could share with a partner, an increas-

ingly uncommon privilege (Ettelbrick, 1989; Spade &

Willse, 2005). Similarly, addressing the marginalization

of queer people in the economy solely through the lens of

antidiscrimination laws barring discrimination in employ-

ment on the basis of sexual orientation—despite the fact

that these laws have been ineffective at eradicating dis-

crimination against other oppressed groups and ignoring

the reality that most people do not have access to the legal

resource needed to enforce these kinds of rights—has

been criticized as marking an investment in formal legal

equality while ignoring the plight of the most economically

marginalized queers.

These questions came to the fore during the welfare

reform debates and subsequent policy changes of the

mid-1990s, when social justice activists criticized gay

rights organizations for not resisting the elimination of

social welfare programs despite the fact that these policy

changes had devastating effects for low-income queers

(Blum et al., 2000–2001). Similar critiques have been

made of the quest for hate crimes laws, arguing that their

aims of enhancing penalties for assaults committed based

on antigay animus and directing resources to criminal jus-

tice agencies are misguided. Queer activists focused on

opposing police brutality and mass incarceration of low-

income people and people of color in the United States

have argued that hate crimes laws do nothing to prevent

violence against queer and trans people, much of which

happens at the hands of employees of the criminal justice

system to which hate crimes laws lend more resources

(Spade & Willse, 2000). These critics have pointed out

that the shift in focus from police accountability to part-

nering with the criminal justice system and aiming for

increased penalties represents a significant move away

from the concerns of low-income queers and queers of

color, who are the most frequent targets of police and pris-

ons, toward the perspective of White and economically

privileged queers who may feel protected by the police

and the criminal justice system and more interested in

retribution than in finding alternatives to a crime-and-

punishment model.

Overall, the gay rights agenda has shifted toward

White gay and lesbian experience while marginalizing or

overtly excluding the needs and experiences of people of

color, transgender people, and low-income people. Blatant



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 60

examples such as the battle over whether the most well-

funded gay rights organization, HRC, would include trans-

gender people in its national legislation or cover only

sexual orientation, as well as examples of value shifting,

such as the move from police accountability to hate crimes

laws, represent this trend. Professionalization in emerg-

ing gay rights nonprofits may be one of the causes of this

shift. As these organizations emerged, often funded by

wealthy White gay people and the foundations they have

created, their staffs were and remain primarily White gay

men and lesbians with professional degrees. These orga-

nizations operate on typical hierarchal models of gover-

nance, with decision making coming from the top down,

including board members and senior staff who are even

more likely to be White, wealthy, and have graduate-level

educations.

The gay rights agenda, then, has come to reflect the

needs and experiences of those leaders more than the

experiences of community members not present in these

elite spaces. These paid leaders could imagine themselves

fired from a job for being gay or lesbian, beaten up on the

street, or kept out of military service. They did not imag-

ine themselves as potentially incarcerated, on welfare,

homeless, in danger of deportation, or targets of contin-

uous police harassment, so those issues did not receive

resources in their work. Furthermore, these leaders came

out of graduate schools more than from radical move-

ments of people facing centuries of state oppression, so

their critiques of such notions as formal legal equality,

assimilation, and equal rights were less developed. Even

White feminist critiques of the institution of marriage

could not trump the new call for marriage equality —

meaning access for same-sex couples to the fundamentally

unequal institution designed to privilege certain family for-

mations for the purpose of state control (Colker, 2006;

Franke, 2006).

The decision-making structures and priorities are

not the only aspects of these nonprofits that have gener-

ated critique. Money has also been a serious concern—

both where it comes from and where it goes. The largest,

White-founded and -led organizations doing gay rights

work have generated much revenue through both foun-

dation grants and sponsorship by such corporations as

American Airlines, Budweiser, IBM, and Coors. These

partnerships, which include free advertising for the cor-

porations, have been criticized by queers concerned about

the narrow social justice framework of organizations will-

ing to promote corporations whose labor and environ-

mental practices have been widely critiqued. These

partnerships have furthered the ongoing criticism that

gay and lesbian rights have become single-issue politics,

ignoring other social justice issues to promote only a nar-

row political agenda that concerns gays and lesbians expe-

riencing oppression through a single vector — sexual

orientation — and thus excluding from concern all the

queer and trans people who simultaneously experience

sexual orientation–based oppression and other oppres-

sions related to their identities as people of color, work-

ers, immigrants, gender nonconformers, people with

disabilities, and so forth.

Lesbian and gay organizations have also, generally,

followed labor practices that do not line up with progres-

sive social justice values. The most well-funded organiza-

tions have pay scales similar to those of the private sector,

with executive directors often making three to four times

the salaries of the lowest-paid employees. Pay often cor-

relates to educational privilege, which again means that

the most resources go to White employees from privi-

leged backgrounds and the least go to employees of color

and people without the benefit of educational privilege.

Furthermore, these organizations for the most part do

not provide health benefits that include trans health care,

despite the fact that this social justice issue is an essential

one for trans people. The organizations also have a record

of not prioritizing the development of antiracism within

their work, with continued failure, despite requests by

some employees, for meaningful anti-oppression training

and development work within the organizations.4 The

refusal to devote resources toward the development of

internal antiracist practice reflects the broader marginal-

ization of issues important to people of color in these

agendas.

Overall, the well-funded gay and lesbian rights orga-

nizations are stark examples of the critiques made by

activists from across a wide range of social justice move-

ments about the problems with the nonprofit structure as

a tool for social justice. Lack of community accountabil-

ity, elitism, concentration of wealth and resources in the

usual places, and exploitative labor practices are norms

within these organizations, and so create and maintain a

disappointing political agenda that fails to support mean-

ingful, widespread resistance to oppressive institutions in

the United States—and sometimes even bolsters them.

Conceptual Tools for Examining Organizational

and Movement Approaches to Change During a

flood, the raft is a life-saving device, but it is only a

means of getting to higher ground. So, too, with

survival programs, which are emergency services. In

4 This information comes from the authors’ own work
within these organizations and their relationships with
other activists working inside these organizations.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 61

themselves they do not change social conditions, but

they are life-saving vehicles until conditions change.

(Abron, 1998, p. 25)

In assessing the disturbing failures of well-resourced

organizations focused on lesbian and gay rights to articulate

meaningful resistance to maldistribution of wealth and

power, and to begin imagining what it would mean to struc-

ture organizations focused on trans liberation that also aim

to resist neoliberal co-optation, we found some useful con-

ceptual tools generated by radical organizations. These tools

provide a framework for imagining how organizations can

engage in an intentional dialogue about how their tactics and

structures fit into their vision of building social movements

and engendering social change and, as such, are helpful for

our discussion about alternatives to traditional nonprofit

structures for emerging trans organizations.

These tools are especially helpful in developing an

analysis that emphasizes the interconnectedness of struc-

ture, ideology, and strategy. As Joo-Hyun Kang (2004)

pointed out, focusing solely on structure may be just as

dangerous as ignoring it. Kang elaborated on this topic in

her plenary speech at The Revolution Will Not Be Funded:

Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex Conference.

After a productive conference identifying concerns about

the limitations of the nonprofit 501(c)(3) structure, Kang

challenged attendees to go beyond structure, to address the

ideologies that drive the work we as activists do and make

sure that the structures employed to carry out that work

are consistent with our ideologies and values. Kang argued

that as long as nonliberatory ideologies are firmly in place,

challenging organizations to change their structures will

do no good. We have found these tools useful in under-

standing the link between organizational ideology, values,

and structure.

Theory of Social Change

Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education

(SCOPE), a Los Angeles organization, offers a tool called the

Theory of Social Change Framework. SCOPE’s assumption

is that all social change organizations have some analysis of

problems in society, some goals for creating positive change,

and some strategies for making their vision into a reality

(Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education,

2004). Broken down into analysis, goals, and strategies, the

Theory of Social Change Framework provides organiza-

tions with a means to understand and address the root

causes of the problems in their communities and with a way

to discern what form of organization is needed to achieve

their goals for how society should work.

With this tool, SCOPE makes an important point

about the interconnectedness of analysis, practical work,

and form of organization. SCOPE notes that an organiza-

tion’s perception of which are the most important prob-

lems will determine who needs to be involved in the work.

Furthermore, an organization’s primary strategies will

dictate what form of organization is most effective.

SCOPE’s framework helps organizations make conscious,

strategic choices based on an articulated theory of change.

Methods of Change: Four Pillars of Social
Justice Infrastructure

Drawing on previous social movements that used a

variety of strategies to build community power, the Miami

Workers Center developed a useful tool for understand-

ing the role of various strategies in social justice work.

Miami Workers Center (2004) has described what it calls

the Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure: the Pillar

of Policy, the Pillar of Consciousness, the Pillar of Service,

and the Pillar of Power. The Pillar of Policy is about work

that changes policies and institutions using legislative

and institutional strategies, with concrete gains and bench-

marks for progress. The Pillar of Consciousness includes

work that aims at shifting political paradigms and alter-

ing public opinion and consciousness, such as media advo-

cacy work, the creation of independent media, and public

education work. The Pillar of Service encompasses work

that directly serves oppressed people and helps stabilize

their lives and promote their survival, including work that

provides critical services. Finally, the Pillar of Power is

about achieving autonomous community power through

building a base and developing leadership: building mem-

bership organizations with a large scale and influence

(quantity) and developing the depth and capacity of grass-

roots leadership (quality).

The Four Pillars model is aimed at helping social

justice movements understand how these very different

kinds of work—which often are located in disparate orga-

nizations that do not collaborate extensively and that

define themselves as single strategy—are in fact inter-

twined, complementary, and essential. The Four Pillars

model focuses on helping movements and organizations

understand that the Pillar of Power—perhaps the most

neglected area in the current nonprofit industrial com-

plex–dominated social justice context—is the most essen-

tial for change and that the other pillars should ideally be

engaged to support the Pillar of Power.

This model is useful for evaluating an organization’s

overall role in movement building, identifying areas of

needed collaboration, and formulating a theory of change.

If, for example, we acknowledge that depoliticized direct

service work disconnected from the Pillar of Power is the

norm as part of the shadow state, we can form ideas about



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 62

what direct services that support base-building and lead-

ership development might look like. The Four Pillars

model allows for recognition of the vital need for all four

pillars: Direct services are not simply a Band-Aid, as is

sometimes argued, but instead can be understood as an

essential aspect to building mass power. Direct services not

only allow the base of people affected to survive and polit-

ically participate but also can be a road to participation if

those services are provided in a politicized context where

people come to understand their need for services as

linked to broader political structures that affect many

others like them.

Similarly, media justice work aimed at changing

hearts and minds is not the single key strategy for change,

as is sometimes presumed by those who invest deeply in

the idea that current political conditions are primarily a

result of ignorance or misunderstanding on the part of vot-

ers or the public. However, media work and public edu-

cation are important components of increasing political

awareness, changing paradigms, and building power for

oppressed people. Seeing the interconnectedness of these

strategies for change, as well as their role in building mass

movements, allows organizations to resist the pressure of

the nonprofit industrial complex to operate competitively

and separately from others engaging in different strategies.

This viewpoint also reminds those committed to change

that the elite strategies mired in expertise, such as policy

reform and work with the mainstream media, need to be

engaged in service to the fundamental struggle to build

power among oppressed people. Looking at social move-

ment infrastructure through the Four Pillars model allows

for integrating disparate, often competing strategies and

offers a chance to reframe the emphasis on elite media

work, policy reform, and services created by the nonprofit

industrial complex.

Contrasting two LGBT organizations with differ-

ent theories of change and different methods for achiev-

ing change may be useful here for understanding how

SCOPE and the Miami Workers Center’s tools can help

identify underlying assumptions in social justice work

and imagine organizational structures and strategies

that mirror radical redistributionist values. We chose

HRC and FIERCE! (Fabulous Independent Educated

Radicals for Community Empowerment) as our sample

organizations because these organizations employ quite

different theories and strategies for change and struc-

tures of governance.

HRC is the largest LGBT organization in the United

States. Its best-known work focuses on federal legisla-

tion — most notably the federal hate crimes law and the

Employment Non-Discrimination Act (2007), which

would bar employment discrimination based on sexual

orientation. HRC is also known for producing public

opinion polls relevant to lesbian and gay concerns; for

promoting candidates who take political positions sym-

pathetic to lesbian and gay rights (as HRC construes

them); and for its Corporate Equality Index, which mea-

sures corporations’ commitment to equal treatment for

lesbian and gay employees. HRC is structured as a tra-

ditional nonprofit with an elite board that rarely

includes a significant proportion of people of color or

low-income people and has failed to retain transgender

board members.

HRC’s primary work suggests that the organiza-

tion’s theory of change posits that providing incentives

for corporations to treat lesbian and gay employees

equally, promoting candidates based on their votes on

gay issues, and promoting federal legislation prohibit-

ing discrimination and enhancing punishment for hate

crimes targeting gays and lesbians will yield positive

social change for its constituency. HRC’s traditional

uses of mainstream media operate within a liberal social

change framework aimed at changing the hearts and

minds of Americans, hoping that increased goodwill

toward lesbians and gays will result in increased support

for measures focused on formal legal equality (e.g.,

marriage rights, rights to nondiscrimination in employ-

ment). HRC’s funding comes from wealthy philan-

thropists and foundations, reflecting its top-down

approach to social change.

FIERCE! is a community organizing group in New

York City comprising trans and queer youth of color. The

scope of the organization’s work is primarily local,

although FIERCE! also participates in national coali-

tional work. Its campaign focuses on dealing with attacks

on public spaces that have served as meeting places for

trans and queer youth of color in New York City’s West

Village, highlighting the connections between police

brutality, discrimination against youth of color in

schools, and foster care, gentrification, and political

marginalization.

FIERCE! uses a by-and-for governance model in

which the membership, composed entirely of those

directly affected by the organization’s work, cogoverns

the organization along with staff and board members.

Building political analysis and unity within membership

is a primary goal of the organization, with a central

focus on the process of membership base-building and

leadership development as key to long-term movement

building and the struggle for power and self-determi-

nation. The question of organizational structure for

FIERCE! is about the maximization of the leadership



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 63

and power potential of the membership base. The

underpinning to the organization’s structure is con-

nected to the question of power. When evaluating the

effectiveness of the organizational structure, FIERCE!

asks the following questions: Do the structure and pro-

gram maximize the leadership and power potential or

more than just a handful of people? and Does the orga-

nization’s structure have integrity with the community

it is charged with serving?5

The organization’s theory of change centers on base-

building: FIERCE! approaches social change by working to

build an organization with the scale and depth to affect

public policy, transform institutions, and shift cultural

norms. FIERCE! focuses on building skills, political con-

sciousness, and leadership among people most directly

affected by oppressive systems. This bottom-up approach

is reflected in its membership system, its prioritization of

relationship building, and its long-term strategies for move-

ment building by collaborating with other social movement

sectors. The organization’s resistance to top-down strate-

gies focused on elite decision-making bodies, as well as its

centralization of the experiences of people facing multiple

vectors of oppression, contrast sharply to HRC’s highly

professionalized workforce, which remains primarily White.

In contrast to the collaborative model FIERCE uses, HRC’s

strategy for exercising power is primarily through narrow

policy advocacy that has frequently been charged with gain-

ing victories at the expense of other communities. In com-

paring these two organizations, even this brief sketch can

offer insight into how an organization’s understanding of

power and social change influences its analysis, strategies,

and structures—and, ultimately, its impact.

Nonprofits differ in strategy (e.g., service provi-

sion, community organizing, legal and policy advocacy,

public education) and represent a wide spectrum of

political ideologies (e.g., radical, liberal, conservative).

Whether stated or not, all organizations have a theory of

how social change happens that determines what work

they deem politically viable, whom they involve in their

work, and which strategies and structures they employ

to carry out this work. As explained previously, an orga-

nization’s ideology will drive the strategies it uses to

address a problem. For example, the Black Panther Party

survival programs, although technically services, were

used as a way to expose the embedded racism in the

U.S. government and the systemic neglect of and violence

against the Black community. The services the Black

Panther Party provided—such as free breakfast programs

and freedom schools6—were based in a broader under-
standing of the role service provision played in organized

struggle for Black liberation and self-determination.

Black Panther Party services, then, were aimed at build-

ing the Pillar of Power, politicizing its constituency and

building shared analysis. Similarly, the Young Lords

Party’s hijacking of lead paint testing trucks in the 1960s

and 1970s to bring them into Puerto Rican communi-

ties combined survival services with political educa-

tion, lodging a critique of state health programs and

their neglect of Puerto Rican communities. These two

organizations’ ability to provide politicized survival

services outside of a nonprofit context offer a lens

through which to critique the shift toward depoliticized

social service provision and the reduction of direct orga-

nizing work in the context of the nonprofit industrial

complex.

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project: A Model for
Collective Resistance

Despite the fact that the development of the nonprofit

industrial complex has led to reduced radical potential and

adoption of many conservative practices within social move-

ments, the need for movement organizations to create

infrastructure for long-term sustainable change remains.

Social justice organizations provide key places for leader-

ship development, provision of survival services, political

development, network building, and sustained campaigns

for change. Can the nonprofit model be engaged critically

and used to pursue radical social change? Luckily for the

emerging institutionalization of transgender justice work,

there are excellent models for building social justice orga-

nizations that resist many of the aforementioned problem-

atic trends. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) is a trans

organization that has researched and used existing models

of collective governance and antiracist organizational devel-

opment that may be useful to people who are working to

build accountable, radical social justice organizations

focused on trans liberation. We offer SRLP’s model as an

entry point for imagining the institutionalization of trans

resistance outside of the limited frameworks provided by gay

and lesbian nonprofits.

SRLP’s Origins

Part of what is interesting about SRLP is the story

of its founding and transition from a traditionally

6 These schools featured a progressive, experiential cur-
riculum that emphasized student-centered teaching and
learning by doing with the goal of empowering Blacks to
become active citizens and agents of social change.

5 This information is based on Rickke Mananzala’s direct
knowledge of the workings of FIERCE!, for which he serves
as codirector.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 64

structured nonprofit endeavor to a radical multiracial

collective. SRLP was founded by the second author, a

White trans 24-year-old a year out of law school in 2002.

Dean started SRLP with legal fellowship funding, a type

of 1-to 2-year grant available to law graduates starting

innovative projects at existing organizations. Dean’s

project was hosted within a large, traditionally structured

poverty law organization, the Urban Justice Center,

where Dean paid overhead expenses in exchange for

office space and fiscal sponsorship. The project was

based on the recognition that no organizations were

providing free legal help to transgender, intersex, and

gender-nonconforming communities, who were facing

extreme discrimination in gaining access to identifica-

tion and basic services, such as welfare, shelters, foster

care, and health care.

Dean’s idea was to build a project that would pro-

vide free legal help, train others who should be provid-

ing services but did not have the basic competency on

trans issues to do a good job, work to change policies, and

engage in litigation. The underlying philosophy, which

remains a key element in SRLP’s mission and vision, was

that trans communities cannot build political power and

take up leadership in the variety of movements that con-

cern us if we are not surviving. Providing survival ser-

vices in a by-and-for environment based on social justice

rather than on charity and focused on building political

change can be transformational to a highly marginalized

population.

As soon as SRLP opened, it was flooded with calls

for help, as well as with community members eager to

support the work. The outpouring of energy toward the

project was significant and overwhelming. Dean began

working with other community members, as well as

people who knew about organizational development, to

think about a model for building an independent orga-

nization that could expand its capacity to use volunteer

energy and serve more people with few financial

resources. He wanted to break away from the Urban

Justice Center — an organization with a typical hierar-

chical structure and pay scale, in which White people

occupied most positions of leadership, and that had

unaddressed internal dynamics of oppression—and cre-

ate a fully trans organization governed in some way

that would resist the typical race, gender, and class

dynamics of poverty-law organizations.

The initial SRLP steering committee researched col-

lectively run organizations—primarily women of color

organizations, such as Sista II Sista in New York, Manavi

in New Jersey, and the Asian Women’s Shelter in San

Francisco, as well as the May First Technology Collective

in New York. Steering committee members read the inter-

nal structure documents of these organizations, inter-

viewed their members, and supplemented this information

with various labor best practices guides to draft SRLP’s

Collective Handbook and Employee Handbook. The

Collective Handbook outlines SRLP’s structure, criteria

for collective membership, grievance policies, decision-

making structures and other key features. The Employee

Handbook focuses on issues of compensation, benefits,

administrative procedures, and other areas specific to

employees.

SRLP’s Mission and Goals

Because of our focus on this model, it is worth

quoting SRLP’s articulated mission and goals from the

organization’s literature. SRLP’s mission statement

reads:

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) works to

guarantee that all people are free to self-determine

their gender identity and expression, regardless of

income or race, and without facing harassment,

discrimination, or violence. SRLP is a collective

organization founded on the understanding that

gender self-determination is inextricably inter-

twined with racial, social, and economic justice.

Therefore, we seek to increase the political voice and

visibility of low-income people of color who are

transgender, intersex, or gender non-conforming.

SRLP works to improve access to respectful and

affirming social, health, and legal services for our

communities. We believe that in order to create

meaningful political participation and leadership,

we must have access to basic means of survival and

safety from violence. (Sylvia Rivera Law Project

[SRLP], n.d.a)

SRLP’s written organizational goals are as follows:

1. To provide access to free, quality, respectful,

affirming legal services for low-income trans-

gender, intersex, and gender non-conforming

people.

2. To use training, public education, policy reform,

and precedent-setting lawsuits to end state sanc-

tioned and institutional discrimination, violence,

and coercion on the basis of gender identity and

expression, which we understand as inextricably

related to race and class.

3. To build a non-hierarchical collective organization

that internally practices what we’re struggling for

by developing the leadership of low-income trans-

gender, intersex, and gender non-conforming

people of color.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 65

4. To participate in the larger movement for racial,

social, and economic justice that includes gender

liberation and prioritizes the issues of those most

affected by the systems of oppression under which

we live. (SRLP, n.d.b)

SRLP’s Structure

SRLP operates on a collective governance model

designed to maximize the use of community volunteer

support, build skills and analysis among community mem-

bers, centralize leadership of trans people of color and low-

income people, and prioritize the needs of those most

vulnerable to state violence. SRLP’s structure comprises

six equally important teams: The Direct Services Team

runs the legal clinic, makes determinations about how to

take and handle cases, and advocates for policy reform

within institutions that affect the community; the Public

Education Team deals with trainings, web resources,

media, and publications; the Fundraising and Finance

Team raises money and administers financial systems; the

Collective Development Team recruits staff and collective

members and is responsible for SRLP’s internal anti-

oppression work; the Organizing Support Team links

SRLP’s work to other community-based organizations

and connects clients to opportunities for organizing on

issues that affect them; and the SRLP Board is charged

with oversight of the legal, ethical, and moral responsi-

bilities of the organization and its financial health.

Many people imagine that working collectively

means making every decision in a big meeting with

everyone present and assume that it is less efficient than

doing work in hierarchal structures. SRLP’s structure

maximizes efficiency by using teams and committees to

delegate decision-making and implementation powers to

small groups and individuals while employing annual

work plans and other accountability measures to make

sure that the broad strokes of programming are approved

by the entire organization. Once a year, all of SRLP’s

teams come together at a retreat to present their work

plans for the coming year, including time lines and

detailed information about specific projects and priori-

ties. Organization members then discuss these plans

and approve them, with changes. Then, 6 months later,

at SRLP’s second annual retreat, members check in on

project progress, changes, and any unexpected events.

With this method, everyone always knows what is going

on and has opportunities to raise concerns, generate

discussion about priorities, and build collaborations.

Because the teams are authorized to do the work and

implement these decisions as they see fit, this collective

process is also efficient.

The cause of efficiency is served, too, by the consen-

sus basis of the decision-making structure. All of SRLP’s

meetings use consensus decision making, a process that

works as follows: Once someone makes a proposal, the

proposal is discussed and clarified, then concerns are

raised and changes made to address them; approval occurs

when all concerns have been alleviated (Butler &

Rothstein, 2005). Any member can block a decision or

stand aside, so no one is assigned a task that she or he did

not have a role in discussing and approving. Unlike tra-

ditional nonprofits, in which decision making occurs from

the top down and the direction of the organization or its

specific programming is rarely decided by the workers

carrying it out, in SRLP everyone doing the work helps

shape that work. This practice maximizes efficiency

because workers are invested in their projects, empowered

to spot problems and concerns and bring them to the

group to be addressed, and never forced to implement pro-

grams or strategies with which they disagree. The invest-

ment in a collective decision-making process pays off both

in the increased leadership abilities of all participating

individuals and in their increased drive to implement the

organization’s mission and programs.

Each SRLP team comprises at least one staff mem-

ber (all staff members are also collective members) in

addition to other collective members. Community mem-

bers become collective members through a nomination

process in which they commit at least 15 hours of work per

month for a year. The Collective Development Team deter-

mines their appropriateness for the collective and their

placement on a team. The Collective Development Team

is charged with recruiting members in a way that main-

tains SRLP’s goals of being governed by 50%-plus-1 peo-

p l e  o f  c o l o r  a n d  5 0 % - p l u s - 1  t r a n s ,  i n t e r s e x ,  a n d

gender-nonconforming individuals. Besides the staff in

general, the makeup of each team also reflects these goals,

so that every decision-making body in the organization is

majority people of color and majority trans, intersex, or

gender nonconforming. These goals were put into place

with the initiation of the collective structure in July 2003—

although it took until 2006 for the staff makeup to reflect

these goals. In 2007, at this writing, the staff is 86% peo-

ple of color and 86% trans, intersex, or gender noncon-

forming (i.e., the organization currently has one White

person on staff, as well as one nontrans, intersex, or

gender-nonconforming person on staff). At the 2007 win-

ter retreat, the organization discussed changing the goal

of having 50%-plus-1 people of color on staff to, perhaps,

80% to reflect the fact that the current makeup of the

collective and its constitutive bodies feels ideal to many

members.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 66

The processes SRLP uses, from its team structure to

its retreats and consensus-based decision making, are

designed to prevent the concentration of power in a small

group of individuals. So far, in the organization’s first

5 years, this method has been successful, with a steady low

level of staff and collective member turnover that allows

both continuity in the work and shifting perspectives and

leadership opportunities.

SRLP’s Racial Justice Initiative

In 2004, a proposal emerged in the collective to cre-

ate a racial justice initiative that would bring more

resources to SRLP’s internal anti-oppression work. The

proposal suggested hiring long-term (1 – 2 years)

consultants to work with SRLP to build its capacity for

organizational development in terms of racial justice. The

process entailed doing shared political analysis about sys-

temic and individual racism among members, as well as

developing a White caucus and a people of color caucus

that would meet on an ongoing basis. This work was vitally

necessary to SRLP’s development as a multiracial

organization. Although at that time the organization

already had a majority of people of color in the collective,

it was nonetheless an organization founded by a White

lawyer with White cultural norms operating in many areas

and precipitating racist dynamics between members.

SRLP recognized that without developing the capacity of

the organization and the individuals in it to recognize

White cultural norms, to address racism between mem-

bers, and to assess racist dynamics in the institutions the

organization targeted for change, the organization could

not take the next steps toward making its anti-oppression

goals meaningful.

As a result of this initiative, SRLP devoted its spring

2005 retreat to working with its new consultants,

Dismantling Racism. That weekend, and at retreats that

followed, collective members engaged in exercises that

focused on building understanding of the nature of racism,

assessing SRLP’s antiracist organizational development so

far, identifying areas for improvement, developing a

shared language and skills for discussing racism in the

organization, and building White and people of color cau-

cuses in which to do specific antiracism work. The process

not only was transformational for the organization and its

individual members but also became a key support in the

organizational developments that followed.

One element that this work supported was the

founder transition process that SRLP began in 2004.

From the beginning, Dean had identified that he did not

want to be the kind of nonprofit founder who stays in an

organization forever. Founders often end up possessing a

great deal of power in an organization because of their his-

tory and role and relationships with funders, and their con-

tinued presence can often restrict the leadership of others.

Dean recognized that most poverty-law organizations he

knew of had White male founders who retained power,

prevented meaningful community governance, slowed

progress of antiracist organizational development, and

contributed to the cult of personality dynamic in social jus-
tice arenas in which individuals, rather than groups, are

credited with the work of community organizations. For

these reasons and others, Dean continued to discuss his

eventual departure from a staff role at SRLP. For 2 years,

the organization worked on this transition, bringing in new

staff and transferring skills and duties so that the people

taking on Dean’s work would be adequately prepared and

allow Dean to move to a new, unpaid support role in the

organization. This process was difficult, in part because of

entrenched racist dynamics within and outside SRLP that

centralized the leadership of a White lawyer in the orga-

nization. The processes and skills provided by SRLP’s

Racial Justice Initiative supported the transition and

provided language for creating priorities and strategies

that would benefit the leadership of people of color in

SRLP. In August 2006, Dean left the SRLP staff, which had

grown to seven, and took up a supportive role on the

Fundraising and Finance Team.

SRLP’s Funding

SRLP’s approach to fund-raising reflects its political

commitment to challenging the ways in which traditional

nonprofit structures can lead social justice organizations

to reflect conservative values in their practices. SRLP is

deeply committed to grassroots fund-raising, believing

that a large donor base of community members and allies

is a more sustainable approach to movement building

than receiving support primarily or exclusively from a

few foundations and wealthy individuals. Raising money

from the organization’s constituency and its allies makes

the work more accountable to that constituency and helps

ensure that the mission and program will not shift in

response to wealthy philanthropists’ visions. SRLP puts

significant staff and collective time into creating sliding-

scale or free community events that raise money and using

mass mailings that simultaneously solicit donations and

share information about issues facing SRLP’s con-

stituency. The push toward using sustainable grassroots

fund-raising is a gradual one for SRLP, which depends on

a combination of law fellowships, foundation grants, major

donors, and small donations. The highest percentage of the

annual budget that SRLP has ever garnered through

grassroots fund-raising is 30%. SRLP is committed to a



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 67

long-term process of developing sustainable fund-raising

strategies while continuing its program work.

SRLP is also committed to intervening in the dynam-

ics that occur within foundation fund-raising, which has

been a challenge for SRLP for several reasons. First, many

foundations that focus on LGBT issues have responded to

SRLP’s requests for support by questioning the necessity

of trans-specific groups when LGBT organizations exist.

These same funders have also questioned SRLP’s priori-

tization of direct services work and reform of institutions

centrally affecting low-income people. SRLP has had to

develop relationships with these funders—who are used

to viewing social change on queer and trans issues through

the lens of the strategies of the most well-funded (so-

called successful) gay rights organizations—to demon-

strate the need for work focusing on trans survival and the

gaps in this work that exist in gay rights.

SRLP has also worked to form mutually supportive,

rather than competitive, relationships with allied groups

focused on LGBT people of color, sharing ideas about

grants to apply for and being careful not to compete for

grants that are more appropriate for other groups that are

even less recognized by funders who do not value base-

building organizing and would rather see lawsuits and

hate crimes legislation. Approaching foundation fund-

raising with a critical eye, recognizing its necessity but also

its shortcomings, has been key to strategizing about engag-

ing with this source of funding. Overall, SRLP’s reliance

on volunteer labor, its avoidance of inflated wages for

people with professional degrees (everyone at SRLP makes

the same wage, regardless of education), and its focus on

grassroots fund-raising are aimed at creating an organi-

zation that is sustainable even if foundation funding

becomes unavailable or the number of staff positions has

to be reduced.

Being Visionary: Long-Term and 
Short-Term Strategies

As SRLP has grown and demand for its services and

work has continued to expand with its reputation, the

teams and the collective as a whole have continually had

to face questions about priorities and determinations of

which kinds of work, particularly institutional reform

work, fit within the organization’s vision and should be

pursued. These questions are complex, especially when

using legal strategies (which are traditionally reformist)

but attempting to manifest radical politics. SRLP explic-

itly aims to build power in its constituency to achieve

major transformations, not to shore up existing relations

of power through meaningless formal legitimizing

reforms.

Recently, several teams of the collective have been

working together to create a goals and strategies document

that will help articulate the politics of short-term and

long-term strategies for change. The process of producing,

amending, and editing this document serves several pur-

poses: (a) strengthening political unity and building shared

political analysis in the collective through disagreement

and conflict, (b) creating clarifying guidance for the work

so that each team can implement the mission more fully,

(c) building a vision that can be shared with political allies

and channeled into public education strategies, and (d)

deepening relationships between teams and among col-

lective members. The Direct Services Team, especially, has

articulated that having a document that provides an over-

arching vision and a range of potential strategies will help

people with legal intervention skills recognize when other

approaches are more appropriate and ask for help from

other teams. Since many of the issues and problems SRLP

works on come in through clients who first interact directly

with the Direct Services Team, and that team has the most

experience dealing with issues through legal help, it is

important to create guidance for them in assessing when

other strategies can be used so that they can alert other

teams. This approach is an important part of implement-

ing SRLP’s commitment to employ multiple strategies,

using all the Pillars rather than just the Pillar of Service

to address community members’ concerns.

The focus of the goals and strategies document is to

look at SRLP’s areas of intervention, such as foster care,

prisons, homelessness, or health care access, enumerat-

ing within each issue the true end goal, the alternative

vision for how that issue or system could work, the short-

term goals for change, the interventions SRLP has already

undertaken, potential strategies, potential targets, and

potential allies. An example may be useful here. The

Homeless Shelter System section of SRLP’s current draft

of the goals and strategies document identifies the true

end goal of SRLP’s work on homeless shelters as “[a]ccess

to free or affordable permanent housing for all people.”7

The document states SRLP’s alternative vision for this

issue as follows:

Housing is a fundamental basic necessity, and should

be a basic right of all people, not mediated by the

quest for profit. There is enough housing and

resources for everyone to be safely housed, and it

should be redistributed so that we all are.

Subsequently, the document lays out short-term

goals, such as increasing legal help for trans, intersex,

and gender-nonconforming people in housing court to

7 Document on file with the authors.



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 68

prevent evictions and thus reduce homelessness. Another

short-term goal the document sets forth is the creation and

enforcement of policies that prevent trans women from

being placed in men’s homeless shelters. Underneath each

short-term goal is a list of strategies that could be or have

been used to achieve that goal.

Central to SRLP’s mission are the organization’s

ongoing efforts to resist relying solely on short-term

strategies of social change and to recognize the limits of

legal reform while balancing the necessity for law and

policy changes that can help trans, intersex, and gender-

nonconforming people survive. SRLP recognizes that

this process must continually unfold, that its work will

be imperfect, that its members will have blind spots,

and that each area of its program, like all aspects of anti-

oppression, is not about arriving but instead about

engaging in a process with integrity, reflection, and

openness to change. The desire to explicitly state long-

term visions is aimed at preventing the common

nonprofit trend toward choosing short-term strategies

in the name of political viability without regard to long-

term vision.

Ongoing Challenges

Several areas within SRLP’s structure present con-

tinuing challenges that the collective consistently

discusses and revisits. One such area is leadership devel-

opment. Developing the members’ capacity to become

leaders (i.e., helping people deepen their political anal-

ysis and gain new skills, such as public speaking, writ-

ing, time management, and follow-through, as well as

helping collective members move into staff roles) is an

ongoing process. As an organization with an enormous

workload that takes on significant issues with very few

resources, ensuring that members have the time neces-

sary to train others, shadow one another, and develop

needed skills before being pushed into a new experi-

ence is difficult. The collective has continuously

improved in this area, but conflicting pressures make it

difficult to meet all the demands.

SRLP has also struggled with addressing issues of

ableism and gender balance. Because its last few years have

centralized a focus on antiracist organizational develop-

ment, some collective members have felt that addressing

the underrepresentation of people with disabilities in the

collective, and the underrepresentation of transwomen in

the collective, has not been given the attention it deserves.

The collective has had several focused conversations

specifically about gender balance and recruitment, and

transwomen have become a larger part of the membership

over time, but ongoing work is required to address the

many effects that sexism and divisions between trans

masculine and trans feminine communities have on cre-

ating a multiracial, multigender organization. Ongoing

discussion about recruitment, accessibility of collective

events, cultural norms within collective space, and the

role of allies in social change work is moving these issues

forward in the collective.

Overall, SRLP works to remain a space for chal-

lenging oppression both within the organization and

outside, as well as to engage in a process of collectiviz-

ing governance and building accountability to the com-

munities it serves. SRLP recognizes these as long-term

processes rather than points of arrival and aims to cre-

ate an environment that welcomes those challenges and

adjusts to meet those goals despite a conservative cli-

mate that erases radical social justice values. Aware of

the incentives the nonprofit industrial complex pro-

vides for centralizing power in the hands of elites and

choosing short-term gains over radical social change,

SRLP aims to create structures that counter those ten-

dencies. Recognizing the important connection between

a social movement organization’s mission, vision, ide-

ology, and structure, SRLP strives to put its money

where its mouth is.

Conclusion

SRLP’s model may be useful for existing and emerg-

ing trans organizations not only because of its organiza-

tional structure but also due to what it suggests about the

possibility of trans political organization. Despite the fact

that SRLP is a new organization with only 5 years of expe-

rience to recommend its approach, we believe that its

innovative use of older existing models of antiracist and

feminist governance, communication, and prioritization

have much to contribute to trans politics. In the politically

trying times in which we live, radical departures from

conservative norms are the most difficult and the most

necessary. To build trans liberation organizations or a

trans movement that does not meaningfully resist capi-

talism and racism or, worse yet, is co-opted to become an

arm of racist and capitalist state building, is unsustainable,

unjust, and inexcusable.

In all social justice work, we cannot know the out-

comes of all of our actions and we must assume that we

have blind spots that will be pointed out by people who are

still being excluded, or by dynamics that have not yet

emerged. However, feminist and antiracist movements

have produced enough critical analyses of the nonprofit

industrial complex and neoliberal co-optation to provide

a good sense that modeling trans organizations, strategies,

and visions on the existing well-resourced lesbian and



SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY

March 2008 Vol. 5, No. 1 69

gay rights organizations, although potentially rewarding

some trans activists in the short term, is not a just or

politically savvy approach to saving the lives of trans

people, building trans leadership in social justice, and

creating a radically different world without gender coer-

cion, racism, patriarchy, or exploitation. Calls for coalition

and collaboration to build bridges to people of color and

immigrant movements are essential for existing trans

organizations, but we must also examine the structures of

our organizations and recognize the deeply rooted racism

and hierarchy that are produced within traditional non-

profit structures. Luckily, we can benefit from well-

developed alternative models.

Nonprofits remain the site of much social justice

work and they can be places of opportunity to provide key

survival services, develop critical leadership, reform insti-

tutions that are killing our communities, and cultivate a

mass movement base. At the same time, we must remain

critically aware of the contradictions inherent in using

the nonprofit structure to build power for oppressed peo-

ple. We must remember that our services operate as a

shadow state, quelling resistance, and that foundations

operate as stored, stolen wealth, often keeping the lid on

social justice and rewarding reformist projects, while the

state criminalizes radical redistributionist political orga-

nizations (Rodriguez, 2007).

Nonprofits alone cannot address the maldistribu-

tion of resources under neoliberalism. We need a

broader social movement with forms of autonomous

community organization outside the nonprofit struc-

ture. We need a progressive infrastructure that includes,

but is not limited to, nonprofits that see their interests

tied up in the dismantling of the ever-changing neolib-

eral project by developing democratic organizations.

As Ruth Gilmore stated in her 2004 speech at The

Revolution Will Not Be Funded Conference in Santa

Barbara, California, we need to “not just fight the power,

get the power” meaning that we need to be both vision-

ary and rigorous, willing to hear critiques and engage an

ongoing, ever-unfolding process of movement devel-

opment that refuses to compromise portions of our

vision or sectors of our community in exchange for a

reduced vision of freedom. These are high demands, but

if we did not think they were possible, none of this work

would be worth trying.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the assis-

tance of the following people, who influenced the content

of this article through conversation, editorial advice, or

other assistance: the SRLP Collective members, FIERCE!

members and staff, Emily Wood, Paisley Currah, Rolan

Gregg, Allison Palmer, Sonja Sivesind, and Harmony

Goldberg.

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