We don’t love organizations back

Beyond donations and into actual relationships

me in 2019, physically manifesting my love for an organization

I’m reading a story about volunteers coming together, signing up in numbers they’ve never signed up in before, to stabilize our state’s immigrant and refugee resettlement agency after their federal funding was snatched by this administration. As is internet typical, I’m feeling that spiteful sort of pride until I get to the comments.

They go like this: “Seems like people remembered how to volunteer” and “More efficient this way” and “So no need for money to continue if you really care.”

I might hate it because a part of me agrees with them and this confuses me. Not the part of me that believes essential work should have abundant funding and abundant volunteer support and not have to pick one. Or the part that knows how this isn’t anywhere close to the tidy answer the commenters seem to think it is. It’s the part of me that also wonders where these volunteers were before and really believes in what we can do together. The strange thrill I feel at the stories of people coming through for each other, the alternative models we are stumbling into, and knowing this type of story is even still possible right now.

I won’t be typing well well well the volunteers were there all along but am wondering: Do we know how to participate in our beloved organizations before the emergency?

It’s like being upset that a restaurant you never went to just closed

What does it mean to have a relationship with an organization in 2025? By ‘relationship’ I mean something truly two-way, reliable, and holistic. By ‘organization’ in this piece I mean anything from the most established non-profit to libraries to a brand new mask bloc. (This is a big definitional tent for right now that gloms together unfunded organizing with funded work, but bear with me as I think our initial orientation towards them is similar enough. And at the very least, this work still co-exists in an ecosystem together.) These efforts rely on our consistent, meaningful engagement and use. But if we wait until the emergency, love them from afar, silo our participation (i.e. donate once a year), or only drop in when we need them, it diminishes their chances for survival…or creates an inhospitable social climate for them to even get started in the first place.

When the organizations we care about suffer – as it’s probably safe to say all are right now – it can feel every bit like heartbreak. I’m especially noticing this feeling come up for me across the greater ecosystem for organizations I’ve never touched, some in places I don’t even live in. It is all heartbreaking. I felt it big time recently when a literacy organization I planned to volunteer with shut down. Humiliating to admit, but when I wondered why this felt familiar, I realized it’s how I feel when restaurants I meant to go to go out of business. I heard the fries there were great! Can’t believe I never made it over.

This is not the relationship I want to have with work happening in my city. But it’s that guilty flopping failing sensation that might be common at this point, leading to all the writing and posting about how we don’t possess the follow through to invest in the connected lives we’d love to have, a disconnect from “of course I support community spaces” and actually doing it, like in this piece or this one or notes like these:

There’s truth in all of it, of course. We fail all the time and then, like the story I mention in the beginning, we miraculously succeed in surges. But what happens in between all of that?

I want to explore a few forces at play in our engagement with organizations today:

• The lack of role models

• Our transactional use of organizations, when we do participate

• The charity model and how this creates participatory distance

By no means is this an exhaustive list of all the reasons we might be out of relationship with organizations. Much of what’s explored here is framed from a “what has shaped us” angle but of course there are also so many ways organizations keep us out: failing to provide accessible and/or safe pathways to actually engage, perpetuating harmful charity models that deepen issues they theoretically exist to solve, being so overly focused on a model relying on fundraising/grants/staff that the opportunities for true engagement (and thus meaningful relationship) are forced into a pinprick, just being cliquey, etc. It’s why self-organized work is so attractive; there is so much less in the middle for us to work through and so much more for us to shape.

The effects above are what I’ve experienced in circling towards my own fuller-throated participation. I’m understanding what it looks like to be a meaningful member of organizations these days, and let me tell you: it is far more immersive, life-altering, and frankly spiritual than we might have the scripts for. It goes way beyond participation for me, and more into the realm of relationship.

Who shows us the way to show up?

The lack of role models

Like any other relationship, it may be best to begin with our expectations.

In friendships and romantic relationships, we develop expectations based in part from what we see other friends and romantic partners in our lives doing. If our parents hugged each other all the time growing up, if every couple in high school went on mall food court dates, if we see videos of friend groups hosting niche dinner parties, it sets a bar. We want that too. Or if we don’t want it, we at least know that it’s possible to have.

But how do we form expectations around organizational life – what it really means to volunteer, show up, and use services – if there are fewer and fewer organizations (and therefore organizational people) to model ourselves after?

I think the answer is…we don’t, and it’s a big reason why many of us have no idea what to do. It’s why we look to civic leaders from the past or our legendary aunts and local heroes who exemplified a yesteryear of participation and hopefully left a map for us. This effect has of course been well documented in your Bowling Alones and million articles about the decline of civic life, but I think we’re in a new moment of consciousness around this right now that’s creating a meta panic, a twin to the experience of awareness around any part of the current polycrisis like climate change, authoritarianism, or genocide.

Like, our story right now isn’t so much “humanity’s social life was collapsing and they had no idea, how sad” but “humanity has read all the think pieces about the collapse of social life and now they are freaking out about it.”

Our comprehension of our social fabric is developing just as the fabric itself is disintegrating, like learning a hummingbird’s name from an endangered species list. It’s a crushing sort of awareness, the kind you curse having because now you know exactly how much you’ve lost. We learn about the importance of membership organizations, third places, unions, and frankly any non-commercial spaces or collective efforts just as we realize we don’t see so many of them around anymore.

I believe this is really messing with us, expectationswise. We accumulate this cranked up sense of importance about how essential these rare spaces are even while the competency of how to engage once we’re there doesn’t necessarily improve at all. It’s like adopting a puppy because it would otherwise be put down even if your tiny apartment would be a terrible place for it to live and you are not ready to take care of a dog. Or spending money you don’t have on a whole art set-up because you like the idea of being a Person Who Paints only to never make time or develop skills to actually put something on paper.

In both examples, one thing sure is true: it’s more about our desperation than actually doing right by the thing we supposedly care about.

Panic googling “how to find my third place”

Our transactional use of organizations, when we do participate

can you also hear the panicked breathing behind these headlines?

We’re desperate about all things community because we are lonely, we need support, we want to make an impact, we know in theory that these things are important and are motivated into action by their peril.

This experience of loss can also trigger a rush of panic and stockpiling – well let me fill my arms with it before it’s gone – that paradoxically enhances the individualism that got us in this mess in the first place.

It’s worth pausing at this feeling for a hot second, I think. I’ve written before about panic leading us to rush and burn out in the interdependent spaces we crave. Panic also shapes what we do first; namely, that meeting our own needs becomes Task #1, the supposed base for the rest of what we mean to do next, you know, for others. Hopefully.

But when we combine the effects of what I’m exploring here so far – the lack of organizational role models + hyperawareness of the sense of social decline – it means that when we do participate, we’re more likely to do so by feel rather than example. Plugging a hole and doing it with urgency. Maybe that hole is ‘making a difference’ or ‘feeling useful or good about ourselves’ or ‘a sense of place’. It might most often just be sheer and utter loneliness.

That’s where I was at in 2021 when searching for a space after just moving to town. The hunger for friends and “place” was so acute it sometimes actually hurt my chest. When I did find my first home – organizing with our city’s chapter of the Radical Adventure Riders – I contributed work, sure, but I was also in such a place of lack that I hoarded so much of it for myself. I was cliquey, searching for friends, and heads down in our little scene, not really bothering to know more yet about the co-op where we were based out of, greater organizing efforts going on in town, or shifting to being a better spacemaker and inviter for others given my position. Even though my aperture has widened since then, I still scrap with the same base instincts today.

If you multiply enough “I’m just here to make friends” participants at scale, it doesn’t exactly build a healthy, sustainable organization. It builds a dining room to hang out in while the work to make it all happen buzzes in the kitchen.

Ok but do you even have a library card?

The charity model creates participatory distance

There’s been many fascinating pieces published lately about how to use libraries (see here and here) and the plea from this note which was liked thousands of times on this platform:

Part of this is educational – there are so many lesser known services the library is able to provide! – but there’s also a much more basic thing happening here: we have to be told to actually use the library.

Which makes me wonder: if we love libraries, but aren’t really using them, what else are we doing?

Maybe we use them in just one modality, like checking out books. And maybe that doesn’t happen often enough. Or maybe we like and share inspiring content on social media (“You’ll never guess what this library lets you check out!” [It’s power tools]). Or we shop the Friends of Libraries book sales but never more than this. We don’t really use them. Could it be because we believe that is for other people to do? I notice in myself the “other people” meaning many things in the case of the library: teens, children, people experiencing homelessness, seniors, people who aren’t really plugged in to other social spaces in town, people without reliable internet access.

I think I use about 3 of these things. Why can’t it be 10?

Even if we never give a cent, we still live within the ripples of charity culture. My othering of people is a result of this effect. In Mutual Aid, Dean Spade traces the roots of the charity model back to “Christian-European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven.” Spade goes on to write “It is based on a moral hierarchy of wealth. The idea that rich people are better and inherently more moral than poor people is why they deserve to be on top.” Spade explores this top-down dynamic in the context of solidarity movements and mutual aid (which you can also explore here), and I think we have so much to learn from this power differential, even outside of pure mutual aid work.

No matter where we’re involved, we all inherit a sense of distance between supporting the organization and actually using it ourselves or becoming deeply, inextricably involved. I think this feels most true for organizations who meet an essential need, like food pantries, tutoring services, or those who provide housing support. These may not be needs we have (right now, at least) so we’re not sure how to engage beyond arms’ length support. But I’ve noticed a similar distance even with organizations who might be one or two steps removed from essential needs. We support them in theory, but don’t use them or get deeply involved in practice – that’s for other people.

An example: a beloved local video store and community gathering space held an emergency fundraiser. I gave to the fundraiser. I would be so sad if they closed! But after I donated and read their shpiel, I realized how little I knew about the organization at large. I had more to learn about their mission, extent of programming, and history. I thought about how I haven’t been to an event there in years and mostly just rent movies. My donation mattered, but my engagement was as transactional as it could be. What might a fuller relationship with them look like?

Using organizations makes them better. Becoming involved across multiple channels – volunteering and joining a board or working group and attending events or using services and getting to know them – sparks all of these nodes of relationship that strengthen our own lives and, excitingly, the organization itself.

Beyond donations…and even beyond volunteering?

There’s something less tactical, less “Do This One Weird Trick to Save Your Local Youth Mentorship Program”, but no less important about all of this: by actually intertwining our lives within organizations we make a world where they are indeed important.

I notice this most at the co-op where there is simply a different weather pattern created by those who deeply align with the purpose and values of the space. They might volunteer a lot, sure, but they are also learned in what the space is about, its DIY ethos, how it all actually works. They bake cookies as a surprise treat and catch up with a friend on the sidewalk and call in to meetings and flop down on the couch between plans and sweep the floor or water the tomatoes if no one asked them. Their presence gives the physical space a sense of aliveness that liquifies the simple category of “volunteer” and enters an entirely different strata.

It’s about all of these acts but it’s also about the spirit humming beneath it all and that could just be the spirit of relationship.

Stay with me, if you will, for an excerpt from one of my favorite parts of the internet, TvTropes.org. They name the trope for this effect as Clap Your Hands If You Believe, emphasis mine:

An old trope, wherein enough belief in something will cause things to happen. Also known as the "Tinker Bell effect", which is itself a subcategory of what is known as "magical thinking", a belief in cause-and-effect relationships between uncorrelated events based on coincidences. This trope isn't a Magic Feather where "confidence" merely allows one to use one's own abilities to the fullest; this physically changes the Universe… A post-modern take on divine pantheons posits that gods are the product of (or severely dependent upon) their believers — take away their believers, and a god "fades away". When turned up to a global or universal scale, this can result in a "consensus reality" — a world completely created by what people think rather than its own Ontological Inertia.

Loving organizations back

Beloved organizations in my town are seriously cutting back services, shuttering physical locations, or closing up entirely. There are new efforts and Frankensteined-coalitions popping up needing new help, and in new ways of helping, every day. The emergency has arrived, an essential layer of organizations made up of non-profits and mutual aid and civic institutions doing great work exists, and there might be this new weird window of demonstrating what systems of community support could look like. I want to take my participation seriously.

Some questions that help me expand my own sense of this:

• What organizations do I use often? How might I explore other ways of being in relationship with them?

• Do I really know what the organizations I care about…do? K and I joke about people suggesting programs for the co-op that we actually already have. No shame! Sometimes it is hard to find the right info. But what if this step became an essential beginning for our relationships?

• And am I familiar with how they work? i.e. their funding, board structure, etc? It might seem basic or boring or invisible but it’s not. As I’ve shouted out before, this is why resources like this “Libraries 101” zine from For The People is so cool; it brings this into the visible.

• What does the larger network look like? How does this ecosystem work? If interested in a community fridge that sources food from local farms – who are those farms? Do they belong to other networks of care and advocacy? Do they need volunteers?

• How am I most comfortable showing up and why? Is there room to change this, try something new, show up to something outside of my usual zone?

• How might I be a connector? With any of this newfound wisdom, we might point others in the right direction, build new networks, or create ecosystem maps, event or resource listings, primers on issues (ie “how tenant rights work in our state”) within our work.

The answers to these should look different for each of us. What a beautiful thing! As I’ve grappled with these questions, I’m coming into new insights about myself: The depth of organizational relationship I’m after might look like only being intimately involved with 1-2 organizations at a time right now. And there are so many lighter ways I can still support the greater ecosystem, which includes being informed about what’s going on in town and who’s behind it, making connections, showing up to actions and workshops and events, building relationships with others doing exciting work. I hope to reassess this a few times a year to make sure my role is right-sized and I am not siloing myself into a hole. Through it all, I’m experiencing a redefinition of relationship, of figuring out the sort of participant I want to be, and discovering new ways to forge intimacy between myself and the work I believe in. For this emergency, before the next ones, and into a reality where there are enough of us involved to weather through them together.

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