When the Executive Accidentally Supported the Movement: Participatory Democracy and the Rise of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

Abstract

The critique of the non-profit industrial complex has spread from movement groups and movement-aligned scholars in fields like race, gender, and ethnic studies to influence scholars in other fields, including legal scholars. Despite this growing influence, studies of the non-profit industrial complex devote almost no attention to the importance of the Community Action Program (“CAP”), part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to its development. When CAP was created, the Johnson Administration sought to capitalize on the rhetoric of “participatory democracy” at a moment when that phrase had great cultural cachet but a deeply ambiguous meaning. The implementation of CAP exposed a rift between the Administration’s expectations of limited participation and the hopes of activists in many low-income communities of color, who had been inspired by a collectivist approach to participatory democracy, one that had grown out of John Dewey, the Christian pacifist movement, and the Highlander Folk School to be embraced by the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. As low-income communities of color began to utilize CAP as a tool to support grassroots efforts for social change, the Johnson Administration and Congress developed new restrictions on CAP to rein in what it accidentally unleashed without suffering the political costs of repealing one of the central components of the War on Poverty just months after it had launched. The tactics it developed—stripping funding, influencing board selection, new emphases on quantitative outcomes, reporting, and eligibility for services, and splitting funding for community organizing from funding for service provision—would become core tactics of the non-profit industrial complex.