From Burden to Benefit: Racial/Ethnic Value and the Nonprofit Organizational Structure

This essay draws on participant observation and focused interviews to compare two San Diego–based nonprofit organizations (a Spanish immersion charter school and a Mexican Indigenous community organization) to question the capacity and the limitations of the nonprofit structure—specifically the 501(c)(3) tax designation—to transform various social burdens into benefits for the organizations’ constituents. The term burden is used here to refer to those forms of difference that have yet to be incorporated into our social and political institutions, and therefore can lower the overall quality of life for those who are forced to shoulder the weight of their own difference. I approach the not-for-profit sector as a useful mechanism for transferring many of the state’s social and economic obligations for serving marginalized communities to a broader sector of the general public. Individual and group social burden can then be transformed into benefit for those who are in a structural position to exploit tax incentives, the symbolic benefits of community service or volunteerism, or the various forms of paid employment facilitated by the nongovernmental sector. However, I argue that the nonprofit structure can be less useful to those communities that are not in a structural position to exploit the economic benefits brought about by the nonprofit organizational structure and who are forced to continue to embody the social burdens associated with difference and exclusion in our society. This essay seeks to help Latinx activists and social entrepreneurs understand when the nonprofit should be considered as an appropriate structure for organizations focused on addressing the needs of marginalized racial and ethnic communities.