What is it? What is it? You run non-profit. Non-profits that succeed, do they get the bulk of their funding from government sources?
So, there are two types of government funding that non-profits in the city and the state receive.
There's competitive funding, and Queen's Pride House receives basically only competitive funding, and then there's discretionary funding.
Discretionary funding is at the discretion of a city council member, a member of the state legislature, and a member of Congress.
Now, that funding at the discretion of the elected official is often a source of real corruption, and I could point to specific cases,
but essentially, when politicians give money to 5-1-C3s, they're often looking for something.
And sometimes they're painting just barely within the lines, and it's tit for tat. There's a quid pro quo,
and sometimes it actually goes beyond the realm of the legal, and we saw this in the case most flagrantly with Pedro Espada,
who is indicted and convicted, a politician from the Bronx, a Democrat from the Bronx.
We've seen this time and again with the leadership in the state legislature, the speaker of the assembly,
Sheldon Silver from Manhattan, the last Senate Majority Leader, Dean Skelos, and the temptation is simply too great.
So, discretionary funding and competitive funding, but even competitive funding is a little bit problematic in the way it's set up.
Non-profits in this city and in this state can all compete for funding from various different types of organizations.
One of the problems with LGBT organizations is they get so little of it.
Do you know the percentage of funding from all sources, both government and private foundations, that LGBT-specific organizations get in the U.S.?
It's one-tenth of one percent. So, from the get-go, LGBT-specific organizations get only a teeny tiny fraction of the total amount of funding available
through government sources and through private foundations.
Transgender-specific organizations are only a teeny tiny fraction of that one-tenth of one percent.
I don't think anyone's actually even calculated it. It's so small.
Then, when you look at the needs of LGBT people of color, LGBT immigrants, for example, which are constituencies that Queen's Pride House serves,
at least half of our clients are people of color and or immigrants, many of them very recent immigrants.
The amount of funding available for those populations is inadequate to the task at hand.
There's also a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and red tape.
I remember one city council member once offered Niagara, my organization, New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy,
a small grant through the Department of Youth and Community Development.
It was a very small grant. It was about $3,000.
I looked at the paperwork and ultimately decided not even to pursue it because the amount of paperwork was so onerous in relation to this really small grant
that it, frankly, was not worth it.
So there's a whole bunch of impediments. There's a whole bunch of structural impediments to LGBT organizations,
especially those serving people of color to get adequate funding.
Then you throw in the fact that the discretionary funding is often with strings attached,
is often used or even manipulated by elected officials.
Like a string. Can you give me an example of a string?
So, name names here. My city council member, Danny Drum, who has basically essentially put Queen's Pride House on a blacklist for discretionary funding
because he is a vendetta against the organization and has basically warned other council members not to fund Queen's Pride House.
Instead, he's diverted funding that would have gone to the only LGBT community center in the borough to other organizations to do LGBT-related work
and make the road in New York as one recipient of his funding, his discretionary funding,
even the Jewish center of Jackson Heights, which has had a number of different LGBT events.
So discretionary funding can be used to reward friends and punish enemies,
and it is, in fact, a potential source of corruption.
As my understanding of non-profit, and I've run a non-profit for a long time, it gets barely any funding.
Non-profits are doing the task, are doing work that profit-making organizations wouldn't do
because it's not going to make a profit. Ergo, they're important to the society that way.
And then if you pick from among those non-profits, the ones that will be your handmaidens
or in some way not rock the boat too much, those seems to be the choices.
That's a really, well, what can I say, flies in the face of the reason for it being.
There's some serious issues with the non-profit industrial complex, as people call it, yes, that need further discussion.
