Corporate influence over nonprofits through donations is something that is rarely discussed. This is especially true when we consider the influence corporate donations to nonprofits has on advocacy efforts of those nonprofits.
While this reality is true for almost every nonprofit, I will use the example of blindness organizations to highlight this point. I’m using blindness organizations, because using them allows me to make another important point later in this post.
Both of the major blindness member organizations, the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind, accept corporate donations to offset funding of their annual conventions and of other organizational priorities. In both cases, they thank their corporate sponsors for their sponsorship at events, on social media, and in publications. On the surface, this makes sense. Corporate money is helping organizations whose memberships, because of systemic oppression, cannot generate the funds necessary to maintain a modern nonprofit.
But in this case, as in every case where corporations provide donations, there is a cost. Here, the cost is that neither of the blindness membership organizations directly confronts companies whose inaccessibility presents daily barriers to blind people. As one example, let’s briefly consider the Web Content Accessibility guidelines (WCAG).
The WCAG are widely discussed as a set of voluntary guidelines designed to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities. Although this is almost never discussed, the real reason for the WCAG is to make it harder for people with disabilities to sue corporations for failing to provide accessible web content. Even worse, the structure of the development of the WCAG is such that people with disabilities who also do not work for corporations and nonprofits tied to corporations have little influence over the development of WCAG and no decision making authority.
Even though the biggest aspect of disability equity is the mantra of nothing about us without us, the blindness membership organizations are silent about the inequitable development of WCAG and the reality that the proposed WCAG 3.0 will make it much harder for people with disabilities to sue when web content is inaccessible.
The reason the blindness organizations are silent on this and many important issues to the blindness community is the corporate donations used to power their organizations. By donating to the organizations, corporations are buying acquiescence from the organizations that are supposedly advocating for more accessibility.
Sadly, this truth is not unique to the blindness organizations. Look at the sponsors of all nonprofits and try finding examples of those nonprofits criticizing their corporate donors. I’m betting you will have a hard time finding examples of nonprofits biting the corporate hand that feeds them, no matter how much a terrible bite is deserved.
Corporate support of nonprofits is another way corporations pretend they care about a better society while actually using their cash to prevent society from becoming better.
In a society dedicated to capitalism, nonprofits are crucial to any hope of change. But capitalism controls the ability of nonprofits to advocate for meaningful change by forcing nonprofits to depend on corporate cash.
The point I hinted at in the beginning of this post is that the need for the blindness organizations to depend on corporate cash is even more acute than is the need for many other nonprofits. The simple truth is that by advocating for a community that is largely unemployed and where most of the members have been forced by discrimination to rely on poverty-level government benefits, the blindness organizations have no hope of ever generating sufficient cash to run an organization for their members without corporate cash. In order to lobby the government and provide social benefits for their members, they are forced to make deals with the corporate devils. In exchange for cash, they will ensure their advocacy efforts do not cause problems for their corporate benefactors.