To be or not to be: a non-profit?

Written by the AUREA team

Word count: 1800 words
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Since the creation of AUREA, we’ve had an abstract goal of becoming a non-profit organization. For a group of people who decided to volunteer for and within the aro-spec community, that seemed like a logical and exciting step on this journey. This organization has been around for close to three years by now, and has made some significant structural changes as well as seeing volunteers come and go. A question we’ve continued to ask ourselves is: is becoming a non-profit the right move for AUREA? 


During our research into this it’s become apparent that community input on this decision is a must. We’re going to lay out the pros and cons, three possible pathways for us to take, and what we would do on those journeys. We’d like you to give this a read over, share your thoughts, and if you’ve got an idea of something this organization can do for the aro community, we’d love to hear that as well.

Non-profit organizations

The term non-profit is typically used to describe any non-government organization that is dedicated to social, environmental, cultural, or other public interests. Their name comes from the fact that they typically make no profit off of their work, and instead rely on donations, grants, and other community funding sources to do their work. Many countries also provide certain tax exemptions for non-profits, requiring this kind of organization to be registered with a particular country. They are subject to that country and local area’s regulations, expectations, and fees. For AUREA this would be Washington State within the U.S. as we have a team member who lives there, can share an address to tie the organization to, and is well-versed in how non-profits function legally.


If we were to become a non-profit the money we receive would go towards running the AUREA website and supporting the aromantic community. As of right now the bulk of the donations we receive go to running AUREA. We require money for things like website expenses, management needs, and security features. To give some specific examples: paying for the website domain, a premium Zoom account (to host a dozen people in an international call with live captioning), and premium password protection. We receive donations throughout the year via our donation box, but we have also run two annual fundraisers - the first of which explicitly raised funds towards our non-profit registration goal.  


As for community support, we could grow. This would include focusing on decentralizing and ensuring our money has a positive community impact. We’d love to fund a scholarship program to encourage aromantic study and research. Funding goals for the community shouldn’t be something we control so we’d like to set up a mutual aid fund where today you help out someone and tomorrow they help you. For those of you interested in starting out aro communities, we could put money towards renting an accessible space, getting a Meet-Up account, going to conferences etc. At every turn, we could assist in making connections and strengthening aro community ties. These are our ideas and we’d continue to ask for community input and suggestions to make sure the collected money should be used for the benefit of the community.


To make things like this happen, we’d need money. As a non-profit, we could receive grants, access to discounts on certain programs and platforms, and we could open a non-profit specific bank account. This means that in some ways to become a non-profit is to become a financially focused organization. 

Non-Profit Industrial Complex

This brings us to the downsides and restrictions of being a non-profit organization. To be a non-profit would require us to work with “official” organizations and groups. This can be anyone from corporations, the government, and philanthropic foundations. This often results in non-profits being limited in their work, as funders are typically unwilling to pay for programs that threaten the status quo. This relationship between non-profits, the government, and corporate funders, where those with money control what services are and aren’t provided has been described as the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). We are simplifying the breadth of this term as there are other aspects of the NPIC and this is what is relevant to AUREA. 


Being recognized in an "official" capacity means representing whoever gives us that recognition, in a way, which means conforming to some societal values. Funders will have requirements of us. To receive grants and funding, we will have to give something in return. What happens when this goes against our organization values? To be a non-profit in Washington State it is a requirement that the organization have a President, Secretary, and Treasurer. We have phased out the hierarchical structure we once had in favor of a horizontal hierarchy to give everyone on the team equal say in AUREA. If we go ahead with becoming a non-profit, someone would need to be the President. Even if that were in name only, can we trust that it wouldn’t be the beginning of AUREA losing our anti-oppressive practices? 


To ensure that we aren’t pushing too hard against the status quo, the state would monitor our actions and projects and potentially suppress any leftist activity. One such entity we’d be under the scrutiny of would be the IRS, which administers and enforces U.S. federal tax laws and has the right to withdraw eligibility for tax-exempt status for organizations they deem to be in violation of their tax code. For instance, any organization determined to be disseminating “controversial or partisan propaganda” would not be eligible for tax-exempt status. This could mean that our anti-oppressive practices, which may be considered controversial by the state, could be controlled or suppressed by the state. 


We all know that activism is often done by the everyday person. One day someone decides to do something that will make a change. To ask for assistance from the people and corporations who profit from the status quo is counter-intuitive. White supremacy covets power hoarding and paternalism. Becoming a non-profit runs the risk of inviting in beliefs we stand against. Making politics and activism a professional undertaking - even via a non-profit organization - can take away access for and involvement of the affected community. AUREA is by aros and for aros. That is non-negotiable.

Community centric-fundraising

Now say we don’t become a non-profit organization. This would follow our current trajectory of actions. Right now we run an annual fundraiser, once a year, to pay for our needs. Community centric fundraising would mean we do smaller fundraisers more often for specific community needs. Perhaps we could still make the mutual aid fund happen, but it wouldn’t happen as fast and it would rely solely on aromantic support. These aren’t inherently bad things. Arguments against community work question the efficiency of everyone having a voice and being involved. How does anything get done if we want dozens of people to do it together? 

As a part of our anti-oppressive practices, we’ve been holding team discussions on various topics including the non-profit industrial complex. During that research we read about some people who have put community centric-fundraising into practise. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Zapatistas) of Mexico and Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD) of Argentina are social groups of working people who have become significant political players in their countries’ efforts towards self-governance. They use horizontal hierarchies of large groups of people and enact their political agendas through consensus. This can happen, simply, on a street corner with a gathering of local people ready to discuss the issues they have and make a decision. When it needs to be done, quick decisions can be made by consensus, and patience and depth of conversation are more important in every other instance. This is collective power, the inverse to the power-hoarding of the non-profit industrial complex.

The goals of community-centric fundraising align beautifully with many of the goals we’ve identified for AUREA. It emphasizes the continued importance of inclusion and diversity. We want to reach out to and partner with more organizations. To monetarily support guests and contributors and the other organizations we partner with in a significant way. And to have financing come from within the community. To continue forward like this puts our collective well-being at the forefront so that no aro gets left behind. 

A means to an end

There’s more to learn from these Latin American groups. The alternative to becoming a non-profit or to focus on community-centric funding is to do both. It is possible for us to use our non-profit status for a specific purpose rather than making it who we are. The Movement of Unemployed Landless Workers of Brazil (MST) is a powerful social movement with no intention of becoming a political party and instead commits to on-the-ground work. This means making education accessible, unlearning internalized social practices, and using safety patrols and community accountability sessions instead of police and prisons. The MST also works with non-profits for specific aspects of their activism, such as to gain technical assistance for agronomy, sustainable development, and organic agriculture. 


Perhaps this model is a way for us to gain the potential benefits of non-profits while not fully submitting to the powers that be so we can uphold our anti-oppression values. Funders still have some say in what we do, but we’re mindful of it and strategic. What if we used the grants to access resources for our plans that would normally be too expensive for us to afford? We could make plans that go ahead with or without the extra funding. What if the grant money we received only went towards our partnerships? We share the funding and in turn the aros and the aro groups take that money to assist community growth. The non-profit becomes a tool we use rather than a means to control our actions. 

What’ll it be?

Path 1:

Register as a non-profit with the explicit purpose of being able to get grant money we can then distribute back to the community at large. The challenge with this is that funders typically want to see clear measures of how well a program is working and that could limit what projects we would be able to get money for.

Path 2: 

We put more effort into community fundraising as a means of getting money for various community projects. The challenge with this is that it tends to be a less stable source of funding and could get complicated if we ever made enough money for taxes to become an issue. 


Path 3: 

A combination of the two. We register as a non-profit for a specific goal so we can get grant funding while still focusing more heavily on community based funding. This would entail something like a 5-year plan with the purpose of the non-profit being dismantled after x number of years or after said goal has been reached. This method is the furthest from our capabilities right now as we would need far more volunteers to make all this happen. 

No matter the path we take there will be obstacles ahead. There will also be growth and cooperation. We want community input to make this decision. We want to know what you think AUREA should do. No matter what we end up doing, no one organization matters. We will continue to uplift aros and encourage other parallel resources to AUREA. The question now is: how will we do that? 

Resources

Email us at contact@aromanticism.org or fill in our Feedback Form with your thoughts and input on whether or not we should become a non-profit.

Papo Aromantic