Community Bike Shops Should Not Be Funded (by Grants)

by Laila Davis

This summer I attended the Bike!Bike! conference in Pittsburgh. Bike!Bike! is a yearly gathering of community and non-profit bike shops and projects. One of the topics that many of the attendees were interested in was how to become an official non-profit 501(c)(3) in order to be eligible for grants. While there are benefits to operating as a non-profit, I feel that the disadvantages aren’t as often discussed, so I’ll lay out some of them here. If you’re thinking about incorporating as a non-profit or applying for foundation grants, you should consider these issues carefully first:

• The application process for grants is competitive, fostering rivalry between organizations which should be working together.

• Non-profits often find themselves molding their programming to what’s “hot” among funders, rather than to the needs of their community or the passions and talents of their workers.

• Funders can revoke grants if your organization takes a political stance that they don’t like. The fear of this happening serves to keep small organizations quiet. As these organizations are often created out of some sort of idea of addressing inequalities in society, losing your political voice is a big deal.

• Once you start down the non-profit road, you have to have someone in your organization who spends hours of her time searching for and applying for grants, rather than working with people and bikes. Foundations were created primarily to protect the wealth of ruling classes from income and estate taxes.
Also to make exploitative corporations look good. Is this something you want to buy into?

• With funding, people sometimes start to think about making a “career” out of their work, and the non-profit is often structured like the capitalist businesses we are trying to surpass. Fitting an organization into a formal non-profit structure can mean losing the flexibility of a more grassroots, movement-building structure.

• Grant money can be unstable because it depends on the larger capitalist economy. Say you’re getting your grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Where is that money really coming from? The sale of software. So if there’s an economic downturn and people buy less software, Microsoft isn’t going to be able to skim the top off as much corporate profit, and they’ll make fewer grants. I also just find it rather ridiculous that the fates of necessary social programs are tied to things as unrelated as software sales.

• Using grants to offer goods/services for free maintains a charity-type relationship which is dehumanizing for the people who need those goods and services and shields the corporations that mistreat their workers from public scrutiny. Wal-Mart is my favorite example: Wal-Mart doesn’t pay its workers a living wage, so they can’t afford to pay for their own services, such as health care. They can, however, often qualify for free or reduced cost health care offered by non-profits. These non-profits are funded by grants from corporate foundations who in turn get their money from corporate profits. So the Wal-Mart Foundation may be funding free or reduced cost health care for Wal-Mart workers. Why not
just pay the workers enough to purchase their own health care like other people?

Well, that would involve too much human dignity, wouldn’t it?

So if you don’t apply for grants, how are you supposed to run a bike shop? There are shops, such as the Grease Pit in Minneapolis, that succeed without grant funding. A shop can cover its rent, utilities, insurance and tool purchases with cash donations that come directly from those who use the shop. There are many ways that the people who use your shop can contribute. They can make cash donations for use of the space or parts. Those who aren’t able to give cash can do work-trade or donate bikes or parts, which usually are pretty easy to find. Or they can offer some other skill/asset your shop needs, like free copies. Grassroots fund-raising in the form of collecting used bikes from people in your area and alleycat race benefits are also an option.

While running a bike shop without grants takes a lot of volunteer time and commitment, every grassroots institution we add to the movement increases the time and energy available to those in our community to create more. If you can get yourself a bike for four hours of work trade and fix it for free, rather than working for some corporation to earn the money to buy and fix that bike (or worse, a car!), you can give that time back to the community instead. Maybe you could invest it in community-based co-operatively run child care, restaurants, grocery stores, or medical care. Each of these institutions supports the people working in the others.

A question to ask at the next meeting of your organization: “Do you create situations in which people can experience their personal power, their connection to others, and their ability to work together for change?” How would gaining funding as a non-profit work towards or against these goals?

For more information on how non-profits are insidiously draining radical energy from social movements, read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non- Profit Industrial Complex by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.
__________________________
Laila is a freelance free non-non-profit community organizer with interests in community-building, local independent business, and the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood She’s enjoying biking much more since she learned to put air in her tires.