(written by Andi Cheney, zine designed and illustrated by heejin kim)

Ecologists talk about closed and open systems (plus a whole spectrum of openish/closedish/queer systems). Open systems, like a cat, take in inputs from other systems (food & air) and feed outputs back (poop & different air & hairballs). Closed systems, like a pet rock, don’t take on new matter or get rid of matter. All systems are open, unless they’re hypothetical (rocks erode given enough time, sorry about your pet rock not being immortal). 

Even the hypothetical things we build, like governments and school systems and economies, are not closed – they connect to each other. But the earth kind of is, like a pet rock. We’re not getting hit by enough meteorites to consider space beyond our lil atmosphere to be adding significant matter to our planet. But capitalism holds that the earth is an open cycle, that money can grow forever, that fossil fuels will replenish themselves or we’ll figure out another thing to consume that has the same effects, and that wealth is more important than life. That’s some bullshit, obviously. 

Capitalism is currently in control, so we gotta interact with it a little bit or it will punish us in ways that are not life affirming. As capitalism collapses (it will, we can help), we’re in an era of harm reduction. So you gotta work jobs to get money to buy food and (in the US) medical care. And you gotta pay taxes that support prisons and cops and buy products that poison the air and water. (Kudos to you if you’ve gotten out of those systems entirely, for those of us who haven’t, we’ll tag in for harm reduction and intelligence gathering.) 

There’s a shit ton of money in nonprofits, and nonprofits are built into the federal and state tax codes, so they’re not very radical at their root. 

BUT. (You smelled the “but” coming, right?) Roots are still alive. And what grows out of them can look pretty different. So if you wanna do some harm reduction, here’s some stuff that could help.

How to Be a Liberatory Worker

Work expands to the time it is given. Do not give your job too much of your time. That means in working hours, and it also means emotional and intellectual labor, spending all your time thinking about it, losing sleep over it. Work has historically also contracted – the 40 hour work week, weekends, holidays – workers died for those ideas. We’re still fighting for get a 20 hour work week, guaranteed basic income, $20 minimum wage (let’s start saying a $50 min wage), full health care with dental/vision/mental/abortion/addiction/gender affirming…more!

Unionize. Yep, do it. And then organize your union.

Organize. Find your accomplices and push for change. Find a human being to talk to. Horrifying and liberating choices are made, sometimes simultaneously, by two people wearing uncomfortable shoes in a dreary office just before lunch.

See the $$$. Talk about your salaries. Know your funders. Pay living wages to the communities you serve. 

Name mistakes. They’re inevitable. Growth isn’t likely to happen without them. Integrating and learning and trying to do better can be revolutionary in a world that demands and pretends perfection.

Traditions vs Laws

A lot of what falls under “don’t have to be” might be a surprise, because a lot of nonprofits choose to be like that – they avoid anything remotely political, they have weird shadowy boards of folks who never meet the staff or the community they serve, they treat employees like they should sacrifice themselves for the mission and thank donors for the privilege of poverty wages. 

More on Ecosystems

Your organizations are in an ecosystem – what role do they play? Who do you overlap with and how can you build power together? How can you think of your role in the ecosystem as a way to build change?

And ecosystems are built of individuals. Who is in yours? What are you working toward together? How can you see each other and affirm each other? How can you make your ecosystem thrive and be more life-affirming?

If you catch folks talking about “sustainability” without considering their ecosystem, and maybe acknowledging that immortality is not sustainable, maybe walk them back a bit. 

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Organizations are structures of people. The moment of “incorporation” is a formal ritual through which you accept the obligations and lose plausible deniability of complicity in systems that are critically flawed and rarely life affirming. (Birth is another such ritual.) Not every endeavor needs to navigate these waters, but many do. Relieve yourself of the compressing feelings of guilt here that restrict your agency, your creativity, and your love. You can bring love to these places, no thing is perfect. Some suffering is unavoidable. Do not lie about it, but neither flagellate yourself for participating in structures older, more vast, and more complicated than you could create in one lifetime.

Transforming is hard and laborious. There must be a great contraction before an expansion. That’s how the universe seems to go. What will you bring with you in the great contraction?  Who will guide and witness and struggle alongside you while you/we transform?