Stop telling me to not be angry.

By the end of 2018, Americans will have given 500 billion dollars to nonprofit charities and foundations.

How do we treat kids raped in war without treating the society that rapes kids in war.

Why has so little progress been made.

Don’t even talk to me about HIV/AIDS research. Trump has stolen that entire appropriation. It doesn’t matter what congress wants. It only matters what Trump wants. Why are we still making antiretrovirals and patting ourselves on the back for how smart we are.

Are we. Smart.

School shootings. You tell me. Exactly how do we treat the kid who might or might not shoot up the entire village. This video the Smash Street Boys put together has a kid pretend to put a gun to his head.

How do we treat the kids exposed to this. How do we treat the culture that created the psychotic kid in the first place/

To wit. We don’t.

Treat anything in a fundamental way. We cling to the institutions from the past that no longer even exist.

How do we talk about this stuff.

— The environment.

— Climate change.

— HIV/AIDS.

— Education.

— Hunger.

— Racism.

— Homelessness.

— Cancer.

— Children’s Rights.

— Gender Equality.

— Diaspora.

The list goes on and on. It is an enormous litany of issues.

How do we not include class as an extenuating circumstance.

500 billion is the proverbial drop in a gargantuan class action bucket.

To wit: I just came home after picking people off rooftops who had been stranded because Hurricane Florence was far, far more powerful than anyone knew.

Rainfall. Floods. Helicopters. Dogs. Kids. Pig shit. And coal ash.

ICE is arresting migrant workers right there in the flood waters. Don’t drink the Kool Aid.

Why aren’t we making the kind of progress with these issues like we should be making. We have certainly thrown enough money at it. Be very careful when you get into the boat, and, please, do not tip us over.

As governments have walked away from responsibility, the private sector was supposed to make up the difference. I am here to tell you, it will never happen. The private sector itself is a hodgepodge of special interests focused on special interests.

There is one glaring example as to why American philanthropy has failed and will continue to fail.

Look no further than — Trump.

The Trump Foundation is a scam designed to enrich the President of the United States. Americans know this. And while they’re in a giving mood, thanks to a boom and bust economic cycle, they view nonprofits, charity, and foundations with skepticism. The giving back that these agencies do is plagued with the same insidious issues they are attempting to correct.

The people at the top of the food chain who matter in giving back are themselves almost always white, always male, always focused on keeping the cash, not spending it, and certainly not giving it away. These are the big boys. The big girls are there, but they have yet to make a splash. Whenever Linda Gates speaks or does interviews, whatch the interviewer. They will work Linda, but it’s all to get to Bill.

Every last foundation director has a monster PR machine (middle management is inherently female) tended to by publicists whose job is to maintain the bright and shining sheen the American imagination thinks is real.

What these NGO’s do is build the kind of walls every bit as intransigent at keeping people out as the wall Donald Trump is demanding to keep the wrong kind (dark skinned) of people at arms length from full participation.

Trump sees our money as his money. We have ceded that reality to him in the same way we have thrown cash at problems we know are intractable, and do not lend themselves to easy fixes. Nothing has been fixed. As Jerry Brown leaves government, he doesn’t think government can do much of anything.

Anywhere else, this is called defeat.

96% of the people in the world still think there is a god. Where do you begin. Science is silenced. There is no god.

I have worked with nonprofits my entire adult life. One of the first jobs I ever had was working with preschool children with cystic fibrosis in Lansing, Michigan. I moved to Florida where I was a teacher at a school for disabled kids. This was my first experience with seeing what thalidomide can do. My next job was aimed at finding developmentally disabled people who had lived in state institutions (now closed) and include them in assisted living. From there I became a counselor to blind families at an EOC. From there, I moved to Taos, New Mexico where I worked with 100 Mescalero Apache children who were living in a functioning ranch. Then, the Ford Foundation called. I am a published writer, photographer, and artist. I was asked to work with the Childrens’ Rights Group in San Francisco who were publishing all kinds of data, issuing reports, and creating books that reflected child advocacy during the United Nations International Year of the Child. All of this work didn’t have a single graphic. No photography. No art. Nothing to facilitate you to read any of it. I changed all of that. I left to build my own photographic agency that would donate art and photography to nonprofits who were publishing words and words and words but no images to exemplify the work they were doing.  I changed that, too. In New York, I worked with blind children, and (in my spare time) was the Director of the Manhattan Children’s Writers Group. I did teacher training workshops for Migrant Head Start in the Everglades.

I wrote a lot about single parent fathers (I was one) for American Baby magazine. I am the numbskull who invented the term: It takes a tough man to be a tender father.

In Key West, I worked with a group of disabled young men who were building a group home. It has been a long, eventful journey. In San Francisco, I worked with young children who had autism. I was then asked to come work for the San Francisco Hearing and Speech Clinic where I was placed in a classroom of hearing impaired and communicatively handicapped four-year-olds who I taught how to read and write. By the age of five, they could do both proficiently. I had never had that much fun in my life. From there, I worked with children with autism at a Nova University preschool. My last job before founding Cinematheque Films was as an organizer for a Navajo science fair on the Navajo Reservation. My students began to study how the environment around them worked.

The personal IS the creative. The personal IS community. The personal IS authenticity.

In this, the reservation becomes connected to the society that surrounds it. No one lives in total isolation.

We share the planet with people.

I served as chairman of the board of directors of a health department’s Office for Young Children where we designed preschool programs that would lend themselves to identifying kids who were being abused.

How do we treat the abused and the abuser.

I have traveled the world as a photographer. I have children and grandchildren. There is still — AIDS or no AIDS — HIV or no HIV – work to do.

None of these jobs had anything to do with following a corporate paradigm.

I would never do that. I could never have done that. Ce serait impossible.

To work, I need breathing space.

One of the trendy criticisms thrown like mud at foundations and nonprofits, is that they do not necessarily follow for profit corporate structures. This is like demanding that a dog pretend he is a catfish.

Most of these funding institutions do give it a go. Unfortunately, the Ford Foundation is not the Ford Motor Company nor should it be. The expectation that nonprofits be like for profits is a good way to render them as useless. But they do it or their boards rebel. Suddenly, Silicon Valley’s Big Wigs find themselves acting just like the New York Big Wigs used to. The Museum of Modern Art is a Rockefeller Nonprofit Corporation.

And I am Marie of Romania.

Big bucks begets big bucks. 

This is where the corporate wall comes into play. Corporate structure is a box within a box within a box, and — no one — in these structures thinks outside of anything must less the boxes they stuff themselves into. Executives know other executives. Their perspective of the world is about as big as a pin head.

The working paradigm is one where foundations create and then recreate and then recreate again, measuring tools supposedly designed to assess their viability.

Authenticity in a foundation’s outreach to a community, any community, is the only relevant measuring stick, and authenticity in relationship to community is a nebulous catfish with a thousand lives.

The reality is that no one in this business knows what the fuck they’re doing, but if they look good at measuring it, maybe the donors will stick with the mission. Maybe. Maybe not.

I don’t know a single artist who wouldn’t sell his grandma down the river for a chance to have a show at MOMA. 

I keep looking for a moral core within the context of the work the nonprofit sector says it does. I have yet to find one. In fact, such an idealistic hope that we can nudge something to become something it is not, isn’t simply hubris, but it’s a guiding light that has no traces of illumination whatsoever. We are all dancing in the dark. But some dark is darker than the other darks.

For 500 billion, there should be no such thing as hunger.

I can’t even tell you how many nonprofit executive directors have kicked my ass out of their well-appointed offices because I have suggested that authenticity means more than showing up. Authenticity means you might have to get your fucking hands dirty.

Don’t work with me in any educational setting with severely autistic children where the staff is too lofty to change diapers. If you can’t change a diaper, go home.

But the box within the box within the box that is the funding institution is at the beck and call of the people who, again, fund it. In any other realm, this would be called money laundering.

There will be a thousand Executive Directors who will flinch at that. How dare I articulate it. The walls of paternalism are alive and well and live all over the planet.

But who to blame.

Suits. I blame the suits. To invent a system whose focus on measurements keeps alive the fantasy that corporate (nonprofits are still corporations) responsibility is a shell game of not only nut, nut, which nut has the money, but when you turn all the nuts upside down, the money has disappeared into the black hole of we need money to give you money in a shuffling game of everyone in the professional giving business gets their take. Incest is not limited to immediate families. The people and the communities foundation directors know consists of other foundation directors whose authentic connections to community looks good on paper, but this is a planet where the people with the money do not authentically know the people without the money whose focus is to survive.

The struggle to survive does not count anywhere. A couple of years ago, we attempted working with children in the DRC, and we made sure they got connected to the Internet so we could all communicate.

They were shot and killed by rebel soldiers. You better have a strong stomach to do this work. I teach art. I teach photography.

Rebel soldiers find all of this – especially the Internet – to be a threat.

My favorite moment in this occurred at the United Nations AIDS conference where the UN had invited transsexual Indian sex workers to come and speak and speak they did.

This was the high moment of their lives. And then, they were flown back to India where they became quite lost and died.

I call this bearing witness. But I am so unsure that bearing witness means a goddamn thing. Can ART be a bearing witness. I seriously do not know. Now, we have nonprofits acting like Barclay’s Bank. You can be one. You can be the other. But you cannot be both.

How many suits do you really know who are giving back so much as their time.

I would bet the ranch that you could count them on one hand. The rest of it is called the nonprofit dog and pony show.

There are those of us in the trenches. We work with individuals. Not boards. And there are those who fund the people in the trenches, but it’s never a one-way street. They all want something.

On a personal level, what they always want from me is the promise that I will shut the fuck up and behave. Hey, I have AIDS. YOU tell ME what I have to lose.

Seen but not heard.

There is one word that drives these professionals mad.

Invisibility. Would be that word.

They kind of know who their focus permeates. The little people. None of it is real. They do NOT know the clients. The client is an IDEA. They do not leave their office suits. Am I telling you that these funding agencies are irrelevant.

Yes. They do not know the people they serve. Authenticity is more than someone’s pseudonym on the cover of a book.

I have thousands of photographs of the people I have shot with a camera. But if you look very closely, there is a perception that will grow on you that even if they are in a photograph, they remain invisible.

Today, I’m working with young boys who do sex work.

How many of them do you know.

None. They do not exist to you. To wit. Some of the boys I deal with are wanted by the juvenile justice system. Shoplifting cigarettes will get your adolescent ass thrown into detention.

The word detention means one thing to you. The system just sucks up the kid.

The word detention means something else to such hardened criminals.

Detention means rape. It’s not complicated.

Undocumented teenagers are running away by the droves. They cannot tolerate the rules of detention.

If you think detention is the answer, then you are the same kind of person who tolerates rape as a weapon of war. This time, it’s a war against children.

Which means I am compelled to say right upfront: I do not have sex with children. The very idea of it is soul-crushing.

Most of the boys I teach have HIV, and most are runaways from sexual and physical abuse.

And they are everywhere. This last week, they saved a lot of people who were sitting on the roof of structures no one will ever live in again. We had a boat, a canoe, and a jeep. To them, it was something of a dramatic hurricane adventure (just being in public during the daytime), and then, they are compelled to disappear again.

When darkness fell, and we could not really see who was sitting on a rooftop, we went home where there was no food. You can play any kind of moral blame game you want to with these adolescents. The relevant issue is hunger. We pick over spoiled food in dumpsters.

I don’t care what the boys say about making money. Sex work fucks them up. It humiliates them. It abuses them. It clinically depresses them, and it’s just not all that much money to live on. They are quite adept at living on the street. They are diverse individuals.

But they share one thing more vicious than any other problem.

They are invisible. I have seen it a thousand times. I possess magic powers.

People do not walk around the boys. People walk right through them.

I teach them photography and art. I buy them cameras when I can. I connect them to the Internet.

This week, we sold our cameras. So we might have food.

No community wants them. They scare the gay community half to death.

I am here to tell you these boys walk like ghosts. There are no foundations whose arms are open to any of them. Adults build the world. The kid simply survives it. Or not. There are no HIV clinics that can reach them. Public health has failed. No one in public health really thinks the hard to reach can be reached. Public health’s rhetoric is about as compelling as a poster taped to a dirty clinic wall. BE AROUND FOR THE CURE.

The boy is not so sure he wants to walk that walk. Being around is often more than he can do.

The only group of do gooders I have any respect for at all is Médecins Sans Frontières. They walk the walk. They talk the talk. They not only show up, but they show up fully prepared for the worst to happen because it always does.

Americans put a good face on the multifaceted self as we pretend we are the cowboys in the white hats who will rescue these sadly impoverished kids from themselves because that is our mission. This is where religion kicks in as a funding institution. People go on missions. Some people should stay home.

Their mission and my mission is simply one of survival even if very few of us can articulate it.

Authentic community.

You have to be an insider to know where the thing really lives.

Suits are good at knowing other suits.

These days, I am too busy begging for money so as to feed MY COMMUNITY. And I don’t have time for the games suits play.

For me, at LONG LAST, I am living in a trench where it’s the suits who are invisible.

http://tim-barrus.format.com/