I used to work in non-profit development for a small after-school program in the poorest metropolitan region in Massachusetts, serving most of the poorest communities in Massachusetts; the vast majority of whom were Puerto Rican and/or Black. My boss was this middle-aged white lady who reported to a board of directors of mostly incredibly wealthy white donors who worked in high positions, or owned, all the wealthiest institutions around. Most of these wouldn't be names you'd recognize, because this was not a major American city and there are no major national American companies that operate out of the poorest big city in Massachusetts; at least nothing you'd really think about day to day.
Much of being an executive director of a small after-school program for impoverished kids in a poor city in a rich state involves being a socialite who all the rich people fall in love with. My job was 70% data entry and other data-management related work; and 30% serving as the executive assistant. This meant I organized and attended every single Board of Directors meeting; prepared their agendas, their minutes, took notes, set up their chairs and tables at the break of dawn, managed their teleconference hybrid set-up situation (yeah I was using Zoom before the pandemic), prepared all the materials for the executive director before she attended, all of her reports and such, etc. I was also one of the lowest paid staff in the organization, although nobody at this organization was earning very much. My supervisor, the head of fundraising, only earned around $45k/year. Albeit in an area with very low cost of living. This was also like, over five years ago. But I did know her salary, because I prepared and formatted the budget presentations for the board.
I also helped with organizing all the big fundraisers including the massive annual gala where teenage girls would talk about how great this program is for them and helping them go to college and the such. And at this gala would be the who's who of the region, all the richest people, all just random names you'd never really recognize. And they'd all write us big checks and then it was my job to process all of these big checks in a database with all of their names and information about them and every donation they've ever given.
Which also gave me time to google these names, and learn who our donors were; and our board members. Corporations love to have vague names that don't tell you what they do. Some of them were typical, real estate developers, banks, mutual funds. But also among our big donors? Arms manufacturers, military contractors, companies that would later be bought out by Raytheon.
My boss loved to name-drop that she was off to have lunch with the Dean of a local college or university, but she'd also name drop people whose names I'd recognize from their position on the board, or as big name donors. She'd say she wants to get them more involved, as "women in business," but those businesses would more often than not have something to do with war and weapons. Because the biggest employers in this region were, in fact, all companies that work for the Air Force; which was also located nearby.
Our kids, actually, would regularly have tours of these companies, to learn about careers in STEM, specifically, in aerospace engineering, for the military. Many of these kids would join the air force in order to fund the college education we'd inspired them to want but which they could not afford. They'd say that after their time in the air force, they'd become engineers, or maybe go into biosciences. Engineers, it's said, have a very difficult time not working for the military. Often, engineers are working for the military and don't even know it.
Here was an organization that branded itself as being all about social justice, empowering marginalized youth, we talked about feminism and racism and all this stuff.... and I slowly came to realize that the entire operation was a way for the rich people of the military-industrial complex to direct tax-deductible money towers professional development for future employees in their war profiteering. Why pay taxes when you can donate to "free STEM classes for underprivileged latina girls" knowing full-well that your "partnership" with said program is a pipeline for those girls to be your future workers, who feel an undue sense of loyalty and devotion to your company for putting them through said pipeline in the first place. Indeed, if they survived their time in the air force in-tact and made it through this pipeline that's designed to work against them at every turn due to classism and racism, if they actually made it to working for Raytheon or Smith and Wesson; then yes, they would be able to lift at least themselves out of a cycle of poverty if not their parents too. Maybe even their whole family.
But only in such a manner that would be profitable for these companies, which would profit the US military. It was through being deep in the weeds of all the data and information for this small non-profit going through my head that I came to understand how even incredibly benign non-profits that seek to do good are still twisted by the system to work to the benefit of US imperialism and the capitalist class. I was given a decent raise at one point, but I still decided to leave to become a librarian. I came to see the organization in a way nobody else there saw it, because nobody else had as much information passing through their brains as I did. Not only was I processing donor records and donations; I also processed the case files for all of the kids in the program. I read about their parents, their family history, their family income, every single kid in the program was a name that I knew and handled their information and learned their story through this bureaucracy I ran single-handed in order to track them and report their numbers to grants and the board. I also met these kids, because I annually administered various surveys and studies for our grantors in order to track things like if they knew about safe sex or about drugs, or had improved career aspirations the longer they were in the program.
I was the only person who had every single point of data coursing through my head from every single side of the organization, simply because I did all of the data entry for $14/hr, and it was... very informative.
It's incredible what you can see in society when you're straddling the lines, setting up the chairs to sit in the room with all the richest people in town; and setting up the chairs to interview the poorest kids in town the day after. Unsurprisingly, this was also when I started reading Marx. It sure did ring true.