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Religion
The crimes of Kim Kerr and DERA
By lobbying for fundamental change, Kerr stepped outside the parameters allowed for superficial change
By Reed Eurchuk
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The liberal element in the media is in an uproar about the NPA-dominated City Council cuts to a DERA-administered program for Chinese seniors in the downtown. Ian King, writing in 24 Hours, said the NPA "spiked last month in a blatantly political move." He's right, but why the surprise?
To understand the Downtown Eastside Resident's Association's current problems with the city, you have to understand some basic history about non-governmental organizations [NGOs]. NGOs are local, provincial, federal and international organizations that rely largely on government and/or foundation funding in order to provide social services. NGOs provide services like famine relief, housing, recreation, essential medical services, needle exchanges, counseling and many similar services.
There have been NGOs since the 19th century, but the modern NGO is of more recent vintage, dating to the 1960s and President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs in the United States. Johnson and the Democrats began funding important services to underprivileged communities in urban and rural America. Johnson's programs sought to lessen the most brutal effects of poverty and racism. But this was not an altogether altruistic enterprise; far from it. The context from which it sprouted is key. Beginning in the early 1960s and with progressive militancy into the mid-60s, Black Americans and their supporters mounted increasing pressure to deal with racism and poverty. Beginning with Watts in 1965, dozens of ghetto communities rebelled against racism, exploding in demonstrations, rioting, looting, fires and armed fighting with police.
The NGOs sought to manage and direct this anger by mitigating the most obvious effects of racism and poverty while also redirecting a potentially radical group of people towards the provision of social services. As well known political scientist Adolph Reed, who worked in NGOs in Chicago in the 1960s, said in a recent interview, "What those community-based organizations mobilize for is to provide services, not to funnel political will or political action."
But at the same time, these services did empower users, by providing them with important services, and along the way informing them that when united into coherent groupings, they had the power to effect change.
But what kind of change, there's the rub. NGOs sought to manage and co-opt legitimate rage at the same time that they provided beneficial, though inadequate, services to specific communities. That is the double-edged sword of NGOs: providing services that served the poor, but at the same time defanging them, bringing them into the tent of mainstream politics as a new, managed clientele to be controlled through the provision of a few helpful, but always minimal, services. DERA is the child of this contradictory parentage, and its history illustrates these contradictions.
NGOs are inherently non-democratic because their social service structure that frames their provision of services mandates the "service-provider" and "client" paradigm. The anti-democratic nature of NGOs is one reason why many Vancouver NGOs have been led by a series of single-minded strong charismatic leaders like, for example, John Turvey who ran DEYAS for years, Ann Livingston who started and continues to run VANDU, Lou Demerais of Native Health, or Mark Townsend at the Portland Hotel Society. DERA itself exemplifies this with a series of strong leaders such as Bruce Eriksen, Jim Green, Barb Daniels, and now Kim Kerr. Many NGOs incorporate a certain amount of democratic structure into their organization by including elements of democracy, for example by inviting people to become "members," by holding membership meetings, and constituting member-elected executive boards. But ultimately all this remains a façade as the paid staff usurps all power. And the money comes from sources other than the membership so the staff are not answerable to the membership for their pay-cheques. As the old saying has it, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Kim Kerr's crime-his originality, his daring, and the reason for the NPAs attacks upon DERA-is his not conforming to the unwritten rule that it's okay to engage in the politics of the status quo-that is, you can choose between the NDP and Liberals, or the NPA and Vision, etc-but don't try to step out of these narrow boundaries.
To me, DERA's darkest hour came during the 2001 provincial election when they demonstrated outside Gordon Campbell's Kitsaliano campaign office. Remember that then-governing NDP had initiated a brutal attack on the poor with radical cuts to welfare. Their previous Premier, Mike Harcourt, had used the language of right wing Republicans to rant about "deadbeats on welfare." The NDP refused welfare to refugees, to the NDP's everlasting shame. But DERA felt it necessary to reward the NDP for the attacks on the poor by targeting Campbell, who had nothing to do with it. Why wasn't DERA in trouble for playing politics that time? Because they were well within the tiny little tent of acceptable BC politics: you're either NDP or you're Liberal, but nothing else.
Kerr essentially incorporated the Anti-poverty Committee as DERA's direct action arm. APC took to the street to lobby for DERA's aims while Kerr kept up the pretense of an arm's length relationship with them, even while key APC activists scooped union jobs at DERA.
Bottom line: Government will not fund radical change. Big surprise. I'm thankful for the hard work of DERA and other NGOs, and for the services they provide, because they're a hell of a lot better than none. But they will never lead any sort of basic change. In fact, since their birth, NGOs have provided a safety valve, a strategy to allow governments to avoid fundamental change, by providing minimal services.
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