From Resistance to Provision:Why Direct Service Is Revolutionary Strategy
Across the country, young organizers spend years fighting for housing justice while living in precarious housing themselves. They coordinate tenant meetings and policy campaigns while foundations celebrate campaign victories but never ask about their own economic stability, their own dreams of opening businesses, their own need for the very security they're organizing others to demand. This is the contradiction at the heart of our movement's current crisis.
We must name a hard truth: philanthropy has seduced us into believing that the only legitimate work of liberation is the work of opposition. We've been funded to fight, to resist, to tear down—but rarely to build the world we actually want to live in. Young people have been recruited into full-time organizing positions that ask them to sacrifice their twenties and thirties to "the movement" while offering no pathway to the economic security, homeownership, or business development that would actually transform their communities.
The Black Panthers understood something we've forgotten. Yes, they talked revolution and challenged state power. But they also served breakfast to children every morning. They ran free health clinics. They provided rides to prison for families visiting loved ones. Their armed patrols weren't just about confronting police violence—they were about creating safety so that Black people could move freely in their own neighborhoods. This wasn't charity work separate from their political analysis; it was the embodiment of their theory of change.
When we fund only organizing positions, we perpetuate the very systems of economic precarity we claim to oppose. We create organizations with no assets, no endowments, no land ownership—entities entirely dependent on the philanthropic apparatus that keeps them small and scrappy by design. Meanwhile, community members continue to struggle with immediate needs for food, housing, childcare, and economic opportunity that our "systems change" work promises to address someday, somehow, after the next campaign victory.
The right wing understood that the economy wins elections because they understood that people's material conditions shape their political consciousness. While we were developing policy papers and promising systemic change in some distant future, the right was making promises they never intended to keep—but promises that spoke directly to people's immediate material needs. Our absence from the realm of direct provision created a vacuum that allowed the right to dupe communities into believing they would receive the jobs, economic opportunities, and prosperity that we had failed to deliver. They offered nothing but the illusion of immediate, tangible improvements while we offered the reality of prolonged struggle with no material relief in sight.
We cannot make this mistake again. Direct service is not a consolation prize for failed policy work—it is organizing. When we create community-controlled businesses that provide good jobs with benefits, we're organizing for economic democracy. When we establish cooperative childcare centers, we're organizing for feminist economics. When we help people purchase land and homes, we're organizing for community ownership and wealth building.
Too many organizers eventually leave movement work for careers that allow them to provide direct service to their communities—becoming nurses, teachers, social workers. Their departures are treated as losses to the movement, but we must ask: what if we had created pathways for them to build community-controlled businesses and institutions while staying connected to broader struggles for justice?
This is our moment to course-correct. Every foundation dollar that goes to direct service work should be understood as an investment in organizing infrastructure. Every community garden, every worker cooperative, every mutual aid program, every after-school program creates material conditions that make further organizing possible. These efforts build the beloved community we're fighting for while meeting people's needs right now.
We owe it to the young people who have given their labor and their dreams to this movement to ensure that fighting oppression and building alternative futures can happen simultaneously. The revolution includes breakfast programs. Liberation looks like Black and brown businesses thriving. Freedom means community members having both the analysis and the resources to transform their own lives.
The Panthers knew this. Our elders knew this. Now we must remember.
