“Our authority is community based”: funding, power and resistance in community-based organizations.
Date
2011-12-19
Authors
Amyot, Sarah
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Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between funding practices and the non-profit
sector through a case study of one community-based organization, called Ma Mawi wi
Chi Itata Centre, located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The thesis traces implications of the
shift to project funding models and outcomes-based management for the communitybased
organizations (CBOs). The research draws on Foucault’s governmentality analytic
to illuminate how funding practices relate to neoliberal discourses and traces the tensions
and resistances that are created by funding policy interventions at the point of practice. I
argue tensions arise between: competition and collaboration; textual accountability and
community need; reporting, learning, and teaching; different problem solving
approaches; and individualism and community building practices. CBOs are intimately
wrapped up in the project of governing. They are not either, a symbol of citizen
engagement or a symptom of a decimated state; rather they are both, part and parcel of a
system in which we are both governed and govern.
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Keywords
neoliberalism, community-based organizations, non-profit organizations, funding, discourse