2016 Annual Conference

This research-based presentation focuses on a justice-oriented nonprofit organization when they were awarded stimulus funds for public computer centers and digital literacy education in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. The presentation highlights the reorganization of work and interventions made by educators as they sought to continue oppositional politics while accomplishing grant obligations.

This research is based on a case study in Philadelphia that I conducted with social justice-oriented adult educators who implemented a federal stimulus funded program in community settings. Adult educators who design educational programs for mission-driven, grant funded non-profit organizations and wish to learn
about research methods that investigate gaps between original intentions and program outcomes are the ideal audience for this presentation. Educators who are critical of "skills" and "workforce development" discourse and practices as solutions to poverty may also be interested.

Questions of organization, scale, and resources become inevitable for adult educators who seek to expand social justice oriented work beyond the spontaneous and local, leading to the consideration of funding. In 2005, a local movement-based organization that I cofounded made a contentious decision to incorporate the organization with 501(c)3 legal status. Non-profit designation has assisted (and impelled) the organization to secure financial resources. Drawing on an institutional ethnographic approach to research, this paper explores two forms of accountability that were occurring concurrently, producing distinct experiences, during a period when they secured federal stimulus funds for public computer centers and digital literacy education in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. This finding explicates how bifurcated consciousness emerged from the disorganization and reorganization of work practices as leaders sought to continue oppositional politics while accomplishing the grant obligations. I argue that a community-led council assisted in mitigating an otherwise fundamental contradiction introduced when they became ‘provider’ of technology and training, by contract with the City, while exposing and challenging municipal austerity measures that continue to threaten Philadelphia’s public sector.