I'm Your Neighbor. If You Need Anything, Just Door Dash, Asshole.

There is a sentence circulating in philanthropic conversation that says we have too many nonprofits and another that says we do not have enough. Both sentences are wrong in the same way. Both sentences assume the number of nonprofits is the question. The number of nonprofits is not the question. The number of nonprofits is the symptom.

What is the symptom of. Of a country that used to help itself one neighbor at a time and now hires a credentialed stranger to do it instead. The United States now has over two million registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, the nonprofit sector now employs more than one in every ten non-government workers, more people than all of American manufacturing combined. In Indiana specifically, about 7.7 percent of the workforce is on a nonprofit payroll. That is the helping economy. It is enormous. It is professional. It is paid. And it has grown faster than almost any other sector of the U.S. economy for thirty straight years.

The argument I want to make is simple. We built that enormous helping economy on top of the older economy of neighbors helping neighbors, and in many places the helping economy has replaced what it was built to support. Not augmented. Replaced. The food bank opened and the casserole disappeared. The social worker was hired and the church stopped visiting. The nurse came on staff and the neighbor stopped knocking. Each of those substitutions felt like progress in the moment. The aggregate is a country that has forgotten what it knows how to do.

Broadway United Methodist Church, children with seeds, Mapleton-Fall Creek, Indianapolis · © Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center, non-commercial use permitted · IU Indianapolis Digital Collections

The argument for more nonprofits often reaches for Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the United States in the 1830s and admired the American habit of forming voluntary associations to solve community problems. The reach is misplaced. Tocqueville described people gathering, knowing each other, showing up. He did not describe people incorporating, filing for tax-exempt status, hiring an executive director, and applying for foundation grants. The two activities are not the same. The first is what neighbors do. The second is what professionals do when neighbors have stopped being asked. The 501(c)(3) is not the descendant of what Tocqueville saw. The 501(c)(3) is what we built after the thing he saw started to disappear.

The pattern I am describing has a name. The philosopher Ivan Illich called it iatrogenesis, which is a medical term meaning sickness caused by the doctor. Illich noticed that the more medical a society became, the sicker it reported itself. The more compulsory the schooling, the less people trusted they could learn anything on their own. The more cars on the road, the less people could move without one. The cure produced the sickness. Illich's point was that this is not a flaw in particular helping systems. It is what helping systems do when they get professionalized at scale. They take the thing they were built to support, and slowly, accidentally, they take it over.

I am a social worker. I teach social work at IU. I have spent my whole professional life inside the helping economy I am describing. I am not writing this from above the sector. I am writing this from inside it. And the thing I have been watching for twenty years is the pattern Illich named, playing out in the city where I was born.

Below this paragraph is the test. It is built around three indicators that, together, ask whether the helping economy in Marion County has served the people of this city or served itself.

Indicator I is Stayers. The percentage of adults in each zip code who lived in the same neighborhood ten years ago. A high stayers number means people are sticking around long enough to know each other. A low stayers number means the neighborhood is churning, and churning neighborhoods cannot build the trust that neighborliness requires.

Indicator II is Paid Helpers. The number of nonprofit employees per thousand residents in each zip code. This is the size of the helping economy in that neighborhood. A high number means a lot of professional help on payroll. A low number means very little.

Indicator III is Owners. The percentage of housing units in each zip code that are occupied by the people who own them. A high ownership rate means the wealth being made in that neighborhood is being kept by the people who live there. A low ownership rate means landlords, investors, and absentee owners are extracting it.

I am calling this framework Spatial Liberty. The phrase names a simple idea. Justice is not only about how resources get redistributed from the top down. Justice is also about whether people have the freedom to stay where they are, belong to where they are, and own where they are. Three freedoms. Three indicators. One map.

Toggle the indicators on the map below. Hover any zip code for the numbers. The Broadway / Roving Listener footprint, which I will explain in a moment, is outlined in red on every view so you can find it on each indicator. If the helping economy has worked the way it claims to work, the zips with the most paid helpers should also be the zips where people stay longest and own their homes most. If the pattern Illich predicted is what is actually happening, the zips with the most paid helpers will be the same zips where the fewest people stay and the fewest people own. That is what a test is.

The footprint outlined in red on the map is Broadway. Not the avenue. The church. Broadway United Methodist Church at the corner of 29th Street and Fall Creek, where Mike Mather served as pastor and where De'Amon Harges developed a practice he calls the Roving Listener. I am part of this story too. Mike, De'Amon, and I co-founded the Zawadi Exchange, the gift economy framework that grew out of what Broadway was practicing on its own block. Mike pastored it. De'Amon walked it. I have spent the last two decades designing and illustrating it, building the vocabulary and the structures that let the practice travel beyond the corner of 29th and Fall Creek. Zawadi is the Swahili word for gift, and the work has always been about treating the neighborhood's gifts as the asset and the institution as the support, not the reverse. For more than twenty years, the three of us ran on a different theory of help than the rest of the city's nonprofit infrastructure. We did not ask what the neighborhood lacked. We asked what the neighborhood already had. We walked. We listened. We funded gifts neighbors gave to each other instead of services delivered by professionals to clients. I am treating Broadway as the control group in this test because Broadway, operating in the same city under the same economic pressures, deliberately did the opposite of what the rest of the helping economy was doing. If the pattern Illich predicted is real, the Broadway footprint should look measurably different from the high-density nonprofit zips around it. Not perfect. Different.

You can argue with the measurement. You should. Zip code is an imperfect unit for neighborhood. Nonprofit employment counts the address of the organization, not always the place served. Self-reported neighbor help is subject to social desirability bias in both directions. The composite index needs sharpening. None of these are reasons not to run the test. They are reasons to run it carefully and to publish the methodology alongside the chart, which is what I am doing. The data block sits at the top of the file, every number visible, every source named. If you have better numbers, send them. If you have a better proxy for neighbor help at the zip level, send it. If you think the bucket assignments are wrong, send the correction. The test gets stronger or weaker based on whether the dots separate. Either way, we learn something about the city.

One more thing has to be said. American philanthropy keeps describing itself as the solution to the funding crisis facing nonprofits. The funders sit on record assets, the nonprofits run record deficits, and the conventional wisdom is that the funders need to give more so the nonprofits can keep doing what they are doing. I want to offer a different reading. The roughly seven point eight trillion dollars now concentrated at the top of the American wealth distribution is the same seven point eight trillion that did not become wages for ordinary workers, did not become taxes that funded public infrastructure, did not stay in the neighborhoods where it was made. The wealth left the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods now need professional help to make up for what left. The nonprofits exist because the wealth left. More foundation grants are not the answer to that. The wealth coming back, in wages and taxes and local ownership, is the answer. Philanthropy is a substitute for that answer. A generous substitute. But a substitute.

None of this is a case against generosity. I am not arguing that foundations should stop giving or that nonprofits should stop existing. I am arguing that the question philanthropy keeps asking is the wrong question. The right question is not how to fund the helping economy more generously. The right question is what the helping economy has replaced, what it has priced out of existence, and whether the institutions we built to address a wound have become part of the wound. That question is not anti-philanthropy. It is the only honest version of philanthropy I know how to have.

My partner Karen worked at Broadway and we raised our kids there for sixteen years. She has a phrase she used with the people she sat with in that work. I am more than you see. Five words. She used them as a kind of preamble, a reminder that the person in front of her was not the case file in front of her, not the demographic category in front of her, not the funder's idea of what their problem was. The phrase is a corrective to a habit the helping economy has fallen into, which is treating the people it serves as data instead of as people. Every chart, every metric, every program design, every grant report has to answer to that phrase. Did the help see the person. Or did the help count the person.

The title of this essay is meant to be uncomfortable. I'm your neighbor. If you need anything, just Door Dash, asshole. The first sentence is what neighborliness used to promise. The second sentence is what the modern helping economy has gradually replaced it with. The vulgarity is not me being rude. The vulgarity is what the replacement actually communicates, every time it happens, to the person being helped. A paid stranger arrives so the neighbor does not have to. The transaction is completed. No relationship is built. Multiply that by a million daily acts of help and you have the shape of a country that has become wealthy in services and poor in neighbors.

Indianapolis can test this argument. I am going to test it. The tool above is the apparatus. The Marion County zip-level data is being pulled from public sources as I publish this, and the version of the tool you are reading now uses preliminary estimates that show the shape of the hypothesis without yet confirming the specific neighborhood-level result. The verified version is coming. Mike and De'Amon will see the chart before the public does. The funders in this city who have spent twenty years building the very infrastructure I am asking about will be asked to look at the result of what they built and ask whether it did what they thought it was doing.

But the zip-level verification is not the only evidence we have, and it would be dishonest to pretend the pattern is unknown until the dots line up. Twenty years of national, state, and Marion County data already tell us a great deal about each indicator in the triangle. Here is what is already established.

What we already know

The Spatial Liberty triangle is not a hypothesis I am proposing to test in the abstract. Each indicator already shows the pattern at the national and state level. What the Marion County map will tell us, once the verified zip-level data is in, is whether the pattern holds at the resolution of a single neighborhood, and whether the Broadway / Zawadi footprint reads visibly different from the high-density nonprofit zips around it. If the verified zip data does not show the pattern Illich predicted, I will say so and this argument has to be reconsidered. If it does, then the conversation about American philanthropy that the sector has been refusing to have for forty years is the conversation we have to have now.

The fix is not more sector. The fix is to ask the sector what it has been a substitute for, and to begin, slowly, with the people who have been telling us the answer all along, to give the thing back.