Every spring, right around the time the jacarandas begin their purple show, a new set of outsiders arrives in East Los Angeles. They come with good hearts, crisp logic models, and a three-year grant burning a hole in their pocket. They hold listening sessions. They map our assets. They promise to build something that will last. Then, when the funding dries up, they pack their laptops and go. The listening sessions become a memory. The asset map gathers dust. The community is left holding the fragments of another good idea that was never built to stay.
I write this during Lent, a season that has little patience for shortcuts. Forty days in the desert is not a quick fix. It is a long, slow stripping away of everything that is not essential. Our neighborhoods have been through their own desert times, and they deserve partners who are willing to stay in the sand, not just fly over with a care package.
The Parachute Model: A Familiar Liturgy
I have been a priest in East Los Angeles for over three decades, and I have seen this cycle so many times I could set my calendar by it. A well-meaning organization, often headquartered in a city far from here, identifies our ZIP code as a place of need. They secure a grant. They rent a storefront, hire a few local people at entry-level wages, and bring in a director from somewhere else. For two or three years, there is a flurry of activity: youth programs, health fairs, community gardens. The funder receives a beautiful annual report with photographs of smiling children. Then the money runs out. The director moves on to the next opportunity. The storefront becomes a tienda de ropa or sits empty. The youth program ends. The garden goes to seed.
What remains is not neutral. What remains is a scar. The young people who gave their Saturdays to that program learned a lesson no one intended to teach: that the people with resources will eventually leave, and that their neighborhood is not a place to build a life, but a stepping stone to somewhere else. The local leaders who were consulted and then ignored learned that their wisdom was just a box to check on a grant application. Trust, which takes years to build, gets spent in months.
I do not say this to condemn the people who work for these organizations. Many of them are sincere. Many of them weep when the funding ends. But good intentions are not enough. Love, in the Christian tradition, is not a sentiment. It is a commitment. It is the willingness to stay put, to be inconvenienced, to let your heart be broken by the very people you claim to serve. That kind of love cannot be funded by a three-year grant cycle.
Incarnation, Not Intervention
The church calendar tells a different story. We do not celebrate the Annunciation as a quick visit. We celebrate it as the moment God decided to move into the neighborhood. To take on flesh. To learn a human language, to walk dusty roads, to spend thirty-three years in the thick of it. That is the model our communities need: incarnation, not intervention.
Incarnational work is slow. It does not fit neatly into a logic model. It asks uncomfortable questions. Are we willing to stay when the grant ends? Are we building something the community can own? Are we raising up local leaders who will outlast our programs and our careers? These are not questions that produce tidy answers. They are questions that produce a way of life.
In East Los Angeles, the organizations that endure are the ones that were born here. They were started by abuelitas who saw a need and gathered their neighbors in a living room. They are led by people who grew up on these streets, left for college or work, and chose to come back. They run on shoestring budgets and sheer stubbornness. They possess something no outside group can purchase: confianza. Deep, earned trust that has been tested over decades, through funerals and quinceañeras, through elections and deportations, through the ordinary, grinding work of staying alive together.
What Rooted Organizations Do Differently
Over the years, I have noticed a few things that set rooted organizations apart from the ones that parachute in.
1. They Answer to the Neighborhood, Not Just the Donor
In a rooted organization, the board includes people who live on these blocks. Decisions get made in conversation with the people who will feel their effects, not in a conference room three time zones away. When a program ends, the relationships do not end, because the people are still here. This kind of accountability is not written into a grant proposal. It is woven into the fabric of daily life.
2. They Start with What Is Already Strong
Parachuting organizations often begin with a needs assessment that catalogs everything broken. Rooted organizations begin with what is already alive: the networks of care, the informal economies, the cultural traditions, the faith communities. They see themselves as joining something already in motion, not starting from scratch. They know that the tamale vendor on the corner and the señora who runs the prayer group are already doing the work.
3. They Walk Alongside, They Don’t Just Deliver Services
Service delivery is a transaction. Accompaniment is a relationship. It means showing up at funerals and posadas, not just at program events. It means understanding that healing from generational trauma cannot be measured in a quarterly report. It means staying when things get messy, when progress stalls, when the easy narrative falls apart.
4. They Share Power, Not Just Money
Money matters, but power matters more. Rooted organizations train local residents to lead, then step back. They share decision-making authority over budgets and strategy. This is slow, difficult work that often makes funders nervous because it cannot be tightly controlled. But it is the only work that lasts.
The Funder’s Role in the Problem—and the Solution
I need to speak plainly to foundations and major donors. Your funding structures often reward parachuting. Short-term grants, rigid outcomes, and a preference for shiny new programs over sustained core support all push organizations toward a project-based mentality. You ask for exit strategies before the work has even begun. You want innovation, but you are not willing to pay for the unglamorous, repetitive work of keeping the lights on and the staff paid.
What if you asked a different question: How will this organization still be here in twenty years? What if you funded endowments, not just programs? What if you measured success by the number of local leaders developed, not just the number of people served? What if you admitted that you do not know this community as well as the people who live here, and you let them decide where the money should go?
There are funders doing this. The Bread & Roses Community Fund practices participatory grantmaking, putting funding decisions in the hands of community members. The East Los Angeles Community Corporation has spent decades building affordable housing and community leadership from within, not from above. These models exist. They just require patience and a willingness to cede control—two things the philanthropic world often struggles to practice.
What This Means for East Los Angeles
Our neighborhoods are not blank slates. They are palimpsests—layered with histories of migration, resistance, and resilience. The murals on our walls tell stories that predate any nonprofit’s strategic plan. The posadas and Via Crucis processions knit together a social fabric that outside interventions often fail to see, let alone strengthen.
When a parachuting organization leaves, it does not just abandon a program. It abandons a relationship. In a community like ours, where relationships are the primary currency, that abandonment is a kind of violence. It reinforces the message that our neighborhood is a problem to be solved, not a place to be loved.
The alternative is not isolation. We need partners. But we need partners who come to stay, who are willing to be changed by us even as they seek to support change. We need partners who understand that the work of justice is not a project with a timeline. It is a way of life, a commitment measured in generations, not grant cycles.
Practical Steps Toward Rooted Partnership
For organizations and individuals who want to engage differently, here are some concrete practices.
1. Start with Listening That Leads to Belonging
Do not come with a program already designed. Come with questions. Spend six months—or a year—simply being present. Attend neighborhood meetings, church services, and cultural events. Learn the history. Identify who is already doing the work and ask how you can support them, not replace them.
2. Fund Core Operations, Not Just Projects
Project-based funding creates a cycle of instability. Organizations spend as much time chasing the next grant as they do serving the community. Unrestricted, multi-year funding allows groups to plan, retain staff, and respond to emerging needs. If you cannot commit to this, consider whether your involvement will do more harm than good.
3. Hire and Develop Local Leadership
Leadership should reflect the community. This means investing in the development of local residents, even when it takes longer. It means paying fair wages, not relying on the discount of “passion.” It means creating pathways for youth to become staff, and for staff to become directors.
4. Plan Your Exit from the Beginning—and Make It a Transition, Not an Abandonment
Every outside organization will eventually leave. The question is whether you leave behind a stronger, more self-sufficient community or a trail of broken promises. A responsible exit means transferring assets, knowledge, and relationships to local leadership. It means endowing local organizations so they can continue the work without you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a parachuting nonprofit?
A parachuting nonprofit is an outside organization that enters a community with a time-limited program, often funded by a short-term grant, and leaves when the funding ends. These organizations typically have little prior connection to the community and do not build lasting local capacity. The term comes from the image of dropping in, doing some work, and quickly departing.
Why do nonprofits parachute into communities like East Los Angeles?
Several factors drive this pattern. Funders often prefer to support new, innovative projects rather than sustained, long-term work. National organizations may identify a community based on demographic data and see an opportunity to expand their brand. Well-meaning outsiders may also underestimate the complexity of community change and overestimate what can be accomplished in a short time frame. The result is a revolving door of programs that start and stop, leaving residents wary of outside help.
How can I tell if an organization is truly rooted in the community?
Look for signs of deep, sustained presence. Is the leadership from the community? Does the board include local residents? Has the organization been operating in the same neighborhood for many years, through funding ups and downs? Do they participate in community life beyond their programs—attending neighborhood council meetings, partnering with local churches and schools, showing up for cultural events? A rooted organization is woven into the social fabric, not just renting space in it.
What can community members do when a nonprofit parachutes in?
Ask hard questions early. Who will be making decisions about the program? What happens when the funding ends? How will local residents be trained to lead? If the answers are vague or defensive, that is a warning sign. Community members can also organize to demand that outside groups partner with existing local organizations rather than duplicating efforts. The strongest defense against parachuting is a well-organized community that knows its own worth and insists on being treated as a partner, not a project.
The Desert Is Not Empty
This Lent, I am sitting with the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. The devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if he would just bow down. It was a shortcut—a way to achieve the goal without the long, hard road of incarnation, ministry, suffering, and death. Jesus refused.
Our neighborhoods face the same temptation. The shortcut of outside money and expertise promises quick results. But it asks us to bow to a logic that treats our homes as laboratories, our children as data points, and our relationships as expendable. We must refuse.
The desert is not empty. It is where God meets us, where we are stripped of illusions and forced to rely on what is real. For East Los Angeles, what is real is the resilience of our people, the strength of our traditions, and the God who has walked these streets with us long before any nonprofit drew up a strategic plan.
Let this Lent be a time to honor what endures. Let us invest in the organizations that will still be here when the grant cycles end, when the trend reports move on, when the parachutes are packed away. Let us build something that our grandchildren will inherit—not another abandoned program, but a living legacy of justice rooted in love.
Father Tomás Guerrero is a priest and community organizer in East Los Angeles. He writes at the intersection of faith, memory, and place.
