By Father Tomás Guerrero
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that settles into a neighborhood when the outsiders arrive. It’s not the exhaustion of hard work—our people know hard work. It’s the exhaustion of being studied, surveyed, and strategized over by organizations that didn’t grow from our soil. The term for this is parachute philanthropy: well-funded nonprofits and foundations that drop into a community, implement a program designed in a distant boardroom, and then leave when the grant cycle ends or the headlines shift. In East Los Angeles, we’ve seen this pattern repeat for decades. It’s a cycle that treats our barrios as laboratories, not as living, breathing neighborhoods with their own memory, leadership, and capacity for self-determination.
This isn’t a complaint against all outside help. The Church herself is universal, and we’ve been blessed by genuine partners who come to walk with us, not to fix us. The problem is a specific model: the short-term, metrics-driven project that prioritizes the funder’s logic over the community’s wisdom. It’s a model that often leaves behind more damage than good—fractured trust, abandoned initiatives, and a deep cynicism about whether anyone outside these streets actually believes in the people who live here.
The Liturgical Shape of a Neighborhood’s Life
To understand why parachuting fails, you first have to understand how a community like ours holds time. Our calendar isn’t the fiscal year. It’s the liturgical year, punctuated by Las Posadas in December, Viacrucis through the streets during Lent, and the explosion of Día de los Muertos altars in November. These aren’t just religious observances; they’re the scaffolding of our collective memory. They’re when we tell our stories, name our dead, and recommit to the living. Any effort that ignores this rhythm is already out of step.
I remember a well-intentioned health nonprofit that scheduled a major community forum on the Wednesday of Holy Week. They had a grant deadline. They had a logic model. What they didn’t have was anyone in the room who knew that on that night, our parish would be packed for the Tenebrae service, sitting in the dark as we listened to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The forum was empty. The organizers were bewildered. The neighborhood, once again, felt unseen.
What Parachute Philanthropy Looks Like on the Ground
I’ve seen the pattern so often I can mark its seasons. First comes the needs assessment, conducted by a young researcher with a clipboard who asks questions our elders have answered a dozen times before. Then the pilot program, launched with fanfare and branded materials, often duplicating an effort already running quietly out of a church basement or a neighbor’s garage. Then the evaluation, where success is measured in outputs that fit a spreadsheet, not in the slow, stubborn work of building trust. Finally, the exit, when the grant ends and the staff move on to the next “underserved” zip code.
What’s left behind? Broken relationships. A mural that will fade because no one budgeted for its upkeep. A youth program that had just begun to earn the confidence of the teenagers on the block. And a deeper scar: the sense that we were only valuable as long as we were a problem to be solved.
The Logic of Extraction Disguised as Service
At its core, parachute philanthropy is extractive. It extracts stories, data, and legitimacy from a community to satisfy the requirements of a foundation or a government grant. The nonprofit’s survival depends not on the flourishing of the neighborhood, but on the renewal of funding. This creates a perverse incentive: the community must remain a “problem” to justify the organization’s existence. Real transformation—the kind that makes outside intervention unnecessary—becomes a threat to the business model.
In East Los Angeles, we’ve lived this. We’ve been mapped, surveyed, and focus-grouped until our stories feel like commodities. Our cultural memory—the very thing that makes us resilient—gets packaged into grant proposals. Our abuelitas’ recipes, our muralists’ iconography, our mariachi masses become “assets-based community development” bullet points. And then the funding dries up, and the outsiders leave, and we’re left to stitch our community back together.
The Alternative: Rooted, Reciprocal Partnership
There’s another way. I’ve seen it in the East LA Community Corporation, which grew from the struggles of our own families and has stayed for decades, building affordable housing and teaching financial literacy with the patience of a people who know they’re not going anywhere. I’ve seen it in Homeboy Industries, born from the grief and grit of Dolores Mission parish, offering healing and jobs to former gang members not as a program but as a family. These organizations aren’t parachutes; they’re trees, planted by streams of living water, rooted in the soil of our shared suffering and hope.
The difference isn’t just about longevity. It’s about accountability. A rooted organization is accountable to the people it serves because its leaders live among them, worship with them, and bury their dead with them. When a program fails, they can’t simply move to another city. They must face the neighbors at the panadería the next morning. That accountability breeds humility, and humility breeds wisdom.
Cultural Memory as the Antidote to Extraction
Our parish, Enomine Patris, sits at the intersection of faith and cultural memory. We’re named for the Father, but we’re also custodians of the stories of this place—the Chicano Moratorium, the displacement of families to build freeways, the Zoot Suit Riots, the sanctuary movement. These aren’t just history lessons. They’re living memories that shape how our people understand power, trust, and betrayal. Any organization that wants to work here must first learn to listen to these stories, not as data points but as sacred texts.
When a nonprofit parachutes in, it often treats local history as a liability—something to overcome with “best practices” imported from elsewhere. But our memory isn’t a liability. It’s a moral compass. It tells us which promises have been broken before, which leaders have stood with us, and which strategies actually work because they honor who we are. To ignore this memory is to guarantee failure.
The Liturgical Frame: Advent, Lent, and Ordinary Time
I’ve found that the church calendar offers a better framework for community work than any grant cycle. Advent teaches us to wait in hopeful darkness, to resist the tyranny of quick fixes. Lent calls us to repentance—to examine how we, even as a community, have been complicit in our own marginalization. Ordinary Time is the long, green season of growth, where the real work happens in the quiet, unglamorous day-to-day. Any organization that can’t live within this rhythm won’t last here.
Consider the Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, which we walk through the streets of Boyle Heights every Good Friday. At each station, we stop at a site of pain: a corner where a young person was killed, a lot where a family was evicted, a school where children are hungry. We don’t do this to wallow in suffering. We do it to name the truth, to connect our story to Christ’s story, and to recommit ourselves to the work of resurrection. A parachuting nonprofit would see this as a “community engagement opportunity.” We see it as prayer.
What We Ask of Those Who Come
If you’re an organization considering working in East Los Angeles, I offer you these questions, not as a gatekeeper but as a pastor who’s seen too much damage done by good intentions:
- Who invited you? If the answer is a funder or a distant board, pause. Come only if the invitation comes from the people who live here, and even then, come slowly.
- How long will you stay? If the answer is tied to a grant cycle, reconsider. Commit to a presence measured in generations, not fiscal years.
- What will you leave behind? If the answer is a report, a toolkit, or a “capacity-building” workshop, know that we have drawers full of these. Leave behind relationships, resources, and a piece of your own heart.
- Are you willing to be changed? If you come only to change us, you’ll fail. The work of community is mutual transformation. Are you open to having your own assumptions, your own theology, your own sense of what’s possible, broken open by the people you seek to serve?
The Prophetic Call to Nonprofits
To the foundations and nonprofits that fund this parachute model: you’re not innocent. Your obsession with “innovation,” “scalability,” and “metrics” has created a nonprofit industrial complex that often harms the very communities it claims to serve. You demand that organizations show “impact” in 12-month reports, forcing them to chase quick wins instead of deep change. You reward charismatic founders with no local ties while ignoring the quiet leaders who’ve been holding their blocks together for decades. You talk about “equity” while perpetuating a system that extracts wealth and wisdom from poor neighborhoods and concentrates it in your endowed institutions.
This isn’t a call to abandon East Los Angeles. It’s a call to conversion. Come, but come in humility. Come to learn before you teach. Come to build relationships before you build programs. Come to stay, or don’t come at all.
Building a Community-Based Alternative
At Enomine Patris, we’re working to build something different. Our Community Memory Project trains young people from the neighborhood to collect oral histories, not for a grant report, but for our own archives—so that our stories remain ours. Our Feast Day Solidarity Markets create economic space for local vendors and artisans, keeping wealth circulating within our community. Our Neighborhood Leadership Circles meet not to be trained by outside experts, but to discern together what the Spirit is already doing in our streets and how we can join that work.
These aren’t programs. They’re practices, rooted in our faith and our place. They won’t show dramatic “outcomes” in a quarterly report. But they’re building the kind of durable, self-determining community that no parachuting nonprofit can ever create—and no departing nonprofit can destroy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is parachute philanthropy?
Parachute philanthropy refers to the practice of outside organizations entering a community with short-term projects, often driven by external funding cycles, without building lasting relationships or local capacity. These groups typically leave once the grant ends, sometimes causing more harm than good by disrupting local networks and creating dependency.
How can I tell if a nonprofit is genuinely rooted in East Los Angeles?
Look for signs of long-term commitment: local leadership, a physical presence in the neighborhood, partnerships with churches and community groups that predate the organization, and a track record of staying through difficult times. Ask whether the organization’s decision-making includes community members, not just as advisors but as board members and staff. A rooted organization’s story is intertwined with the neighborhood’s story.
What can I do if my community has been harmed by a parachuting nonprofit?
Begin by documenting the impact—both the promises made and the reality left behind. Build or strengthen local networks that can hold outside groups accountable. Consider creating a community benefits agreement or a set of principles for outside organizations that want to work in your neighborhood. Most importantly, invest in your own community’s memory and leadership, so that you’re not dependent on outsiders to define your needs or your future.
How does the church calendar relate to community organizing?
The liturgical year offers a rhythm of reflection, lament, celebration, and ordinary work that mirrors the cycles of healthy community life. Advent teaches patient waiting and preparation. Lent calls for honest self-examination and repentance for communal sins. Easter proclaims that death doesn’t have the final word. Ordinary Time reminds us that most of the work is slow, daily, and unglamorous. Organizing that follows this rhythm is more likely to be sustainable and deeply rooted than organizing that follows a grant cycle.
A Final Word
I write this not in anger, though there’s anger in me. I write this in love—love for this neighborhood, for its saints and sinners, for its alleys and gardens, for its stubborn hope. We’re not a problem to be solved. We’re a people to be loved. And love, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, is patient and kind; it doesn’t insist on its own way; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for programs, they’ll cease; as for grants, they’ll run out; as for metrics, they’ll fade away. But faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Come, then, in love. Or stay home and pray for us. Either way, we’ll be here, doing the work, as we have for generations.