There’s a particular silence that settles over a neighborhood after a well-funded nonprofit closes its local office. Not the quiet of contemplation or the hush of a church before Mass. It’s the silence of a vacuum. The banners come down. The rented storefront goes dark. The program director—often a bright, earnest young person from a university far away—updates their LinkedIn profile and moves on to the next “underserved community.” The people who live here are left holding the remnants of a six-month initiative, a half-finished mural, and a lingering question: Were we loved, or were we just a line item?
This is the problem with nonprofits that parachute in and leave. It’s a pattern as old as the missions themselves, and here in East Los Angeles, we know its rhythms by heart. An outside organization identifies a deficit—food insecurity, youth violence, lack of green space—and arrives with a ready-made solution, a grant deadline, and a logic model that has never walked down Whittier Boulevard. They don’t stay for the quinceañeras. They don’t sit with the abuelitas on the porch. They don’t learn the names of the dead. And when the funding cycle ends, they depart, taking their resources and their institutional memory with them, leaving behind a community that is not transformed but disrupted.
I am Father Tomás Guerrero, and I’ve served the parishes and streets of East Los Angeles for over thirty years. I’ve buried the victims of gang violence and baptized their children. I’ve seen the slow, sacred work of organizing—the kind that builds power from the ground up, that honors the memory of a place, that understands the liturgical calendar as a framework for civic struggle. This article isn’t a lament. It’s a call to discernment. We have to learn to distinguish between those who come to serve and those who come to extract, between the Good Samaritan and the consultant who crosses to the other side of the road because their per diem doesn’t cover trauma.
The Liturgical Shape of a Neighborhood
To understand why parachuting fails, you first have to understand that a neighborhood has a liturgical shape. The Church year moves through Advent’s waiting, Christmas’s incarnation, Lent’s repentance, Easter’s victory, and the long, green growth of Ordinary Time. So too does a community. There are seasons of grief—the anniversary of a police shooting, the death of a matriarch. There are seasons of celebration—the blessing of the lowriders on Good Friday, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, when the streets fill with danzantes and the air smells of roses and tamales. There are seasons of ordinary resilience, when nothing dramatic happens but the block club still meets, the tías still check on each other, and the garden on the corner still needs watering.
An outside nonprofit that arrives in July with a twelve-month grant to “build community resilience” has already missed the point. It doesn’t know that July is when the neighborhood is bracing for August, the month of the 1965 Watts uprising and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, when the heat and the historical memory press down together. It doesn’t know that the best time to launch a youth program isn’t during summer vacation, when families scatter to visit relatives in México, but in early September, when the rhythm of school and parish life returns. It doesn’t know that you can’t hold a community meeting on a Wednesday evening, because that’s when the novena is prayed. These aren’t small details. They’re the architecture of belonging.
The Logic Model vs. The Lived Calendar
The typical parachute nonprofit operates on a logic model: inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes. It’s a tidy, secular creed. But a neighborhood isn’t a machine; it’s a body. And a body has memory. When an organization ignores the cultural and spiritual calendar of a place, it commits a kind of violence. It schedules a “healing circle” on the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows without understanding that the women in that room have been practicing a theology of sorrow for five hundred years. It offers “leadership development” to young men whose abuelos were organizers in the United Farm Workers, as if the knowledge of how to build power hadn’t already been passed down through blood and tortillas.
I’ve seen this play out painfully. A few years ago, a national nonprofit arrived with a generous grant to address “food deserts” in Boyle Heights. They held a series of focus groups, complete with gift card incentives and catered sandwiches. They didn’t consult the parish’s Guadalupanas, the women’s society that had been running a food pantry out of the church basement for two decades. They didn’t ask the elders who remembered when the neighborhood had thriving backyard gardens, before the factories came. They produced a glossy report, recommended a mobile market, and left. The mobile market came for three Saturdays, then stopped when the funding ran out. The Guadalupanas, feeling bypassed and disrespected, quietly continued their work, but the trust that had been broken took years to repair.
The Three Wounds of Parachuting
When a nonprofit parachutes in and leaves, it inflicts three distinct wounds on a community. These aren’t metaphorical. They’re measurable in broken relationships, lost time, and the erosion of the very social fabric that makes organizing possible.
1. The Wound of Extractive Listening
The first wound is extractive listening. The organization arrives and convenes “listening sessions.” Residents share their stories, their pain, their hopes. They’re compensated with a meal or a small stipend. The organization collects this data, packages it into a needs assessment, and uses it to secure more funding. The residents never see the report. They’re not invited to the funder’s briefing. Their stories become raw material for someone else’s career advancement. This isn’t listening; it’s mining. And it teaches a terrible lesson: that your story is valuable only when it can be sold.
In the parish, we practice a different kind of listening. It’s rooted in the confessional and the pastoral visit. It doesn’t require a consent form. It comes with a commitment to stay. When a parishioner tells me about their son who’s struggling with addiction, I don’t log it as a data point for a grant proposal. I carry it with me to the altar. I check in on them next Sunday. I connect them with the St. Vincent de Paul society. The listening is embedded in a long-term relationship of mutual obligation. That’s the only kind of listening that heals.
2. The Wound of Displaced Leadership
The second wound is the displacement of indigenous leadership. Every community has its own leaders: the woman who runs the tamale sale, the veteran who coaches the soccer team, the young mother who organizes the posadas. These leaders may not have titles or degrees, but they have authority. They’ve earned trust through years of showing up. When an outside nonprofit arrives with a paid staff and a professionalized vocabulary, it often bypasses these natural leaders. It hires from outside. It convenes new coalitions that duplicate existing networks. It treats the neighborhood as a blank slate, erasing the leadership that already exists.
This isn’t just disrespectful; it’s strategically foolish. Sustainable change requires local ownership. When the grant ends and the outside staff leave, the work collapses unless it’s been rooted in the community’s own leadership. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly with youth programs. A well-meaning organization hires a recent college graduate to run an after-school program. The young person is energetic and idealistic but has no ties to the neighborhood. They don’t know the families. They don’t know the gang dynamics. They leave after eighteen months, and the youth are abandoned again. Each abandonment makes it harder for the next effort to gain trust.
3. The Wound of Memory Erasure
The third wound is the erasure of memory. Parachuting organizations rarely document their work in ways that remain accessible to the community. They produce reports for funders, not for neighbors. They don’t contribute to the local archive. They don’t record oral histories. They don’t leave behind a shared narrative of what was attempted, what was learned, and what should come next. When they leave, they take their knowledge with them. The community is left to start over, again and again, without the benefit of its own history.
This is a form of cultural amnesia imposed from the outside. It’s particularly damaging in a place like East Los Angeles, where the dominant culture already works to erase Chicano history. Our murals are whitewashed. Our stories are omitted from textbooks. Our elders pass away, and their memories go with them. When a nonprofit adds to this erasure—by failing to document, by failing to share, by treating local knowledge as disposable—it compounds a historical wound.
What Faithful Accompaniment Looks Like
So what’s the alternative? How do we practice a kind of organizing that stays, that roots itself in the soil of a place, that honors the memory of the dead and the dignity of the living? I want to offer a few principles, drawn from the parish and the streets, that might guide us toward a more faithful presence.
1. Begin with the Liturgical Year
Any organization that wants to work in a community should first learn its calendar. Not just the secular holidays, but the feasts, the processions, the anniversaries of local significance. In East Los Angeles, that means knowing when the Guadalupanas hold their annual retreat, when the community gathers for the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, when the Chicano Moratorium is commemorated. These aren’t obstacles to work around; they’re the very fabric of community life. An organizer who shows up to these events—not to recruit, not to hand out flyers, but simply to be present—will learn more in one afternoon than in a dozen focus groups.
2. Hire from the Neighborhood
If your organization can’t find qualified staff within the community you claim to serve, you’re not looking hard enough. Or you’re using a definition of “qualified” that privileges credentials over relationships. The most effective community health workers, youth mentors, and organizers are often people who already live in the neighborhood, who are known and trusted, who will still be there after the grant ends. Pay them fairly. Invest in their training. But don’t assume that expertise only comes from outside.
3. Commit to Memory Work
Every project should include a memory component. This could be an oral history initiative, a community archive, a partnership with a local library or historical society. The goal is to ensure that the knowledge generated by the project stays in the community. When a mural is painted, document the stories behind it. When a garden is planted, record the names of the elders who shared their agricultural knowledge. When a youth program succeeds, let the young people tell their own stories, in their own voices, and preserve those stories for the next generation.
4. Practice Subsidiarity
The principle of subsidiarity, rooted in Catholic social teaching, holds that decisions should be made at the most local level possible. A nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., shouldn’t be dictating the priorities of a neighborhood in East Los Angeles. The people who live with the consequences of a decision should be the ones making it. This means that outside organizations should see their role as supporting local leadership, not supplanting it. It means sharing power, not just resources. It means being willing to have your agenda changed by the people you claim to serve.
5. Plan for the Long Haul—or Don’t Come at All
If your funding model only allows for a three-year intervention, ask yourself whether you should be intervening at all. Some problems require a generation of patient presence. The work of healing trauma, building trust, and nurturing leadership can’t be rushed. The parish understands this. We baptize infants and bury their grandparents. We’re present for the whole arc of a human life. Nonprofits don’t need to match that commitment, but they should at least think in decades, not grant cycles. If you can’t commit to staying, then commit to leaving well: transfer your resources, your knowledge, and your relationships to a local institution that will remain.
Discerning the Spirits: Questions to Ask an Outside Organization
For those of us rooted in place, the arrival of a new nonprofit can feel like a test of discernment. Is this organization a genuine partner, or another extractive force? Here are some questions to ask—of them, and of ourselves.
For the Organization
- Who from this community is on your board or staff? If the answer is “no one,” that’s a warning sign. It means decisions are being made by people who don’t share the lived experience of those they claim to serve.
- What is your exit strategy? A responsible organization plans for its departure from the beginning. It builds local capacity. It transfers skills and resources. It doesn’t create dependency.
- How do you define success? If the metrics are all about outputs—number of people served, number of workshops held—rather than outcomes owned by the community, be skeptical. Real success looks like local leaders taking over the work.
- Are you willing to learn from us? An organization that arrives with all the answers is dangerous. Look for humility, for a willingness to listen and adapt, for a recognition that the community holds expertise that can’t be found in a textbook.
For Ourselves
- What are we being asked to give up? Sometimes the cost of outside funding is our own autonomy. We may be asked to shift our priorities, to adopt someone else’s language, to participate in evaluations that don’t serve us. Count the cost.
- Who benefits from this partnership? If the primary beneficiary is the organization’s brand or the funder’s reputation, walk away. The community’s well-being must come first.
- Does this align with our calendar, our memory, our identity? A partnership that requires us to abandon our traditions or ignore our history isn’t a partnership; it’s a colonization.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean for a nonprofit to “parachute in”?
Parachuting refers to the practice of an outside organization entering a community with a pre-designed program, implementing it for a short period—often tied to a grant cycle—and then leaving abruptly when funding ends. The organization typically doesn’t build deep relationships, hire locally, or transfer knowledge to community members. The result is a cycle of disruption that undermines long-term trust and local leadership.
How can a community protect itself from extractive nonprofits?
Communities can protect themselves by developing clear criteria for partnership. This includes asking about local hiring practices, demanding a transparent exit strategy, and insisting that decision-making power be shared with community leaders. Building strong local institutions—parishes, neighborhood councils, mutual aid networks—also creates a buffer, so that outside organizations must negotiate with established leadership rather than operating in a vacuum.
Why is cultural memory so important in community organizing?
Cultural memory is the shared knowledge, stories, and traditions that give a community its identity and resilience. When organizing ignores this memory, it erases the history of struggle and survival that has shaped the neighborhood. Honoring cultural memory means recognizing existing leaders, respecting local calendars and rituals, and documenting the work so that future generations can build on it rather than starting from scratch.
What is the difference between a service provider and a faithful presence?
A service provider delivers a program and measures success by outputs—meals served, workshops held, clients enrolled. A faithful presence, by contrast, is rooted in long-term relationship. It stays through seasons of failure and success. It shares in the life of the community, not just its problems. It’s accountable to local people, not just to distant funders. In a faith-rooted context, it understands that transformation is slow, sacred work that can’t be reduced to a logic model.
A Word for the Weary
I want to speak directly to those who’ve been wounded by this pattern. To the community leaders who’ve been bypassed. To the young people who’ve been studied and abandoned. To the elders whose wisdom has been ignored. I see you. Your frustration is righteous. Your weariness is understandable. But don’t let the failures of outside organizations convince you that change is impossible. The power to transform this neighborhood doesn’t come from a grant. It comes from the Spirit that has sustained this community through deportations, freeway construction, school walkouts, and pandemics. It comes from the memory of those who came before us. It comes from the relationships we build with each other, day by day, in the ordinary time of our lives.
The parish will remain. The Guadalupanas will still make their tamales. The young people will still paint their murals. The gardens will still grow. And if outside organizations want to join this work, they’re welcome—but they must come as learners, not saviors. They must come to stay, or they must come to leave well. There is no third option.
May the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared to a humble campesino and not to a bishop, intercede for us. May she teach us to recognize the holy in the overlooked, and to build a Church and a neighborhood where no one is treated as a project, but everyone is honored as a child of God.
—Father Tomás Guerrero
Father Tomás Guerrero is a priest in East Los Angeles and the voice behind enominepatris.com, a blog exploring faith-rooted community organizing and cultural memory preservation. He writes at the intersection of the liturgical year and the civic life of his neighborhood.