Nonprofit Work is Killin' Me

The values of celebration, engagement, community, and safety are central to Vélez Young’s Choctaw and Cherokee family and many Indigenous societies. Her book celebrates and critically engages truth-telling as a framework for understanding the U.S. phenomena of nonprofit workplaces being inundated with staff teams engulfed in unmitigated chronic-stress (CS) and vicarious trauma (VT) in the course of “doing good.” Nonprofit community-based social services teams deliver programs and resources to communities facing the greatest symptoms of inequality in this country. We are fortunate that front-line professionals triage high-risk situations and cultivate opportunities for generational healing. Yet their work has not been comprehensively explored.

Indigenous author presence is vital here as the sectors’ focus areas reveal the racist and colonizing forces still with us. The book’s truth-telling in the nonprofit sector activates readership to contend with contradictions of ignoring this foundation. Further, Vélez Young contributes by outlining healing methods for mitigating the negative impact of CS and VT with their Indigenous origins and how to access these methods as individuals and collectives.

Ultimately, this book amplifies the contributions of nonprofit social services professionals while calling for the activation of their capacities to heal and transform oppressive norms and structures inside of the nonprofit sector.

Intended for a wide audience, this exploration of the primary forces relevant to punishment—poverty and political powerlessness—highlights the necessity for humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge. This provocative overview looks at the business of punishment and at the historical patterns of control regarding slavery, the death penalty, women, the LGBTQ community, juveniles, and supervision.

Vélez Young-Alfaro, M. (2018). School violence inside a youth prison school. In Gordon A. Crew (Ed.), School violence in American K-12 education. Hershey, Penn; IGI Global.

This chapter complicates common examples of “school violence” and sheds light on those types of school violence that have adult agents.

Herron, J.D. and Vélez Young-Alfaro, M. (2018). Racialized perceptions of school violence: Suspensions of African-American students. In Gordon A. Crew (Ed.), School violence in American K-12 education. Hershey, Penn; IGI Global.

This chapter explores the role of school suspensions in punishing Black students for real and imagined behavioral