When Care Becomes Extraction
A Statement on Nonprofit Labor, LGBTQ+ Community Work, and Why Workers Organize
The Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County is a nonprofit LGBTQ+ community organization providing crisis support, peer connection, advocacy, education, and programming across the region. For many LGBTQ+ residents, it functions as an essential point of access to affirmation, safety, and community-based care, particularly in moments of isolation or crisis.
This past Friday, I stood in solidarity with staff organizing to unionize there.
I want to be clear about my relationship to the organization. I am not, and have never been, a paid employee of the Center. My connection comes through clinical training: I completed my practicum internship there as part of my graduate program in counseling, and I will return in a volunteer capacity this summer. I did receive a $1,000 stipend at the end of my practicum year, which was a welcome surprise. I write from the perspective of a clinician-in-training who has been inside the relational and institutional ecosystem of this work, but who is not embedded in staff, management, or leadership. I have worked in non-profits my entire career.
What that moment of solidarity reminded me of extends far beyond any single organization.
There is a familiar story nonprofit institutions often tell about themselves and many people in this field will recognize it. Because the work is mission-driven, relational, and rooted in care, it is often treated as if it exists outside the ordinary tensions of labor and power. Staff are described as passionate, committed, and deeply aligned with the cause, so much so that they willingly absorb instability and strain. In LGBTQ+ community spaces especially, this work can feel inseparable from survival, belonging, and political commitment.
But a care mission does not exempt institutions from power relations.
If anything, care-based organizations are uniquely vulnerable to obscuring them.
This is one of the central contradictions of nonprofit labor: the language of care can substitute for the language of labor when tensions arise in organizational life. When this occurs, unsustainable workloads, under-compensation, blurred boundaries, and burnout become easier to normalize—the harm is not necessarily intentional, but devotion to mission can become a resource in itself (Hochschild, 1983; Jeung et al., 2018). Recent research on nonprofit worker organizing names this dynamic idealism exploitation, where workers’ identification with a cause is leveraged to justify chronic low pay and poor working conditions (Zhao et al., 2025). McKittrick-Sweitzer (2024) further sharpens this analysis by showing how commitment to care becomes a site of structural vulnerability, where those most invested in justice are presumed to give beyond sustainable limits.
From the clinical and theoretical frameworks I work within—Feminist Therapy, Liberation Psychology, and Relational Cultural Therapy—this is best understood as structural rather than interpersonal.
Power does not disappear in care-based organizations. It reorganizes. When unexamined, those with the least institutional power and material security are most likely to absorb its costs (Young, 2011). This is especially evident in nonprofit and LGBTQ+ organizations, where frontline workers hold crisis response, community trust, political education, emotional containment, and institutional continuity simultaneously. Emotional labor research consistently links sustained affective regulation under low control conditions to burnout and occupational risk (Hochschild, 1983; Jeung et al., 2018).
One of the most common arguments against unionization in small nonprofits is that it introduces division, bureaucracy, or rigidity into otherwise relational environments.
But this framing confuses formal structure with the origin of conflict.
Unionization does not create conflict. It makes it legible. It reveals strain that was already present—strain previously managed through informal negotiation, uneven access to leadership, or unspoken expectations of emotional endurance.
As James Baldwin reminds us, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Unionization formalizes voice where informal systems of accountability, negotiation, and repair have proven insufficient or unequal. This matters especially in organizations that claim liberation, equity, or healing as core values. When staff must rely on personal goodwill or relational proximity to negotiate basic labor conditions, power has not disappeared—it has become privatized.
Workers organize not because relationships have failed, but because relationships have been asked to substitute for structure.
To leadership and board members in nonprofit and LGBTQ+ spaces, this moment offers a choice.
In care-based institutions, the instinct is often not opposition initially, but pause. My understanding is that The Diversity Center was notified over a week ago and staff have not yet received a response. However, silence is communicative. It signals whether collective worker voice is being recognized as legitimate at the moment it becomes formalized. What may be framed internally as caution or care is often experienced by workers as uncertainty about whether their voice has structural standing within the organization at all.
Delay is frequently interpreted as care or an attempt to avoid escalation or misstep. Yet for workers organizing collectively, absence of engagement rarely registers as protection. It more often registers as non-recognition.
Unionization is often framed as introducing division into cohesive environments. But it does not generate conflict; it reveals it. It makes visible strain already carried through informal expectations of flexibility, emotional labor, and relational endurance.
This is where oppression frameworks matter.
Liberation is not only a value communicated externally; it must shape internal distributions of power, voice, compensation, and governance (Martín-Baró, 1994; Young, 2011). Otherwise, care risks becoming extraction, sustained through the unpaid absorption of structural gaps between mission and material conditions. This concern is reinforced in care ethics and activist scholarship, which shows how commitments to justice become sites of exploitation when scarcity is treated as fixed rather than produced, allocated, and governed (McKittrick-Sweitzer, 2024).
Nonprofit organizations often operate through restricted grants, donor contributions, and constrained operating budgets. Even when total funding appears adequate, much is earmarked for specific deliverables rather than staffing, compensation, or infrastructure. The result is not only scarcity, but a funding architecture in which labor flexibility and emotional endurance become the mechanism through which the organizations mission is delivered. Care becomes extraction when labor absorbs the gap between mission and funding reality.
Constraint is real. But constraint should not eliminate decision-making—it should organize it. The question is how costs are distributed across labor, burnout, turnover, and compensation structures.
Even under constraint, distribution is a moral and political choice.
LGBTQ+ care workers deserve more than symbolic alignment with organizational values. They deserve fair compensation, sustainable workloads, transparent decision-making, meaningful negotiation power, and governance structures that reflect liberatory commitments in material form. Care does not exist in the abstract. It is carried by people—by bodies, schedules, limits, and lives that extend beyond the workplace. The question is not whether this work matters. It is whether the people doing it are allowed the same dignity, stability, and care that they so often provide to others.
Care work is labor.
Community survival work is labor.
And labor organizes.
References
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Jeung, D.-Y., Kim, C., & Chang, S.-J. (2018). Emotional labor and burnout: A review of the literature. Yonsei Medical Journal, 59(2), 187–193. https://doi.org/10.3349/ymj.2018.59.2.187
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Harvard University Press.
McKittrick-Sweitzer, L. (2024). Preventing the exploitation of activists’ care. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 27, 253–267. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-024-10435-2
Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. Oxford University Press.
