My last post about the grassroots fundraising conference reminded me about another thing I’ve been meaning to post about: last year, a group of people who met at Making Money Make Change formed a reading group to discuss the brilliant book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Everyone in the reading group identified as having wealth in some form or another, and was trying to figure out how to give some or all of it away.
There’s a very specific kind of anxiety that results from the collision between progressive philanthropists and The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. When you actually are trying to fund the revolution and are confronted with the essays in that book, class (and often race) guilt can get really intense. The essential premise of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is that the nonprofit system allows social movements to be co-opted and controlled by various incarnations of wealthy elites. Participants of the reading group (mostly white, lefty inheritors) spent a lot of time grappling with questions like: As a wealthy elite who wants to support radical grassroots social justice movements, what do I do with my money? By giving to nonprofits, am I perpetuating a counter-revolutionary system? How do I avoid wielding harmful power as a philanthropist?
We started a blog to share some of our thoughts, which then got posted online as a PDF; you can find it here. I wrote the entry called “Thoughts About Giving,” which I’ll re-post below.
I want to reiterate (this is in the post below as well) that giving away money does not have to be complicated. The whole culture of philanthropy conceptualizes giving away money as a full-time job – and if you’re running a foundation, it probably is a full time job. But it’s important to remember that most of that structure is set up to preserve wealth, not redistribute it. If you have extra money and want to fund the revolution, you can just find a revolutionary organization and write them a check (no strings attached, of course). Tema Okun calls perfectionism a hallmark of white supremacy culture, and I think young white class-privileged folks trying to give away money (myself included) so often get trapped in a really unresolvable ethical dilemma about the most radical way to redistribute personal wealth. I definitely encourage all of us to be thoughtful and conscious about the decisions we make (and there are definitely ways to be a responsible, accountable donor) – but also not to get so paralyzed by complicated political dynamics that a good simple choice like giving away money seems a lot more difficult than it needs to be.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2007
Thoughts About Giving
I think the question of “should we or should we not give to nonprofits?” misses the point a little bit. It isn’t like nonprofits are some monolithic entity that are all related in the same way to the analysis put forth in this book. Like Matt said, there are many nonprofits doing great work, and to suddenly cease funding to nonprofits would be catastrophic to the social justice movements that currently exist.
That said, it can be hard (for me at least) not to kind of obsess over this or related questions when considering how to redistribute my inherited wealth. The thing about The Revolution Will Not be Funded is that it’s clearly not written to owning class funders, but to grassroots activists and movement leaders – hence the usefulness of this blog for those of us trying to figure out how the lessons in the book apply to our own choices as people with substantial resources to give away.
But the book presents a broader question that to me is more connected to how movements are structured than how they are funded. The rallying cry of the book is not, “Tear down the nonprofit industrial complex!” It’s more like (Paula Rojas put it this way at the USSF), “How can we think outside the box of capitalism when we envision how to build movements?” How can we avoid creating a network of social justice organizations that are dependent on/complicit with the “shadow state”? How can we create a movement that is self-sustaining, isn’t reliant on elite funders, and supports broad-based participation? How can we create social-justice-oriented communities in which we support each other, foster interdependency, and model equitable, supportive relationships?
I think these questions are incredibly useful to ponder as an activist. An organization I’m a part of, partially in response to the analysis discussed in TRWNBF, chose to abandon an effort to get a foundation grant (from RESIST, with the help of a fiscal sponsor) in order to focus more on our grassroots fundraising. We also chose to become a dues-paying organization (on a sliding-scale basis), and both of these choices helped us remember 1) how important it is to remain accountable to our constituency and 2) how effective grassroots fundraising can be as an organizing tool.
In my position as a rich kid, I think these questions have to be considered from a different angle. Our role in responding to this book isn’t to take the challenges posed by the various authors and re-vision, as funders, how a social justice movement should be structured. That would be the exact wrong reaction. On the other side, I think it can be easy (but bad!) to get caught up in guilt, start to despair that our money is dirty and evil no matter what we do, and question whether we have any role in funding movements led by people who are more oppressed than us.
So, in terms of actually implementing a giving plan, I have a few thoughts:
1) After a brief initial freakout upon reading this book for the first time, I stopped worrying too much about whether or not it’s “good” to give money to nonprofits. There are tons of awesome nonprofits doing amazing important work (and playing an instrumental role in challenging the dominance of the NPIC) to which I would feel great about giving all the money I possibly can. What’s important is to break out of the paradigm that says we should only give money to nonprofits. But as it is, nonprofits exist and are a major vehicle for a lot of social justice work that happens right now. When giving money to individual organizations whose leadership I respect and trust, I’m happy to let them assess for themselves whether having 503(c)3 status is more useful for their work than it is limiting.
2) In preparing myself to create my first giving plan, I did a lot of research trying to figure out where to give money in a way that both redistributed the decision-making power and didn’t support the nonprofit industrial complex. The best models I found for redistributing power were in foundations, which horrified me at first because I was basically convinced that foundations were an evil tool of capitalism. I still mostly think that, but I’ve also learned enough to be confident that there are a few foundations that are a) led by or accountable to grassroots activists, b) actively anti-racist, c) regularly give to groups that aren’t 501(c)3s, and d) have a critique of the NPIC and work to challenge problematic power dynamics in grantmaking. They’re still limited by the fact that they exist in and are influenced by capitalism, but so is everything. Being an individual with great inherited wealth is a position that comes with inherent, unavoidable fucked-up power dynamics. I find it’s useful to embrace nuance and contradiction in trying to deal with that position. I think it can make sense to give to foundations like this – particularly when giving large sums that couldn’t easily be divided between a few organizations with small budgets, or when we don’t know very much about the area we’re trying to support, or we just don’t want to be the one making the decisions about where the money goes. In a flawed system, I actually think community-based social justice foundations are a good model for redistributing owning class power and wealth.
3) The definition of grassroots funding is that organizations get funded by a broad base of constituents. There’s nothing stopping us from being a part of this! We should give to things that we’re constituents of – not like, the opera and fancy private schools and country clubs, but social justice organizations that support us and that we believe in. For me this means organizations like RG and the Catalyst Project that support my growth as an anti-racist/anti-capitalist/
anti-classist activist, organizations working for queer and trans liberation, radical arts and media outlets that I get information and inspiration from, local organizations I’m a part of, etc. Let’s work on checking our own privilege and being good allies, but let’s also conceptualize ourselves as part of movements, not disconnected funders standing outside. 4) Our personal giving plans won’t bring on the revolution, even if we have millions or billions of dollars. Money doesn’t cause social change, activism and organizing do. In the same vein, not giving our money away “perfectly” (as though the possibility exists) isn’t going to stop the movement in its tracks. To avoid obessing over just how I give away money, which can be useless and paralyzing, I like to think of giving away my inherited wealth not as a heavy responsibility laden with meaning and irreversible repercussions, but rather as a good personal choice to make because I believe in it and it’s the right thing to do. I think there are always a few good general rules to keep in mind (let’s not start our own foundations, let’s not give to organizations that are primarily led by or accountable to people in positions of social power (white folks, rich folks, men…), etc.), but I think giving away money can be a simple thing that should go hand in hand with activism and good politics.