On Tuesday I went to a funders briefing/panel discussion hosted by the Beyond Prisons Fund, which my friend Jamie set up with money he was given by his family. His goal was to use the money to fund prison abolition (almost unheard of in the philanthropy world), and he worked with a board of grassroots organizers to grant all of it out. Angela Davis was the featured speaker at the briefing, accompanied by a panel of folks from Critical Resistance, Generation 5, and Creative Interventions. Everyone was brilliant and nuanced and inspiring, and it was especially amazing to be there so soon after CR10 and feel such movement momentum around abolition.
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This particular event was amazing and unique due to the kick-ass speakers and the presence of a lot of activists and organizers along with the funders and donors. Usually, though, I hate going to donor briefings because they tend to be so uncritical of philanthropy as a system. I sometimes find myself at them anyway, as part of my work with Resource Generation – the idea being that as a person with access to those types of spaces (because of class privilege and being a major donor), it’s useful to get involved and push them in a more radical direction – or at least towards funding more radical things. It’s part of the whole “leveraging privilege” strategy that Resource Generation is really good at, and because I know how powerful my access to those spaces and resources is, I try to push past my discomfort with the hors d’oevres and suits and detached professional atmosphere and bring a social justice analysis with me into the philanthropy world. I struggle with it a lot though; lately I’ve been thinking about an essay by Emi Koyama that I read a couple years ago in The Color of Violence, in which she describes her work in the domestic violence social service industry. As a former patron of those services, she enters the work vowing not to perpetuate the type of abuse that she experienced from social workers in the shelter system – but she ultimately concludes that the system itself is so institutionally abusive that anyone who functions as its agent is forced to perpetrate abuse just by holding a position of power within the system.
The reason I have so much trouble with donor briefings and other philanthropy events is that they tend to be focused on educating/convincing/explaining to funders why it’s so important to fund xyz, without explicitly implicating the institution of philanthropy as part of the problem. Social justice nonprofits are constantly in a state of scarcity and competition over funds, and simply convincing funders and donors to give to grassroots organizing will never change that, because there will never be enough funding as long as 2% of the U.S. population owns over half the wealth. Philanthropy as we mostly know it relies upon, takes for granted, and usually perpetuates this extreme wealth inequality, and so I sometimes think of Koyama’s essay and wonder if my participation in philanthropy – despite the best of intentions – actually does more harm than good. Obviously it’s useful to get money to grassroots organizations, but when philanthropy takes place without an actual power analysis, it can feel like it’s just feeding a hierarchical and oppressive system: the people with money hold the strings, the people who need money are pressured to yield to powerful elites, not rock the boat, and avoid calling out oppression and bad behavior by funders. As someone who holds power in that system, I wonder if it’s possible to work within it without enacting that power in harmful ways whether I mean to or not.Â
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As I was listening to the amazing speakers at the briefing, I kept thinking that abolition is a really great framework to use to think about philanthropy. In order to work towards a world based on justice and equality, we have to acknowledge that the system itself is inherently flawed beyond redemption; at the same time, we know the system is deep and can’t disappear overnight, and so it’s necessary to take small steps towards justice while envisioning and working towards a completely different system. As all of the speakers emphasized, prison abolition isn’t about tearing down a system without creating anything new, but about building a world in which prisons are no longer necessary. And as Angela Davis pointed out, visioning abolition doesn’t mean not working for reform in the meantime, but that we make sure that by working to reform the system we aren’t simultaneously strengthening it.
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So with this in mind, I try to think about “leveraging privilege” within philanthropy as less about working the system to get money to good things (although I’ve done this and I think it can be part of a strategy too), and more about connecting the dots between philanthropy, wealth inequality, and social injustice to move towards dismantling the system itself. Although philanthropy doesn’t directly perpetrate the type of violence that the prison industrial complex does, it is partially responsible for maintaining the PIC and other violent and oppressive institutions by upholding the systems of oppression that create them (see Dylan Rodriguez’s awesome essay “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex” in TRWNBF for more about how philanthropy supports the PIC).Â
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One of the many ways that philanthropy disempowers grassroots organizers is by only allowing a social critique that ignores or underemphasizes the complicity of philanthropy and the nonprofit-industrial complex in systemic injustice. It was strange to sit in an event explicitly organized as a briefing for funders and wealthy donors and listen to such amazing, intersectional analysis about abolition without having a conversation about how capitalism and philanthropy and wealth uphold the systems that we’re working to abolish. It’s kind of a no-brainer that if rich people weren’t hoarding almost all the money and power, a lot of the poverty-based problems that social justice philanthropy works to change would be a lot less dire. I’m one hundred percent sure that all of the speakers on the panel could give a great analysis of this if asked – and while I wasn’t in their heads, I imagine that the limits on how much of that analysis they could share in that space felt pretty clear. Riding the subway home after the panel, Elspeth and I were talking (belatedly) about how useful it would have felt to have a conversation during the briefing about how donors and funders are implicated in the structures that uphold the prison industrial complex – but entrenched power dynamics so often shut down those conversations, silencing grassroots organizers by threatening to cut off funding if their analysis too deeply threatens the philanthropic status quo. Hence the usefulness of “leveraging privilege” by using access to critique and dismantle the system – those of us with access to philanthropic inner circles have a lot less to lose by challenging them. (and the fabulous Karen Pittelman, radical philanthropist extraordinaire, thankfully modeled this by bringing up a lot of these critiques from a donor perspective in a comment during the Q&A)
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How do we push philanthropy in positive ways while working towards a world in which capitalism and wealth inequality (and thus philanthropy as we know it) no longer exist? I know there are many, many amazing organizers working within social justice foundations who are doing funding in a way that envisions an end to the limitations of the nonprofit-industrial complex. What are some of the contradictions you struggle with? How do other grassroots organizers envision the role of philanthropy in movements? How can we leverage such a flawed system to redirect resources to social justice?
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Great post! I think the way you are thinking about an “abolition” framework for donor-organizing and leveraging privilege is rad. You inspire me, friend!
my heart started beating really fast at that event as I got worked up thinking about how the movement as a whole (+ social services, etc) is about to lose so much funding due to the stock market crash. It’s like: DUH!(but it still kills me) philanthropy is literally more INVESTED in the success of capitalism than in the long-haul of social transformation. thinking and talking about applying abolitionist visions to philanthropy is very exciting.
Tyrone,
Thanks for writing this great post.
Do you happen to have notes from the event containing any specific quotes or ideas from the speakers? I’m curious to know if they offered any concrete examples of either so-called social-justice philanthropy * not * really embodying abolitionist vision, or ways people have begun to experiment with giving using an abolitionist framework. (I feel like I’ve heard a lot of examples of people experimenting with fundraising using an abolitionist framework, but less on the other side of that, as it were.)
You mention the Beyond Prisons fund, and I’m wondering if there were any other specific examples discussed.
And beyond that, I’d love to read any inspiring or challenging quotes you may have written down …
xo
Hey Jess!
I got to the briefing a bit late, so I missed some of what Jamie and the rep from the Funding Exchange (which houses the Beyond Prisons Fund) said – they might have touched on other examples of funding abolition. Maybe someone who knows more than me can chime in with specific examples of other places where this is happening – I know the Funding Exchange funds a lot of organizations doing abolitionist work (this newsletter touches on a lot of that, including the Beyond Prisons Fund: http://www.fex.org/assets/library/80_enewsseptember2008.pdf).
But like I said, the panelists mostly talked about strategy for doing abolitionist organizing rather than about philanthropy. I did scribble down a bunch of notes – a lot of what I found most inspiring was the focus on creating and building just alternatives to the PIC. Generation 5 and Creative Interventions are both organizations that do anti-violence work with a politicized, social justice framework which views the criminal legal system as a perpetrator of violence rather than the savior of survivors that the State makes it out to be. Sarah Kershnar from Gen 5 gave examples from their work of the ways that the State gains access to communities and families by intervening in intimate violence, and uses the role as intervener to criminalize poor communities and lock people up. Transformative justice, which Gen 5 and Creative interventions use as an organizing framework, offers really good ideas and models for addressing community and intimate violence in ways that doesn’t involve the State: http://www.generationfive.org/index.asp?sec=3&pg=48
Angela Davis talked about positive abolition instead of negative abolition – like how slavery was abolished without creating new structures that would allow former slaves to build safe, sustainable lives and have self-determination, and without the input (mostly) of former slaves. So lots of the problems inherent in slavery didn’t actually go away but just came back in other forms that still exist today as institutionalized racism and all its manifestations – hence the need for an approach to prison abolition that isn’t singularly focused on tearing down the PIC, but also on working towards a world in which prisons aren’t necessary.
There was so much more good stuff, and it was great to hear it all from people who have all been involved in this work for a really, really long time. A lot of what folks talked about was focused on movement building for the long haul, since dismantling the PIC and building a new society won’t happen over night (and how hard it is to get funding for movement building in a philanthropy world that tends to be so short term and focused on tangible results and deliverables). Kai Barrow from Critical Resistance talked about how movement building is about fun, pleasure, culture, spirit, beauty, vision, and art – and I always love it when people say those things.
So I was left feeling really inspired about movement-building and prison abolition, and really sad and distressed about philanthropy – which, as Nepon brilliantly put it, is literally invested in a system based in exploitation to survive and function! It’s such a horrible trap and contradiction – that even rad social justice funders like the Funding Exchange can’t escape investing in that system in order to keep funding the organizing that is fighting against it.
Tyrone,
Thanks so much for this awesomely thorough response! My hopes are high that somewhere, somehow, there is a way to move out of the all-too-familiar impasse of “feeling really inspired about movement-building and prison abolition, and really sad and distressed about philanthropy.” I mean, my hopes are high *because* I know people like you and so many others are really putting energy into work around this. Maybe in my craving for concrete examples and tactics, I need to keep that helpful and necessary long-term perspective in mind.
Love,
Jess
I love adore and am smitten with this line of conversation. Here in the Twin Cities we are organizing a series that works with small grassroots orgs (mostly but not all nonprofits) on the Raising Change model- how to put building community and building base and being constituency led into the front vision and have resource gathering come out of supporting that work. Like Suzanne Pharr says, we are in hybrid times and we are sitting in this place of needing to, on the one hand, still identify foundation dollars so folks don’t lose jobs while also building AGAINST the charity/privatization model that philanthropy depends on. I once went to a gathering where a big dollar donor was going to be given an award. She stood there and said, “I almost refused to accept this award because you should not be thanking me. The fact that my family is rich is directly tied to the reason why poverty exists and you need money. You shouldn’t thank me, you should criticize me. I haven’t given away all of my money nor the control of my money to anyone. I still have the power and the choice. I still win in this system. But I know you are thanking me hoping that it sets an example for other rich people out there. I accept the award with that intention and I say to all other rich people – are the problem, not the solution.” Blew me away.
I like the positive abolition instead of negative abolition frame – this is what we are talking about here. I am eager to keep looking at this site and thinking about how to do this with other people. Thank you for posting this!
On another note – for about four years, I was paying my bills through grantwriting etc. I woke up one morning and realized that I was contributing to the privatization and hierachization of the public and community-based sectors and that I needed to stop. So, I pay my bills in other ways, live collectively so there aren’t too many bills to pay alone, and only do work with orgs who are seeking to change their model from philanthropy to justice based. I will now use the abolition language with the folks I work with – I am so grateful for it.
tyrone : thanks for writing about the briefing ! i was totally struck by similar feelings of awesome / total discomfort. it was so striking how we are totally reliant on the capitalist economy (philanthropy) to do anti capitalist work (abolish the pic?) but how we cant escape it by relying on foundations that rely on the structures we hate to build or sustain their wealth.
hiya tyrone–
this is yummy and complicated and has had me thinking for the past two days to and from bart, so i thought i would weigh in.
i remember at mmmc a conversation with a non-constituent organizer (and i’ve had this conversation a lot i think) who was saying that us participants all wanted her to be honest and say what she really thought/felt/experienced, but she was also super aware of the power dynamics in the room and how her organization and life was funded by people in the room, and that hence most folks wouldn’t *really* want her to be honest, because it might fundamentally upset their ideas of themselves, and she had a hellava lot to loose in that conversation.
big breath. so all i’ve been thinking is wondering how we (people with wealth/class privilege) fundamentally upset the ideas of ourselves (the normalcy of philantropy as a progressive response to people with wealth) while keeping people at the table and open to the challenge? that’s the big question hey?
thinking a lot about envelope pushing over here. so glad to read your words.
love and respect,
bruin.