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WILL THE REVOLUTION BE FUNDED?  
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Zac Chapman and Nairuti Shastry
June 11, 2024
The Forge
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_ Organizers and researchers Zac Chapman and Nairuti Shastry examine
how movements can build power by working within, without, and against
philanthropy _

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In April 2022, grassroots organization Mijente unveiled
[[link removed]] a political framework
in which it advocated for a threefold strategy of working within,
without, and against the state to achieve its political goals. This
framing was inspired by a movement group in Chile, the Movimiento de
Pobladores en Lucha.

We propose a similar path: building strategic alignment across groups
working within, without, and against philanthropy. We aim to share the
historical and present-day value of diverse approaches to fundraising
that include but are in no way limited to philanthropic investment.
Moreover, we seek to show how aligning work within, without, and
against philanthropy can catalyze power building on the Left.

New Gilded Age

This April marked twenty years since INCITE!’s landmark conference,
“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
[[link removed]],” shifted the conversation
about how the Left organizes and funds our movements. The conference
and eponymous anthology published in 2007 put forth incisive critiques
of how the “nonprofit industrial complex”—largely due to its
pernicious relationship with philanthropy—professionalizes, derails,
and cools off dissent that would otherwise go toward mass movement
building.

INCITE!’s own experience was informed by a 2004 incident in which
the Ford Foundation retracted a $100,000 grant after catching wind of
a letter the group had written in support of Palestinian liberation.
Two decades later, censorship continues
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and funders remain largely silent about the escalating genocide and
collective punishment wrought on the Palestinian people.

The past two decades have marked the rise of a “new gilded age
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of capitalist accumulation. Foundations currently hoard upward
of $1.5 trillion
[[link removed].].
Moreover, movement organizations on both the Left and Right
increasingly rely on this capital to advance their work, no matter how
frustrating the funding process may be. In March 2024, the New Economy
Coalition (an organization with whom we both work) hosted “Will the
Revolution Be Funded?
[[link removed]],” an event marking the
launch of a new Solidarity Economy Funding Library
[[link removed]]. When asked to share a word
or a phrase participants might use to describe what resourcing has
looked like for their communities at large, the chat flooded with
hundreds of comments: keywords included “gaslighting,”
“exploitative,” “scarce,” and “soul theft and spirit
murder.”

Foundations gave away an estimated $105.21 billion in 2022—a 2.5
percent _increase_ from the previous year
[[link removed]).]—so
why does it still feel like there is not enough?

Thrice-Stolen Wealth

As Justice Funders note in their Just Transition Investment Framework
[[link removed]], foundations
“[contribute] over 13 times [more] to extractive global stock
markets” than to grants through their portfolio assets. Ruth Wilson
Gilmore refers to philanthropic wealth as “twice stolen
[[link removed]],”
but it could really be viewed as thrice stolen: the $1.5 trillion in
current US philanthropic assets are not just (1) stolen from wage
laborers and (2) warehoused outside of the realm of taxation but are
also (3) actively invested every day into ensuring this same
extractive cycle continues.

Where do we go from here? While INCITE!’s conference, anthology, and
very phrase “nonprofit industrial complex” conjure images of
burning one’s problematic nonprofit to the ground, the introduction
to the book’s 2009 edition makes it clear that “the more important
question [is] not whether one should ever get nonprofit status, but
what is the most strategic way to use nonprofits so they support
movements rather than being thought of as _[the]_ movement.”

When we live in a world where nonprofits have largely become the
movement, we need to explore better ways—beyond philanthropy—of
building power.

Organizing Without

Tiny (lisa) gray-garcia [[link removed]] is a
lot of things—“that houseless momma, that houseless daughter,”
“a poverty scholar…[who rocks her] jailhouse attire”—and
unabashedly so. As cofounder of POOR Magazine
[[link removed]] and PeopleSkool
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voices of the poor and unhoused. The Homefulness Project
[[link removed]] in East Oakland is a
manifestation of that work, a co-housing project funded by what tiny
calls “the bank of community reparations,” an interracial and
interclass community fund.

Self-funding for unmet community and movement needs, although
difficult and time-consuming, is at the heart of organizing without
philanthropy. The historical record is replete with other examples of
how self-funding our movements can itself serve as prefigurative power
building. One of the Black Panther Party’s most profitable funding
streams funding stream came from its book publications, a point that
compelled researcher Andrew Fearnley to write
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“the Panthers’ books were not just accounts of their activism, but
examples of it.”

Another example comes from the radically simple technology of member
dues, which union members have put toward worker power building for
decades. Recently, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced
[[link removed]] a
$40 million investment of dues toward organizing workers in the
nonunion auto sector. This mark of renewed labor militancy came just
weeks after UAW’s president, Shawn Fain,  plans for a 2028 general
strike.

Mutual aid groups like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project also organize
without philanthropy: In 2013, it released a report
[[link removed]] describing
how sliding-scale dues structures build “members’ investment in
the work,” limit potential philanthropic co-optation, and nurture
leadership. And new outfits like the Resource Organizing Project
[[link removed]] are
building off of this wisdom by training cohorts of movement
organizations to build out grassroots donor bases while reconstructing
fundraising to be a “form of organizing, power building, and
healing.”

All of this draws on the long legacy
[[link removed]] of community
savings pools and other forms of solidarity funding to meet immediate
needs across historically colonized and oppressed communities,
precluding the need for external monetary support. 

Beyond self-funding, organizing without philanthropy includes
fortifying alternative financing efforts—like community lending,
community development financial institutions (CDFIs), social movement
investing, regulation crowdfunding, and more—so there is no longer a
hyper-reliance on philanthropic capital.

The work of both PODER Emma [[link removed]] and
the Drivers Cooperative [[link removed]] is a testament to
this effort, serving as powerful prefigurations of what solidarity
economies can look like if we truly leverage a plurality of
non-extractive financing options. In the words
[[link removed]] of
Seed Commons (a cooperatively governed network of loan funds that
moves millions of dollars into worker-owned businesses each year):
“Non-extraction is defined simply as the returns to the lender not
ever exceeding the wealth created by the borrower.” Non-extractive
financing—as opposed to traditional financing—places emphasis on
the social impact and community success of the investment alongside
(and, at times, over) financial return.

Alan Ramirez is a community organizer who hails from western North
Carolina and works as a cooperative developer with PODER Emma. For
years, PODER Emma has worked to preserve the homes and livelihoods of
Asheville’s increasingly gentrifying immigrant neighborhoods—and
it’s done so by relying on non-extractive lending capital for
sustainable land and housing projects in the city’s Emma
neighborhood. Alan’s care for workers in the South is palpable, even
over Zoom. When asked, at the conclusion of our event, what they would
want wealth holders (read: hoarders) to know, they looked
unflinchingly into the camera and said, “We got us.”

Erik Forman is one of those people who is so gracious and humble that
you wouldn’t believe that his Drivers Cooperative, a worker-owned
alternative to Uber, made headlines in the _New York Times_
[[link removed]].
As Erik explains it, the Drivers Cooperative started in 2019 as 25
drivers in a classroom and grew to 2,500 drivers and 40,000 users by
August 2021. Largely funded through non-extractive investments
[[link removed]],
a membership drive with 2,500 members, and regulation crowdfunding
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the cooperative is a hallmark example of building without
philanthropy.

As Alan and Erik secure resourcing outside the current paradigm of
reliance on philanthropic dollars, they not only demonstrate what
fundraising looks like in a post-philanthropic world but also showcase
a new form of community-controlled enterprise that is not hoarding the
wealth that creates philanthropic surplus in the first place.

Organizing Within

There have been some improvements in the realm of philanthropy in
recent years, most notably in the rise of more movement
[[link removed]]-anchored
[[link removed]] funders and
radical philanthropy-serving organizations
[[link removed]] (PSOs). It’s also
important to note recent strides in democratic practices such
as participatory grantmaking
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circles [[link removed]],
and worker self-directed governance
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Much of these advancements have largely been the result of the
burgeoning field of funder organizing, which looks at certain groups
of funders as a base that can and should be organized to support
redistributive and reparative work.

But it would be a misunderstanding to view funder organizing as merely
“moving the money.” “Money is a governance tool. We’re trying
to figure out how to govern, and we need to build out our
infrastructure,” said Michael Brennan, project coordinator of the US
Federation of Worker Cooperatives, on a recent call. Brennan sees the
notion that money is something finite “to be moved” as limiting
our organizing horizons. Transactionally viewing funders as ATMs to
rage against also absolves them of their wider political
responsibility for shifting power.   

Bridget Brehen, director of resource mobilization for Grassroots
Global Justice Alliance, recently told us that we must organize
alongside the organizers and allies that have strategically deployed
into philanthropy, as well as organizing funders to see themselves
“as political actors with the potential to become conscious
organizers.” In the same breath, she shared that the ecosystem model
of transformative organizing
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unique challenges in its application to philanthropy. As Brehen put
it, “Poor and working-class people are the base and primary drivers
of transformation. Who is the ‘base’ we are organizing in
philanthropy, given the class character is vastly different?”

Additionally, there are so many different sectors within philanthropy
itself (e.g., foundations, PSOs, and donor advisors). A continuous
question remains: How do we further organize the multifarious bases of
philanthropy in alignment both with grassroots groups and with each
other?

Writing in _Dissent_ last year, Working Families Party organizer
Nina Luo made a compelling case
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bringing funders “into live campaigns where they can experience what
it’s like to struggle together.” Luo calls for a militant
comradeship with funders who “practice organizing skills, build deep
relationships of trust, see directly how money sustains or kills work,
and develop the political discipline that comes from making complex
decisions with real consequences.” Such a process outlines one way
in which we can organize funders into alignment with grassroots
movements.

One limitation of Luo’s piece is what amounts to a dismissal of
projects that go beyond seizing and wielding state power. Limiting the
funding ecosystem to policy and electoral wins harms the very forms of
prefigurative power building that make those wins meaningful. Building
housing justice won’t just come from passing TOPA (tenant
opportunity to purchase) laws
[[link removed]] and
electing more members of the Squad. It’s also going to derive from
resourcing the tenants’ rights groups
[[link removed].] and community
land trusts [[link removed]] that make laws
like TOPA worth fighting for. It’s going to derive from resourcing
communities willing to take risky direct actions
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shape a narrative exposing how violent rentier capitalists truly are.
And it’s going to derive from resourcing movement-anchored lawyers
like those at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, who
are developing new legal structures
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community control can look like.

While funder organizing entails philanthropy grappling with the
paradoxical role of working to provide capital to those from whom
wealth has been intergenerationally stolen, it also entails opening
the risky terrain of engaging with (some) funders as solidaristic
political actors who can become organizers.

Organizing Against

While organizing with funders is a crucial component of leftist power
building, it’s severely limited by one blatant fact: on a structural
level, we’re not going to convince the owning class to work against
their class interests. And yet there has been a glaring asymmetry
between the number of groups organizing within philanthropy (as
evidenced by the proliferation of the industry of
philanthropic-serving organizations) and the number of those
attempting to wield both state and people power to fight back against
big philanthropy as a permissible phenomenon in the first place.

This has not always been the case. In 1915, institutional
philanthropy, still in its nascent stage, was put on trial in the form
of a congressional investigation. The proceedings included testimonies
by people across the political spectrum speaking out against
institutional philanthropy as a deeply anti-democratic phenomenon. The
commission concluded
[[link removed]] that
foundations “are so grave a menace [that] it would be desirable to
recommend their abolition.”

Today Congress remains largely silent on philanthropy’s unchecked
power. The 1969 Tax Reform Act
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the last meaningful federal policy reigning in the power of
foundations. Even a milquetoast piece of legislation calling for a
mandatory 15-year payout of donor-advised fund assets has stalled
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Congress. However, several advocates are still working toward
leveraging policy-level interventions to make the landscape untenable
for big philanthropy. The Institute for Policy Studies’ 2022 Gilded
Giving report [[link removed]],
for example, calls for a constellation of non-reformist reforms that
would completely overhaul philanthropy as we know it.

Aligning Our Strategies

The current political moment is awash with resourcing strategies, from
resurgent dues-based labor organizing, increased mutual aid activity,
and funder organizing to frontline groups using financial tools to put
community assets under community control. Many initiatives are already
oscillating among within, without, and against strategies. It Takes
Roots [[link removed]], for example, organizes
funders to advocate for policies that curtail the power of
philanthropy itself. The organization with whom we work, New Economy
Coalition, is funded by institutional philanthropy, grassroots donors,
and mandatory member dues.

Mijente’s threefold political framework is powerful precisely
because it allows for cross-coalitional experiments in power building
that wouldn’t otherwise take place. These experiments are happening
at this very moment in the form of solidarity between organized labor
and worker cooperatives
[[link removed]].
As Brennan reflected to us, “One of the reasons unions and
cooperatives should work together is that cooperatives can help shape
the ceiling of what is possible in an industry, and unions can help
raise the floor toward that.”

Despite this proliferation of diverse funding strategies, there
continues to be a lack of alignment. To us, after having worked in
this field for nearly a decade, one thing is certain: The current
economic system operates on one thousand coordinated fronts. In order
to supplant it, we must work on ten thousand.

This kind of alignment necessitates going beyond reductionist
arguments for moral purity (even Vladimir Lenin avidly courted wealthy
donors and was an unlikely champion of professionalized paid
organizers, as Chicago-based organizer and researcher Jasson Perez
recently unearthed
[[link removed]]). It
requires us to hold philanthropy and funders to account culturally,
materially, and legislatively. It compels us to imagine _and_ build
out a rigorous federation of anti-capitalist financial tools and
tactics. And it demands that we organize together to make this work,
in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, irresistible.

_Zac Chapman [[link removed]] is an
organizer and researcher based in western Massachusetts. He is the
Resource Mobilization Director at the New Economy Coalition, a
steering committee member of Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network,
and board member of LittleSis. tiktok: @applzeed_

_Nairuti Shastry [[link removed]]
(she/her) is a movement builder, engaged scholar, and
facilitator-strategist working toward racial and economic justice that
transcends organizational, cultural, and political borders. Founder
and principal of Nuance Research, Strategy, & Consulting, LLC._

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