(Illustration by Taslim van Hattum)
In the wake of the civil unrest that swept through Los Angeles in 1992 and shook the city to its core, Black, Latinx, Asian, and white community organizers were rushing from one meeting to the next to discuss how to channel the rage about racist policing, income inequality, and neighborhood neglect that had precipitated the violence and turmoil. There was much talk about what should be done right away. But in one of the meetings, in the midst of a sense of urgency and rush of ideas for rapid responses, one activist leaned back and commented: “There is an urgent need to think long-term.”
In the decades that followed, those words had impact: Community organizers in Los Angeles focused on the long-term projects of protecting immigrant rights, securing community benefits agreements, and increasing residents’ engagement in electoral politics. Los Angeles City now boasts a Black mayor, Karen Bass, who emerged from the 1990s organizing milieu. Their success in transforming L.A.’s governance can be attributed to combining impatience about injustice with patience about strategy—and all the while keeping a relentless focus on securing voice and power for marginalized communities.
Philanthropy would do well to follow a similar strategy. The forces of oppression that pushed people into the streets in L.A. in 1992—systemic inequality, structural racism, unequally distributed vulnerabilities, and governance failures—are as strong today and as widespread as ever. To confront those forces, blunt their impact, and make a real difference in the lives of people in marginalized groups and communities, the philanthropic community must act not only boldly but thoughtfully, by looking past short-term fixes and the issue du jour to the long-run work of building community power.
We recommend that in the coming years foundations put the power of their significant resources behind three themes, each with a different kind of transformative potential.
1. Build Governing Power
Power has many forms, but in a society with healthy democratic structures, the most important form is political. One impactful innovation in building political power has been integrated voter engagement (IVE), a strategy in which grassroots organizing groups combine their on-going, multi-year policy campaigns with cyclical, high-intensity electoral campaigns. Rather than parachuting in canvassers from outside a community to get out the vote, groups cultivate community members as precinct leaders and engage voters between elections to become full participants in civic life. This approach has been key to the remarkable progressive reshaping of California’s policy landscape, as well as to changes of national significance like Georgia’s blue shift.
Philanthropy has played an important role by investing in the non-partisan voter education and engagement efforts that increase turnout and activate new and occasional voters. This has required both foresight and courage; getting involved in the political process can leave a funder vulnerable to claims of partisanship. It is also not flashy: It means funding IT support for phonebanks, trainings for volunteer canvassing, and printing of voter-education materials.
However, while winning elections is absolutely necessary for historically disenfranchised groups to gain power, it is far from sufficient. Not only must organizers recalibrate their relationships to former peers who now serve in elected office, but they must close the gap between well-meaning intentions and implementation, so that voters see the promised changes in everyday conditions. Newly elected officials must grapple with the reality of working with others who defend the status quo.
These challenges are reflected in what’s meant by use of the terms governing power and co-governance. In the words of one organizer in Orange County, the task of building governing power is to remake civic institutions so that they “are seen as, and are, an extension of us.” To do that, organizers must work with champions within government agencies to align resources, practices, and systems to implement hard-fought policy wins. It means getting into the weeds of how money is spent, monitoring and enforcing regulations, and making government worthy of the public’s trust. Organizers who have long relied on agitation and confrontation to hold institutions accountable may need to develop new skills and new allies to shift both culture and capacity.
Funders have an equally important role to play in building governing power. Grassroots organizations need the staffing, time, and resources to fully participate at multi-sector regional tables where program plans and proposals for allocating state and federal dollars are being discussed. Funding smooth-talking consultants and sophisticated think tanks is not the way to provide grassroots organizations with what they need in this arena. Access to experts can be important for them, but developing in-house expertise is even more so.
2. Tell the Truth About the Root Causes of Inequity
In conversations with foundations, many grassroots organizers will reluctantly play to whatever new fad is grabbing funder attention. But stay in the conversation long enough and organizers return to a central point: You can’t build power for marginalized groups—and get the healthy and safe communities foundations claim to want—without challenging root causes. There are many perspectives on what those root causes are, but the inconvenient (and, for foundations, often awkward) truth is that they are all linked to our capitalist economic system.
(Illustration by Taslim van Hattum)
We have to tell the truth about that system: Inequities in health outcomes, economic opportunity, household wealth, and other determinants of position in the socio-economic hierarchy are not bugs of our capitalist economic system but its central features. Capitalism maintains poverty and economic disadvantage for a segment of the population just as surely as it generates extreme wealth for the one percent. Most people grow up learning that poverty comes from deficiencies in character and that inequality simply reflects the naturally unequal distribution of virtues and intelligence. But if foundations are serious about addressing social problems, then it’s essential that they also challenge the narratives that prop up capitalism and normalize the injustice it causes.
In short, foundations must support grassroots organizations in telling a new story about economic inequality. This will never be easy. Grantees will cause controversy by taking on the very system that generates philanthropic wealth; it means working towards a world in which foundations neither need to exist (because greater equity doesn’t leave people in dire need) nor can exist (because individuals and families don’t accumulate extreme wealth).
To do so, we must connect prosperity to mutuality instead of selfishness. Our own work on “solidarity economics” stresses that everyone should talk about our economy and not the economy, emphasize the corrosive effect of racial and economic inequality on prosperity, and argue for investments in movements as a way to both change the world and practice mutuality. A new narrative will also revitalize “older ideas” like the sacredness of our planet, the interconnection between our well-being and the well-being of the land, and the value of communities to help us live in right relationship with each other. These ideas emerge most strongly from Indigenous traditions, which suggests that the philanthropic community could do a better job centering Indigenous leaders and thinkers on restoring these intersectional narratives.
Building a new narrative for social change is a complex and long-term endeavor. Many pieces of the old stories—like the virtue of hard work—have essential moral and ethical value. But we should couple heart-warming stories of individuals who beat the odds with inspiring tales of community champions who change the odds for all. Striking the right balance and using the right words requires attention and understanding. Telling a story of hard-working immigrants, for example, rightfully attaches human dignity to hard work, but it can also feed into the notion that some of those at the bottom of our economic hierarchy just didn’t work hard enough to make their way. It is all too easy to inadvertently prop up well-trodden mental maps of personal responsibility, self-interested individuals, the invisible hand, and acceptable levels of inequality when you use the ideas that come most easily to mind.
Philanthropy often conflates narrative change with messaging, then asks large communications firms to provide a “fix.” But that is a recipe for sound bites rather than for transformative solidarity. What is required instead is making the investments that give grassroots organizations the time, space, and resources to promote new worldviews, as well as to do the allied work of ensuring government accountability and building trust in the state.
3. Support Grassroots Groups That Do the Work
Whatever their particular focus—labor organizing, policy advocacy, electoral campaigns, immigrant legal support—grassroots groups are changing society from the ground up and building a multiracial democracy. In their organizational culture and inter-personal dynamics, many are modeling the world we want to see—inviting people into possibility as they invite them into power. Some organizations are serving as critical political and social homes for individuals who have been impacted by racial trauma and economic distress. With staffs made up of individuals from diverse racial and ethnic groups, and often working with populations of similar diversity, they are navigating the challenges that come from people having identities shaped by different forms of racism with particular histories—anti-Black racism, erasure of Indigeneity, anti-Asian hate, and immigrant xenophobia.
None of this work is easy on body or soul; healing is essential and must be integrated into workplace practices. People need the space for both the internal, very personal process of healing and their external work changing societal conditions. Funders may see this cry for healing as an ill-considered rebellion by Gen Z employees—and indeed the unfortunate stories of some organizers being knocked off important missions by too much internal focus have grabbed significant attention. But the now-famous intervention by Maurice Mitchell, head of the Working Families Party, gets it right: Resilient organizations require resilient people and you don’t get there just by asking folks to “tough it out” through overwork, burn-out, and organizational disrespect.
It doesn’t help that financial pressures threaten the very survival of many foundation grantees. Non-profits are constrained by the same economic drivers that are squeezing and displacing families: Organizations are facing rising office rents that price them out of the very communities they were founded to serve. They also often struggle to pay their staff a living wage with sustainable work hours and opportunities for mentorship, growth, and learning—all factors that are important to recruiting and retaining workers.
In short, because many organizations can ill afford to devote time and resources to the “soft” work of supporting healing, funders can help. They can make long-run commitments to general operational funding; they can recognize the need within budget requests to raise salaries in the sector; they can better support leadership training and capacity building so that staff can become both more effective and more empowered in their careers; and they can help organizations hit higher standards for how their people are treated and treasured. In these ways, funders will help build a truly resilient movement able to balance emotion and effectiveness, healing and hellraising, soul, and strategy.
Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
Some communities and populations lack the power to determine their own destinies because there are people and interest groups with power who want to keep things the way they are. That is why building community power is always about challenging those that hold power and the structures that support them. Co-governance requires that bureaucrats cede authority. Marginalized communities gain power over economic and social policy only when corporate influence is diminished and white supremacy is derailed. Power building is therefore a conflict-ridden process. There is no way around the reality that building power for social and racial justices means making enemies. For some in the philanthropic community, that is an unwelcome prospect. It may be even harder to accept that philanthropy’s own power must recede as its trust in community leaders grows.
However, in learning to be comfortable with taking apart, brick by brick, the foundations on which they stand, philanthropic organizations are modeling what must occur to make way for transformative social change: Those who have historically wielded the power in society must step back, recognize there are things more important than their own interests, and commit to lifting up those who have suffered from racism and the failures of our economy.
Support SSIR’s coverage of cross-sector solutions to global challenges.
Help us further the reach of innovative ideas. Donate today.
Read more stories by Jennifer Ito, Manuel Pastor & Ashley K. Thomas.