How do we bring more people into the room?
In my intensive preparation for Women Deliver in July, I entirely missed the release of the 2023 Giving USA Report, which identifies trends in Americans’ charitable giving. The report showed that “2022 was the worst in philanthropy history” according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, with a 13% decline in charitable giving among American households (adjusted for inflation). Upon reading this, I recalled Oxfam’s shocking (or, perhaps, not shocking enough) report from May 2022, Profiting from Pain, in which they tabulated that “573 people became new billionaires during the pandemic, at the rate of one every 30 hours. We expect this year [2022] that 263 million more people will crash into extreme poverty, at a rate of a million people every 33 hours.” These two sets of facts co-exist. There was critique of the Oxfam report for not more clearly delineating the explosion of American billionaires from those in other countries (yes, the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals is growing globally, particularly in China, as noted in Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth 2021 report, which states that “global financial wealth reached an all-time high of $250 trillion in 2020” and that, in the category of the “ultra” wealthy (individuals whose personal wealth is over $100M in wealth) “China is on track to overtake the US as the country with the largest concentration of ultras by the end of the decade.”) Yet, for the moment, the US remains on top of the world in terms of the “ultras”—and the number is only growing.
For those of us who care about the future of democracy, the planet and human rights, we have two tracks we must pursue with utmost energy and focus. First, reform of our system of taxation. We cannot resign ourselves to the belief that our regressive taxation policies can never be reversed. Change is possible, and can have amazing impact! But it requires all of us who believe in that possibility to do everything in our power to make it a reality. The second—which is really part of the first—we must radically alter philanthropy, bringing in those who are sitting on the sidelines, or who may see and understand the perils of our current system but feel they are powerless or that incremental changes will adequately address these problems. I am thinking about Loretta Ross’ encouragement to speak across difference to those people with resources who agree with 90%, or 75%, or 50% of what we believe, to bring them to our shared Human Rights Movement.
I don’t fault human rights activists who speak with clarity and conviction and take philanthropy to task for not supporting their work substantially enough. I agree that most funding comes with too many strings attached, and that most philanthropy does not behave with trust toward those doing the work. But making those complaints the focus of any interaction with philanthropy discourages new participants and can even alienate those who agree with us. Attending Women Deliver, and specifically a pre-conference on feminist philanthropy, reminded me of how desperately feminist movements (and progressive movements more broadly) need to bring new funders into the room—and that we still don’t seem to know how to do it. The fault does not lie entirely with the movements; but we as the true believers would do ourselves and our movements a favor by taking on the responsibility and working with determination on this. I heard so many movement actors taking up the precious time they had with a mic talking only about needing more money, how underfunded we are (every single person saying “only x% of philanthropic dollars goes to yyy issue” needs to stop!) and how unjust the world of philanthropy is. Yes, it is—all the systems of resource allocation in American capitalism are unjust (see track one above!). But we in movements need to say more about what our collaborations across movements are yielding, about the world we are building with our vision, what we will be able to accomplish when we achieve the policy and social change we are demanding come to pass. We have success stories! But we are allowing the scourge of capitalism to play out in our non-profit economy, driving competition and animosity between organizations on one hand, and reinforcing scarcity mentality on the other.
Our movements are not the only ones to blame here. The media, too, demands crisis after crisis to keep eyeballs glued, and I will say again that philanthropy is truly broken and will never solve the problems we identify – we need radical reform of income inequality and taxation to do the job. But for now, as we are in “fix the boat while we are sailing it” mode, we have to do a better job of identifying some of these new billionaires, along with all of those who are already out there, and help them see the beautiful world we could build through support of our movements. Yes, we are stopping catastrophe, but we are also building something amazing, a society that cares for all its members, that respects land and water for more than what we can extract from it, that lives within its means and enables the continuation of humanity. Can we make that case and bring more philanthropic people into that effort?
