Who to support & How to decide
I am so lucky to have such wonderful social justice leaders in my life. I am sparked to reflect on the conversation I had earlier this month with Shari Silverstein, founder and former Executive Director of EJUSA, with whom I recently reconnected. As we stayed warm by sipping hot drinks on a bench outside of a Brooklyn café, we got to talking about the distinction between movements and organizations. Having organically jumped into action through participation in a number of interconnected movements as a young person, and then having spent the last ten years raising money for a number of organizations, I am currently feeling an excitement about the former and a frustration with the latter. But my conversation with Shari helped to remind me of the nuances of the distinction. I am excited to keep thinking and writing about this to further elucidate the kinds of change we are working toward, and what tools—larger or smaller infrastructure? Established or yet-to-be-proven leadership? Local, national, regional or global reach?—are best suited to addressing a given issue.
I think what I am coming to here is that my frustration is with organizations that exist for their own sake—for the perpetuation of their work. What I feel are critical to support, however, are “movement-based organizations.” To that end, I’m going to try to articulate some qualities of what constitute “movement-based.” (1) led by and following the vision of a person or people with lived experience of the issue being addressed; (2) actively working to shift power; (3) working collectively with other movement-based organizations to address an issue or constellation of related issues; (4) strategizing and/or working holistically; (5) actively engaging with and living within with the community in which the organization is based, not just serving that community.
Alicia Garza, one of the preeminent thinkers of our time on these issues, writes about this in her book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. She writes, “Every successful social movement in history was undergirded by organizations: the suffrage movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-war movement. Even in the age of technology, it is a fallacy to believe that organizations are unimportant or unnecessary.” For Garza, the key is that the organizations where we direct resources should be ones that are accountable to movements (in Garza’s words).
This thinking forces us to consider not only what the work of an organization is but how the organization does it. in a typical, white supremacist-culture model, the bigger an entity, the more “polished” the leadership, the more external validators you have, the more effective you will be in securing necessary resources (probably) and advancing your goals (not necessarily!). But if the goal is also around the how—questioning with whom power rests, identifying overlooked leaders, grounding your perspective in a marginalized community perspective—then you should be looking for movement-based organizations.
There is so much talk now in philanthropy about funding movements, or funding movement-building—and it really seems like sometimes we don’t even know what we are talking about or what we mean—and people outside of philanthropy certainly don’t seem to fully understand it. But I think part of beginning to understand, and to make an actionable plan to do it well, involves differentiating between movement-based organizations and those that are part of the non-profit industrial complex. Don’t get me wrong—some work requires big infrastructure; but the good news is that those organizations, with well-tested metrics and big offices and all of that—are getting most of the resources they need already. The ones that aren’t are the movement-based organizations. And if we want to fuel the power of movements, those are the organizations we need to focus on.
