Transforming Donors: The Revolution Could Be Funded

When funders are retrenching and we’re worried about making our budget, it can be hard to dream wildly about how to sustain not just our own organizations, but a vibrant Left ecosystem that has enough funding and scaled infrastructure to steadily march us past both authoritarianism and the racist neoliberalism that got us here. But we are living in the culmination of 60 years of right-wing funding, organizing, and infrastructure building. And if we don’t take a cue from the Right and think deeply about how we’ll generate funding at the time-scale of generational progress instead of grant reports, we’ll never get the level of structural change we dream.

This purpose is what has us experimenting with how to best do transformative donor organizing. Transformative Donor Organizing (TDO) includes relational fundraising, but focuses on creating political homes where wealthy people can meaningfully participate in the education, personal transformation, leadership development, and collective action that enables them to say yes more often, in bigger and more sustained ways, to using their resources, relationships, and power for liberation. It’s not just about creating better donors, but about creating and supporting leaders who build the skills to organize their families, peers and other wealthy people–ultimately moving significantly more wealth, political power and aligned action toward working-class-led movements. 

I started thinking about movement funding during a different moment of retrenchment–when the 2008 financial crisis spurred a major pullback from foundations funding grassroots organizing work against the prisons and policing. That was when I learned how to do grassroots fundraising for the first time. At the same time as I was learning to make small dollar asks and coordinating others to do so, I encountered Resource Generation, a national group that organizes “young people with access to wealth and class privilege in the U.S. to become transformative leaders working toward the equitable distribution of wealth, land and power.”

Organizing People with Money

Let’s be honest, I was suspicious. Young wealthy people as leaders in movements? How on earth could that be a good idea? But it sounded like a good place to hustle up some money, so I went to a gathering, thirsty and ready to use my middle class privilege and fancy liberal arts school training to bond and bait. But what I found, in addition to a lot of rage about capitalism, was something I’d never seen: an attempt to truly transform young wealthy people into lifelong organizers for liberation. 

I struggled with the apparent tension: if these people care so much about justice, why are they moving so little money? At the time, the question was more of an accusation than an inquiry. WHY AREN’T YOU GIVING MORE?!?! I was angry and I fantasized about some old-school ways we could get the money for movements before remembering that people I love had ended up in prison that way. 

So with the people who became my colleagues at Resource Generation, I started to think about it more like a real question: why are they moving so little money?

We found some things that were obvious and some that were less so. There was often only partial control of the money, with young people navigating both legal trust restrictions as well as hard family dynamics and political differences to get access. There was a lack of organizing skill to do that effectively. There were many people who came into money through the death of a loved one and were still navigating grief. There were wild myths about scarcity and fear of future financial security that had been drilled in by family members, wealth managers, tax accountants and more. There was the reality of a public social safety net that leaves a lot to be desired.

There was a deeply embedded culture of it being inherently right that the money always gets bigger, and “hey, doesn’t that mean I can give more in the future too?” There was the bizarre reality that giving in a way that outpaces stock market growth gets harder the more money you have, and deciding where to give when you’re exercising that level of power creates a lot of fear of getting it wrong. There was hiding and shame. There was inertia and prioritizing other things in their lives. There was a deep lack of understanding of the impact that money has on organizations and communities, especially during moments in which movements were less publicly visible. There was a low level of political education sometimes combined with an ungrounded radicalism seeking social approval. There was a lack of confidence and willingness to make a sustainable income through paid work. And yes, for some, there was a deep attachment to getting to live a rich lifestyle forever.

You may read this and think, “These are first world problems multiplied by something with a lot of zeroes on the end.” It’s true: most social justice organizations are not set up to care about or deal with these problems, and they shouldn’t be. They should get to keep their focus on organizing working class communities and communities of color.

But the current approaches of working with wealthy donors–transactional fundraising, a bit of political education, or a friendly relationship with a development director–isn’t shifting power at the scale we need. We might make our budgets. But we won’t develop the kind of leaders that not only give a large amount of their resources but also activate their real power in alignment with movements, and organize others to do the same.

If you’ve ever taken fundraising training, you’ve likely heard the classic organizing principle: “organized people plus organized money equals power.” What we can’t lose sight of is that donor organizing is not organizing money–it’s organizing people with money. Unless we deeply organize the people, the money is going to be small, erratic and fickle.

Creating a Model

The transformative organizing model showed us a path of:

1. demanding radical structural change, including against imperialism, while 
2. fighting campaigns that redistribute power and resources to working class communities and communities of color, and 
3. developing conscious agents of change, or protagonists, who 
4. transform as a part of the struggle 
5. within mass-based organizations who grow collective power over time. 

So what happens if you take that model, which was developed specifically to build power in working class communities and communities of color, and try to apply it to organizing wealthy people, most of whom are white?

Here is some of what we’ve learned and what we’re trying at Solidaire. You’ll recognize a lot of these lessons because organizing wealthy people has a surprising amount in common with organizing people from other communities. 

Personal transformation is not easy and it is not quick, but it is absolutely necessary if we want to unlock more (sustainable) capital.

This is what it takes to organize wealthy people to give significant amounts of their wealth to movements in committed and supportive ways; to follow leadership of movements through times of fear, failure, or slow down; and to become skilled donor and funder organizers who can bring more wealthy people along. Like others, wealthy people need the type of political education and leadership development that changes who they are, not just how they think.

Transformation happens in real community and in action over time.

We build grassroots organizations knowing that people need places to experience belonging and collective power and to grow their confidence, skills, and leadership over time. Progressive wealthy people need political homes, too. They need places to come into deeper political alignment and accountable power over the course of many years.They need cultivated relationships with peers who share their positionality and politics for inspiration, camaraderie, and courage. They need places to feel fully seen, known, celebrated and cared for. They need places to be vulnerable, make mistakes, and still belong. 

Love and spirit are the stuff of lifelong commitment.

As a part of this, we also embrace and cultivate spiritual practice, from ritual to meditation to ceremony to griefletting to cultivating a sense of sacred purpose in the work. In times like these, spirit-level commitment, fortitude, clarity and vision feel particularly important.

Collective action is life-giving and creates real breakthroughs.

When our members take action together–whether it be collective giving, doorknocking, or participating in a campaign–they are braver and more joyful. Collective effervescence anyone?

Often, donors are only engaged as individuals, the recipients of funder briefings or education, or at best, with a common fundraising goal with limited contact with other people. They thrive, give more, and are willing to take bolder action when they are engaged collectively with their peers and also asked individually to take leadership in collective efforts. And on that note…

We need wealthy people to be leaders, not just allies.

While some of the most powerful donor organizers I’ve known have been working class, we generally find the most success when people organize their peers: tech leader to tech leader; dynastic family to dynastic family; wealthy activist to wealthy activist. Some of the most impressive donor organizers quietly and painfully organize their wealthy families over the course of a decade. We need a lot more wealthy donors to become these types of patient, skilled, and rigorous organizers themselves. As one Solidaire board member said recently: “we need to be deployed.”

When we rely on too narrow an “allyship” model that tries to put rich people “in their place,” we can stunt this kind of growth and development. You can’t lead well when you’re mired in guilt and shame and not grounded in your own sense of dignity and purpose.

It helps to recognize the amount of courage, dedication and determination wealth distribution actually takes.

Progressive donors come up against established systems designed to hoard wealth and need politically aligned support to navigate the mechanics of releasing their wealth. Giving away a significant amount of your resources to working class communities and communities of color when you belong to families, communities and cultures that tell you accumulating more and more wealth is crucial to your safety, standing, and relationships is more courageous than most people realize. It’s helpful and humbling to admit to ourselves that if we had the kind of resources that meant we and our families would never experience scarcity, that we could safely leave our war torn country, that we could pay for that private school for our kids, debt-free college, a vacation home, the shoes we’ve always wanted, private round-the-clock healthcare for our suffering elders, and that we could pursue all sorts of pleasure and luxury, we probably wouldn’t give it all away. Add to this that navigating the wealth defense industry and actually moving the money in good ways to good places takes a lot of time, patience and skill.

There’s no need to bust out a tiny violin for the rich-people-problems, but it’s helpful to recognize (and dare I say, admire?) people who are working hard for liberation, too. Good donor organizing also recognizes that they need concrete tools. They need practical and personalized support to make bold giving plans, use transformative giving practices, influence their family members, divest in the stock market, navigate their very capitalist financial managers and accountants and organize philanthropic campaigns.

Transformative Donor Organizers Struggle With Some of the Same Things You Do

We are challenged by the depth of work it takes to create transformative leaders versus our desperate need for scale. I’d be surprised if the overall movement organization ecosystem had more than a few thousand wealthy donors supporting it. But scaling up means people act in less alignment. How do we deal with this tension while recognizing that ultimately we need many thousands more major donors to grow the movement infrastructure we need? 

Answering Questions Together

Movement leaders and resource organizers must begin to answer these questions together. We need to stretch our imaginations so we can define what winning looks like. So that the next time students rise up in protest against genocide, a cohort of powerful and wealthy alumni launch into action, pressuring university leadership to protect students and the freedom of dissent. So the wealthy can match the bravery of immigrant families and divest from the tech companies powering ICE abuse.