Listeners may be familiar with stories from the past few years about left and movement organizations coming under legal attack. These include an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud charges, claiming their strategy of paying informants to expose extremist groups is fraud. Or bad faith accusations by Israel against UNWRA, a relief agency of the United Nations tasked with trying to provide food and other supplies to Gaza amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide.
These types of legal attacks can accomplish their intended goal even if they don’t succeed in court. The mere threat of legal action can scare donors out of support for work that formerly seemed innocuous.
This week’s episode features two organizers who have worked on issues related to how donor-advised funds are unique chokepoints for philanthropic funding. Our guests include Beezer de Martelly, who has over a decade of experience in philanthropy organizing and recently published an article for Convergence on the subject titled “A Blueprint for Donor-Advised Fund Organizing.” Our other guest is Fatema Ahmad, whose work at the Muslim Justice League has included getting UNWRA reinstated as a philanthropic destination for Fidelity, one of the largest donor-advised funds in the world.
In this conversation they lay out some of the terms of debanking and donor-advised funds for listeners less acquainted with these models. We then discuss the campaigns seeking to repair these financial relationships and what organizers need to know about the politics of philanthropy.
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Episode Guests
Beezer (they/them) is a community and donor organizer based in the SF Bay Area. They currently serve as Common Counsel Foundation’s Senior Director of Philanthropic Organizing, advising DAF and Family Foundation donors on strategies for resourcing and shifting power to frontline movements and guiding the organization’s Fiscal Sponsorship strategy.
While on the donor organizing team at Solidaire (2019–2015), Beezer worked with donors to move millions to national and international frontline social justice movements and build organizing leverage for national and international movements. With a background in intersectional community and labor organizing, facilitation, and social justice-centered teaching, Beezer builds broad alliances that join organizers on the frontlines of struggle with those who create capacity for change behind the scenes at sites of power many cannot access. They orient their work towards mutual transformation and collective liberation.
