Funding protest movements
James Ozden has a new piece in SSIR making the case that investing in protest movements may be a far more effective use of money than many more common charitable contributions. He reviews how much funding protest movements receive (not enough) and how effective they can be (very), and provides some helpful guidelines for how to decide which groups to fund in this area. Check it out! And here’s a quick list of Ozden’s key indicators for movement work that merits funding: (1) clear purpose and shared values; (2) strategic theory of change; (3) clear governance and processes; (4) ambitions to scale, with plans to make it happen; and (5) diversity plus unity.
For those interested to go deeper, I recommend taking the Ayni course on social movements, and checking out the Ayni Institute’s 2018 report on Funding Social Movements, a highly accessible introduction to how movements work and the challenges of funding them.
Here’s a summary: After providing an introduction to movement ecology, the report lays out the relationship between mass mobilizations that shape public opinion by creating a moral crisis, and the public policy changes that follow. It argues that skillful movement leaders can create events that trigger large mobilizations that capture public attention and change what is politically possible. It then proposes metrics for understanding whether mobilization efforts are working to build active support for change, and makes recommendations for how to fund mass mobilization and protest work effectively. Overall, it urges donors to recognize that a movement strategy to achieve major social change should include a mass mobilization component.
Given the power of mass movements (such as the lunch counter sit-ins, the March on Washington, Black Lives Matter protests, and many more) to bring about major social change, why don’t donors spend more time and resources funding the leaders, formations, and organizations that are building movements? The Ayni report offers great insights on this, and many colleagues in philanthropy including Crystal Hayling, Farhad Ebrahimi and Vini Bhansali have regularly written about it. Here is my own gloss, combining what I’ve learned from others and observed in practice:
Mass movements target the public, identifying and amplifying a moral crisis to make it a matter of major public concern. This is inherently political and polarizing work: its goal is in fact to polarize the public, to force people to choose a side (between apartheid and non apartheid, women being able to vote and not being able to vote, AIDS being treated as a crisis or ignored while people die, etc.). The resulting upheaval can be uncomfortable for institutions and donors alike. It may feel threatening to fuel a process that could result in more change than the donor bargained for. It is a lot safer to limit the work to institutionally-driven tweaks, with funders setting the parameters of what is “reasonable”.
Building the power to mobilize people in a strong movement ecosystem requires long-term investments in leadership and organizations that can rapidly escalate when the time is right. This ecosystem development work is hard to measure, the effects are hard to attribute to certain inputs (i.e. it’s hard to track if your money caused the outcome), and it can be very unclear for a long time which grants are going to have the most effect. Funding this well requires patience, relationships with and deference to strategic leaders close to the ground (whose rationales may be hard to parse), and the ability to move quickly when needed. The entire framework of grant cycles, grant reports, project grants, communicating in language that foundation staff who aren’t close to the work will understand, is ill-suited to this type of funding challenge, and many donors aren’t prepared to do it differently. To be clear, donors can effectively fund pieces of the whole through traditional models, but there will be major gaps left by the traditional approach, which are hard to see if not looking from a movement strategy perspective.
Donors and their staff often lack tools to process what it is they’re looking at, to understand whether it’s valuable, where to lean in further, and whose leadership to trust. Especially when working across race and class lines, it can be difficult to communicate what’s happening and fit it into models that make sense to a donor or their staff. The usual metrics, developed to assess service programs or legislative efforts, don’t capture the essence of the work.
I came to philanthropy as a white-woman Harvard-trained lawyer from the ACLU. This training was geared to prepare me to work on the inside game (as a litigator, as a policy aid to government and those working in capitol buildings to influence government, as someone well versed in the languages of access and power). While this training gave me a strong understanding of the mechanics of the criminal justice system and its history, it did not prepare me to analyze, develop, or execute on strategic movement funding, and certainly didn’t prepare me to navigate the challenges noted above.
To the extent I’ve been successful in funding strong movement work, these four things have been key:
Being trained in a robust movement strategy framework by Momentum and Ayni. This tells me what to look for and what I’m looking at (even when I can’t parse all the details);
Forming long-term relationships with people closest to the problem. This tells me who is doing the work, provides strategic direction, and lays a foundation of trust to partner well;
Being in community with donors in groups like Solidaire who are thinking hard about how to effectively support movements. This gives me courage, leadership development, and a sounding board;
Operating with an expected value framework, which makes clear the value of taking longshot bets. Under this framework, it’s worth spending $1million on a 1.1% chance of causing an outcome worth $100million. This allows me to take smart risks.
These elements have enabled me to move with confidence, back leaders and ideas that may be longshots but could be transformative, know when to wind down funding when things aren’t working, and to recognize the signs of success that should trigger major additional funding. I hope this background is useful to others, and I welcome any comments or feedback about it.