Zac

The power of participatory grant-making, the power of giving circles, the power of having movement-anchored funder organizing institutions, and the power of specifically having community-governed non-extractive loan funds as well.

Host

This is Zac Chapman, resource mobilization director for the New Economy Coalition, a steering committee member for the Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network and board member of Little Sis. Zac and Nairuti co-authored "Will the Revolution be Funded?" A powerful article that unpacks how to build movement power within, without, and against philanthropy.

Zac

On a structural level, we are seeing more and more wealth being sequestered and we're also co-emergent with the rise of this intensified billionaire capitalist class. We're also seeing new technologies for hoarding that wealth.

Host

Expanding on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's notion of twice-stolen wealth, tell us about this concept of thrice-stolen wealth that philanthropic institutions continued to hoard.

Zac

First, those wages are stolen from laborers. Then they're warehoused outside of the realm of taxation, but they're not just warehoused. Those dollars are actively invested into ensuring that the same extractive cycle continues over again the next day.

Nairuti

Philanthropy as a sector, the way that it exists and operates in its current form is really just a way to keep the wealthy wealthy. And it reifies wealth inequality in ways that I think many of us are not really aware of from a day-to-day perspective.

Host

You, along with many other experts, assert that we're living through a new gilded age. Have you seen any indicators of this within the philanthropic sector?

Zac

The past decade in particular, we see a massive expansion of wealth being sequestered by the one percents. And what we're also seeing though in the philanthropic landscape is the rise of mega-giving, gifts that are just dropping out of thin air to the tune of tens or sometimes even hundreds of millions of dollars. So we're seeing this simultaneous process by which wealth is being extracted and hoarded at a rate never before seen.

Host

But isn't investing hundreds of millions of dollars into social change a good thing? Shouldn't we meet larger-scale problems with large-scale resources for change?

Nairuti

95% of philanthropic endowments are being invested in the same extractive systems that the focus areas of a philanthropic organization are supposedly intending to support. So think about philanthropies that are supporting climate infrastructure. You can do 5% of your grant-making to support that, but if the rest of your portfolio is investing in Exxon and BP, we've got a problem.

Host

$100 billion may seem like a lot, but at scales of billion and trillion dollar industries, even a mega-gift looks like a band-aid.

Nairuti

The very first thing we need to do is dethrone philanthropy and make it very clear that there is a whole other world of capital and financing opportunities, many of which have not yet been invented, that we actually need to invest time, research, energy into building out. We need to broaden those horizons, broaden that universe of opportunity.

Host

In your article, you describe ways to organize within, without, and against philanthropy. Can you break down each of these approaches to dethroning it?

Zac

So the work of organizing within philanthropy goes far beyond just the concept of moving the money. It's really seeing not all funders, but some funders as a base that can and should be mobilized and organized and brought into live campaigns.

Host

And what's organizing without philanthropy all about?

Nairuti

How do we leverage capital from communities, small dollar amounts, but lots of community engagement in order to support and finance projects outside of the bounds of traditional philanthropy? Being able to engage in these other forms of financing, again, doesn't just raise you the money in values aligned ways, but it also builds community and then drives local ownership in the process.

Host

So like mutual aid, giving circles, the kind of organizing we heard about from Sara, Jenice, Wit, and Z & M from episode two. So what about organizing against philanthropy?

Zac

We have seen so, so little actual work trying to organize against philanthropy as a permissible concept in the first place, right? There's still the Overton window on mainstream stage is that philanthropy overarchingly is this good, noble, and deeply American colonial endeavor.

Host

A moment of shared literacy here, the Overton window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. The frame that is set around what is normal, acceptable, good, and therefore bad or taboo in dominant culture. So why don't you think that folks are organizing more against these mainstream perceptions of philanthropy?

Zac

We're talking about the blatant fact that on a structural level, despite all of these different efforts, no matter how many insurgent program officers you throw into the Ford Foundation or other organizations, we're not going to convince the owning class to work against their own class interests. It's just the reality. And so this is where we need to have structural changes that dramatically overhaul the power that philanthropy yields in the work of devising the society in which we live.

Host

How can those of us who've chosen this career path participate in these methods of movement building to make the change we hope to see in our communities?

Nairuti

There is an ecosystem of people who are really married to the philanthropic sector existing in perpetuity, and if we say that our overarching vision is that there is no longer philanthropic capture of our movements, and the way we're going to do that is based on your positionality, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're a wealth management advisor, a deaf advisor, if you're working at a PSO, you need to be working at these three tiers in a variety of different ways and strategies.

Host

This brings me back to our first conversation with Michele Kumi Baer and her question about the desire to exist in perpetuity.

Michele Kumi Baer

What lives at the root of a desire to exist forever? What is that about? Why is it there? Who and how is that being perpetuated? There's just a lot of questions to dig into around why permanence seems to be a really deep desire within philanthropy, full stop.

Host

Nothing in nature grows and lives forever, and yet that deep desire indeed remains a strong influence on our field. So how do we use these strategies to unpack the desire for permanence making way for a strong and sustainable liberatory movement?

Zac

The reason why we need to be interweaving all of these different strategies, whether it be dues-based labor organizing, mutual aid activity, funder organizing, et cetera, is that we know from looking at the historical record that when we have cross-coalitional social movements that are able to set aside differences with a common goal, then we are able to adequately build power and make change happen.

Host

This is important. This work is all about building power and learning how to utilize it together towards a liberatory ecosystem of our future.

Nairuti

Are philanthropic organizations existing to serve in perpetuity? Or do they have this kind of goal and overarching vision of broad-scale economic transformation? And I think there is an opportunity for us to be able to leverage that, quote-unquote, "sector" to be able to do those other things, but only if we're looking to that full ecosystem of folks who are again operating within this infrastructure, but actually could be doing something totally different.

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