by ZAC CHAPMAN & NAIRUTI SHASTRY
Organizers and researchers Zac Chapman and Nairuti Shastry examine how movements can build power by working within, without, and against philanthropy.
In April 2022, grassroots organization Mijente unveiled a political framework in which it advocated for a threefold strategy of working within, without, and against the state to achieve its political goals. This framing was inspired by a movement group in Chile, the Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha.
We propose a similar path: building strategic alignment across groups working within, without, and against philanthropy. We aim to share the historical and present-day value of diverse approaches to fundraising that include but are in no way limited to philanthropic investment. Moreover, we seek to show how aligning work within, without, and against philanthropy can catalyze power building on the Left.
New Gilded Age
This April marked twenty years since INCITE!’s landmark conference, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” shifted the conversation about how the Left organizes and funds our movements. The conference and eponymous anthology published in 2007 put forth incisive critiques of how the “nonprofit industrial complex”—largely due to its pernicious relationship with philanthropy—professionalizes, derails, and cools off dissent that would otherwise go toward mass movement building.
INCITE!’s own experience was informed by a 2004 incident in which the Ford Foundation retracted a $100,000 grant after catching wind of a letter the group had written in support of Palestinian liberation. Two decades later, censorship continues, and funders remain largely silent about the escalating genocide and collective punishment wrought on the Palestinian people.
The past two decades have marked the rise of a “new gilded age” of capitalist accumulation. Foundations currently hoard upward of $1.5 trillion. Moreover, movement organizations on both the Left and Right increasingly rely on this capital to advance their work, no matter how frustrating the funding process may be. In March 2024, the New Economy Coalition (an organization with whom we both work) hosted “Will the Revolution Be Funded?,” an event marking the launch of a new Solidarity Economy Funding Library. When asked to share a word or a phrase participants might use to describe what resourcing has looked like for their communities at large, the chat flooded with hundreds of comments: keywords included “gaslighting,” “exploitative,” “scarce,” and “soul theft and spirit murder.”
Foundations gave away an estimated $105.21 billion in 2022—a 2.5 percent increase from the previous year—so why does it still feel like there is not enough?
Thrice-Stolen Wealth
As Justice Funders note in their Just Transition Investment Framework, foundations “[contribute] over 13 times [more] to extractive global stock markets” than to grants through their portfolio assets. Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to philanthropic wealth as “twice stolen,” but it could really be viewed as thrice stolen: the $1.5 trillion in current US philanthropic assets are not just (1) stolen from wage laborers and (2) warehoused outside of the realm of taxation but are also (3) actively invested every day into ensuring this same extractive cycle continues.
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