Category: Philanthropy Networks

Editor’s Note: This is an editorial by Ashindi Maxton, who is a Senior Advisor for the Women Donors Network (WDN), one of our Spotlight Organizations. The editorial tells the story of how WDN and its allies have been able to effectively bring in more partners to fund the resistance. As Ms. Maxton points out, the Threshold Fund and the Democracy Alliance joined WDN and Solidaire to expand the Emergent Fund, amplifying the ability of that fund to protect and empower marginalized communities.

From Ashindi Maxton:

Philanthropy in the U.S. has never faced a moment quite like this one. New threats loom larger over one community after another in steady sequence and core norms of equity and democracy feel suddenly unstable.

Muslim-Americans face hate crimes and travel bans. Immigrant communities face criminalization and deportations. Women face attacks on reproductive rights. Black and Latino communities face attacks on civil liberties, including voting rights and police violence. LGBTQ communities face a loss of the most basic protections in employment and public safety.

As the level of threats we are facing increases, philanthropy must also elevate our level of response. The philanthropic community cannot meet this rapid barrage of unpredictable threats using our traditional models. Instead, we must question some of our own core assumptions.

A few best practices we could begin to question include funding driven by rigid long-term planning, extensive organization vetting, and decisions made entirely by donors or foundation staff who are removed from the crises at hand. We have to ask ourselves if our funding models seize the tremendous opportunity of the historical and political moment.

The Women Donors Network (WDN) and Solidaire, two networks of individual donors committed to funding movements for racial and social justice, shared a key question, “How can our work rise to the level of these crises?”

Two driving principles for our response: responding at the speed of the threats and placing radical trust in the threatened communities to develop their own solutions.

With these principles as the foundation, we built a funding partnership for rapid response called “The Emergent Fund.” The name refers to “emergent strategy,” solutions that fluidly adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Our shared vision was for the Emergent Fund to support the work of threatened communities to build their own new reality — one that emerges on the other side of crisis and supports organizing that uses the energy of the moment to build powerful new thinking as envisioned by community leaders.

Foundation staff and wealthy donors often do not reflect the communities most at risk in this moment. Mainstream philanthropy is anchored in a conviction that people with advanced degrees and sophisticated titles are best positioned to solve social problems although they are the furthest removed from impacted communities. Knowledge of those communities is too often considered irrelevant in hiring or decisionmaking.

The Emergent Fund, on the contrary, was based on the premise that expertise lives in the communities we want to support.

The process we used to ensure that the expertise of community members drives and informs our funding decisions was steeped in networking with community leaders.

We started by calling the organizers and community leaders, most affected by today’s political moment, that we knew and asked about needs and approaches to this work and criteria we could use to allocate funding.

Next, we formed a brilliant decision-making advisory council of eleven well-respected and networked community leaders and funder representatives with community organizing backgrounds. This group of mostly women included Latinx, Black, Asian, Arab-American, Muslim, Native, White, and LGBTQ members.

We designed an easy application form, available on our website for anyone to apply, based on our mutually agreed on criteria.

Finally, we asked a second set of diverse activist leaders from across many communities to serve as a Nominations Network, to let others know about the Emergent Fund, to vet strong proposals, and to provide feedback to inform funding decisions.

This model, adapted from other models like the North Star fund and Marguerite Casey Foundation, which have been doing activist advised funding for many years, was based on curating thoughtful decision-makers with expertise in the communities we wanted to support. In every conversation, we learned about critical dynamics previously overlooked or ignored by other philanthropy colleagues.

Two additional networks of progressive donors, the Threshold Fund and the Democracy Alliance, joined our effort. In the first few months of 2017, their individual donors helped to raise over one million dollars allocated directly to communities most in need.

As we reflect on the lessons learned from the initial launch of the Emergent Fund, one thing is clear: any funder concerned with social change should be grappling to answer this question, “Who is best equipped to solve the challenges facing the most threatened communities?”

Philanthropy cannot presume expertise over the people whose lives are most directly impacted in this moment. Rising to historical moments should mean letting go of practices that have not served us or these communities well. Now is the time to experiment with and adopt new funding and leadership models led by people forming responses and vision from their own lived experience.

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Ashindi Maxton is a senior advisor and funding strategist for the Women Donors Network (WDN) with extensive work in democratic reform, racial justice, and education. The Women Donors Network, a community of more than 200 progressive women donors who invest their energy, strategic savvy, and philanthropic dollars to build a just and fair world.

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