Resourcing Your Community: A Toolkit by Zahra Dalilah

30 Sep

How to sustain social movements through community provision.

A toolkit by Zahra Dalilah, for Africans in the Diaspora.

This toolkit will unpack and explain how community provision and grassroots fundraising can support the work of movements for social and ecological liberation. Thanks to Zahra Dalilah for sharing this invaluable resource with us.

3 Introduction

14 Grassroots fundraising & community provision

20 Case studies

40 Resourcing your community

48 Receiving from your community

56 Conclusion

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Introduction

1. Institutional philanthropy based on trends Philanthropy tends to work on different trends that come and go. Unfortunately, poverty doesn’t come and go and neither does capitalism. Philanthropy often falls short as its focus on innovation takes it away from the crucial long, slow building needed for much movement work.

Fickle foundations will often shift their focus areas or interests with little transition time, pulling funds and infrastructure that has become a staple for the movements they were supporting, to divert them elsewhere. It’s rare (but it does exist!) that foundations give stably and consistently to movements regardless of shifting trends. This should be the norm rather than the exception.

Philanthropic institutions or funders can plug some of the resource gap by making grants to movements. But not enough funders fund movements, fund Black-led movements, or fund Black-led movements in the Global South. The vast majority of philanthropic dollars generated in the Global North, stay in the Global North, and not much of it ends up in the hands of Afrodescendent and Black communities.

“By connecting Black women donors to grassroots Black feminist organizations, we have shifted the narrative of how Black women: create, sustain, and fund their own movements.

We stand as a model for the philanthropic sector; we are the solidarity funding that Black women deserve.”

Black Feminist Fund

For example, last year, the Black Feminist Fund released research evidencing that only 0.1% of the world’s philanthropic money goes to Black feminist activists. What’s more, institutional philanthropy1 and the funding mechanisms

1 Author’s note: Philanthropy describes the act of giving. Institutional philanthropy refers to the network of philanthropic institutions which have created the norms, culture and praxis around disbursement of wealth that can be identified in the grant-making sector.

Introduction

it uses can often corrupt and hinder the work rather than simply providing the necessary resources and moving on. This often happens when institutional philanthropy falls down three common holes.

2. Philanthropic institutions as risk averse Philanthropic institutions are usually governed by a series of complex rules and set laws that are put in place to protect money and privilege. As a result, institutions are incredibly risk averse. The context within which movements operate is unpredictable and fast-changing so they have to take risks.

Introduction

Oftentimes, these risks have put their lives and communities in danger, while institutions stay in their comfort zones nestled in the protection of wealth, failing to support the work with the greatest capacity to impact change.

“Often it is the boldest, most daring movements with the capacity to make the most radical, impactful and healing change are those which are perceived as the highest risk to fund.

Perhaps, they are not operating within your borders or not registered in a format that you can fund.

Furthermore, if iced out by their governments, they may struggle to access financial institutions or to get insurance on their assets.

For security reasons they might not always be able to share many details about their plans, they could be working in remote areas that are not always appropriate for regular visits, or in countries that are isolated on the global stage, bringing in a host of complications when it comes to financial transfers.”

Zahra Dalilah

Introduction

3. Philanthropic institutions wield power to set and influence political agendas

The process of setting up a fund often requires developing criteria which dictate who the fund is appropriate for. These parameters often become a mechanism through which philanthropic institutions set the agenda of what folks on the ground will work on.

When power and control is concentrated in the hands of money, ideas and visions are conceded to fit philanthropic demands.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a great example of this. Their pouring of money into a fight against malaria has centred “patented1 products, such as new insecticides and drugs to counter resistance; vaccines; and genetically modified (GM) and gene drive mosquitoes.”

As a result, those who are decrying the use of genetic modification and privatised, patented healthcare as a solution have become marginalised in the conversation.

The desire to live free of the harms of malaria pushes civil society to compromise and conform to the path laid out by the Gates’ foundation rather than holistic solutions which get to the root causes and address health inequality,

1 A patent gives the inventor [in this case of a drug] the right to stop others, for a limited period, from making, using or selling the invention without their permission. Patented products are therefore not widely available for general and public use, unless expressly made so.

corporate pharmaceutical ethics and maintaining balanced ecosystems.

The Paradox of Philanthropic

Institutions and the Logic of Capital

One inevitable paradox of philanthropic institutions is that they start with people whose material needs have been met in excess and abundance, and them aim to reach people whose material needs have not been sufficiently met or have not been met at all.

Institutional philanthropy is by design reaching outside of its own world and each time must start to build trust, knowledge and understanding of the communities it wants to support.

Furthermore, it exists in a broader extractive 1, transactional, capitalist2 framework where capital is always the priority, and it is spent only when there is a clear return on investment. So money is tightly guarded, often with bureaucratic or physical violence, and is only parted with reluctantly, if there is an immediate and guaranteed benefit to doing so. In the

1 Author’s note: Extractive here means rooted in a colonialist mindset of taking, from people and land, when you are in a position of relative power.

2 Author’s note: Capitalist is an adjective describing the way in which a system, person or practice is aligned with the values of capitalism including the prioritisation of wealth creation above the wellbeing of people and ecosystems.

Introduction

context of philanthropy, monitoring and evaluation is the process through which the return is assessed. Predetermined outcomes become a restrictive and unattainable condition of grantmaking as the fixation is on what the institution can see, touch or feel in order to have the sense that they are getting their money’s worth, whatever they decide that that looks like.

“At Decolonising Economics we have funders reach out to us all the time because they’re commissioning research. It’s like they’re taking something, abstracting it as much as possible and then making it as complex as possible. And it makes sense because most people who work in this type of stuff have had their needs met most of their lives so how would you even start to understand people that don’t.”

Nonhlanhla Makuyana

So what could this look like instead?

Resourcing our community ourselves is possible. Communities can, do and have pooled funds to sustain essential community work locally, regionally and transnationally. We see this in the sweeping successes of crowdfunders during the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment of crises for so many individuals and organisations.

Introduction

Community giving often cuts through much of institutional philanthropy’s shortcomings, it is more generous, more sustainable and enables better, deeper movement work. Here’s how.

“I think I always separate philanthropy as an institution from philanthropy as a practice. So when you think of it as a practice, the practice is about what people give within their communities.

People of colour in philanthropy, what has made them really good at their work is not that they have integrated into the system, but the fact that they have fought against it.

They’ve gone back to some of the instincts that they’ve had from their communities and actually try to implement and inject that into what is a very extractive, paternalistic system.”

Derek Bardowell

Trust

Good funders spent huge amounts of time and money building trust between grantmakers and grantee partners.

Introduction

In the community provision model1, the hardest part of the work is done. Moving money through a network of people in relationship with one another means that for those investing their money they have deeper connection and understanding to the movement work that they are putting money into and those receiving funds are more secure in their relationships and have less ‘to prove’ to their donors.

The attached strings, bureaucracy and monitoring and evaluation become gently redundant and the focus can more sharply be put on leveraging funds and doing the movement work exclusively.

Risk

Communities who know structural oppression2 are less susceptible to the shining lights of new trends because it is their own lived realities on the line. Furthermore, they are less invested in the protection of wealth as they are not likely to be in a position of great wealth themselves.

This means that in the community provision model, risk aversion in the name of wealth protection makes less sense. Dedication to the success of social movements1 who are trying to dismantle systems of oppression is easier to sit with when those systems are not working for you, any more than it is for those movements.

1 Author’s note: Community provision model is an umbrella term for fundraising and leveraging resources by broad-based pooling of the resources of many individuals. It is any model in which the community provides what is needed.

2 Author’s note: Structural oppression refers to the overlapping systems of which keep people marginalised and disempowered such as racism, classism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia etc. and the institutions of society which uphold them.

Introduction

Reach

Giving from the margins of society i.e. from African, Afrodescendent and Black communities in a white supremacist context, means starting with a sharpened lens in terms of understanding need and access to support.

In this way, more money can touch the parts of society that are far too marginalised or suppressed and repressed for the world of philanthropy to be familiar with.

1 Author’s note: A social movement is an organised constellation of individuals and collectives who are working together to make social, environmental or political change happen.

Introduction