It’s been a while
Originally distributed via newsletter on October 17, 2024
Hello loyal readers!
It’s ya boy Michél, back on this newsletter thing. What a couple years it’s been. I believe the last time you received a newsletter from my consulting business platform was in 2022, I’m sorry for the long delay. As I’ve always said this newsletter was on a ‘when I’m feeling inspired to’ schedule.
I’ve spent that time replenishing energy, bound to responsibility for movement work I wanted to give my full presence to, and life things that were unavoidable and more important to me than anything else.
Since 2022, we’ve seen a lot in the movements for justice. I’m coming to you one year into a full fledged genocide of Palestinians carried out by the Israeli government and a potential polycrises in the region with other states being dragged into the conflict. We’ve watched organizations and funders sunset (close up shop), we’ve seen the economy tank, and the material circumstances of many hampered. There’s the oft forgotten ongoing conflicts in Congo, Sudan, and Haiti. More recenlty there’s an out of control fire in the Amazon Rainforest, flooding in the Sahara, and the American South has been battered by multiple hurricanes and storms.
I’ve been in awe of the political conciousness of billions of people shifting in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. If there’s other opinions or examples on that I’d love to hear them. We are in a moment where the progressive advancements the masses yearn for are possible given the current Overton Window.
What I’ve been dismayed by is many things, an unyielding desire to continue business as usual, the inability to align around a shared hard line, and the role of philanthropy in this moment in time. There’s little I can do from my role individually that I’m currently not engaged in. As a consultant I’ve spent the better part of the year asking myself what feels like an important interjection – a valuable one – at this moment. And after much of the conversations I’ve been having in 2022 and 2023, I believe that role is to better communicate what I think needs to be addressed in the funding landscape.
Philanthropy . . . we’ve got to talk.
At a time when the economy is declining, inflation is up and so are costs, many people and organizations have been struggling. At this point we should understand that with an intersectional lens, the justice issues we’re focused on are interconnected. So by that logic, if the economic inequity is rising that will therefore make all of our other efforts impacted. At a time where individuals are hurting financially and giving individually may be declining especially in lower dollar donors and when organizations left and right are hitting financial crises, you would think philanthropic entities committed to ‘justice’ would follow the trend of need. Instead they’ve opted to follow another trend, important, but counterintuitive to our stated goals of alleviating the impact inequity has on people. They’ve decided to follow the lets be economically and fiscally conservative trend. I heard more in the past 18 months about slashing budgets than I’ve heard in the past decade. Funders have indeed caught across the grain to focus on adjusting expenditure for inflation rather than funding the need of society in this moment.
At the same time, the three-year strategic priorities announced in 2020, albeit without the declared internal timeline, are up. The commitments felt and heard in 2020-2023 for racial, climate,and intersectional justice feel like they’ve quietly been un-echoed in 2024. To the few that have proudly and loudly reaffirmed those commitments, cheers to you (nonalcoholic sparkling cidre please)!!! But for the others who’ve run in cowardice, I ask you how do we get you back with us? How do we make these efforts more resilient than any time-bound strategic plan or whimsy of a movement trend? How do we solidify your courage to face what we know will fracture and diminish our efforts?
Finally, philanthropy has failed its young and vibrant leaders. The amount of brilliant and fresh leaders who have wanted to see change adapt with the needs of the movement are incredibly heartening. Seeing leaders in philanthropy, long inoculated by the sector, mentor these new leaders coming out of 2020 with clarity and vision and guide them in the path they’ve been tenderly nurturing was heartening. But many will leave or have left. The tumultuous nature of Big Philanthropy has hardened some and left others feeling apathetic. For those that maintain, we see you, we believe in you, and we want to support you! How can we stop halting the progress of our philanthropic spaces? How do we nurture those that have the passion and the vision while understanding how to transform and change at pace with what’s possible? How do we push on what people think is possible with what’s needed?
How can we do different?
I don’t present myself to be someone with all the answers. I can see what’s in front of me, and informed by what others have presented, I’ve come to one conclusion…this can’t be it. We don’t have to go this road and for those that are ready to do different I welcome the opportunity to build together. So here’s what I’ve got
What if we thought about one percent of our budgets as creative dollars to live out our most radical partnerships. What if we protected 1% of our annual budgets, endowments or otherwise, as funders to think about radically abundant funding strategies. What could 1% of your budget transform. For too long funders most closely supported partners, trusted in many ways to create the impacts they work towards, don’t get funded in ways that lift the burdens of fundraising to critical mass year over year. For some funders experimenting with funding an endowment strategy for some grantees that when drawn down covered all their overhead could open up so much more flexibility and strategy towards programmatic impact and agility to address pressing issues happening in the globe. Constraining and earmarking programmatic work is hampering our ability to fight injustice. For some funders this may not be practical or workable but for some 1% could do this for one organization, for others it could be ten organizations. Imagine what our landscape would look like. Again, this would be a protected 1% on top of yearly expenditure.
For our racial justice commitments from 2020. Clearly the right does not care about what good we want to do. They will fight tooth and nail to make sure equity is never achieved. But out strategies should be considerate of what is right, what is just, and how to reach a level of repair for the historic injustices in this country and globally. If we can’t commit to that, we will never be able to achieve the grand visions for solving injustices, especially racial ones. Why are funder commitments tied so heavily to quickly transitioning strategic plans. Why during internal overhauls every 3-5 years do those commitments somehow dissipate without any acknowledgement? What if every pillar infused a benchmark or a stated goal or if the visions and missions were updated to include such commitments…for the longhaul?
I’m really interested in helping advance these visions with committed philanthropic partners and being a conduit to communicate between the world of philanthropy and grantees in a way that feels like too wide of a chasm currently. We aren’t doing our work justice and as we’ve identified with the legal and economic systems we build new language to exclude people, philanthropy with all it’s resources has done the same again. There’s too many of us forced to decipher what’s actually happening to aid and protect organizations from the fallout.
I don’t know what 2025 holds, but I hope it means more justice, more peace, more radical love, and a vision for how we end these systems that harm so many.
With love and until collective liberation is ours,
Michél
