Funding must fit the movement cycle and timing is critical. Healthy movements have cycles, and the needs of a thriving, expanding movement change dramatically and rapidly. However, these shifts are neither unpredictable nor random. Funders must be able to anticipate these shifts and be able to respond with agility in order to be most effective.
The Movement Strategy Center offers a plethora of resources that speak on transformative practices, collective impact, intersecting issues, and building progressive power. This is a curated list.
This special collection includes research from nonprofits, foundations, and university based research centers, who have not only described and documented the issue but who also provide much-needed recommendations for addressing this chronic and tragic problem.
Transformative Campaigns are a means to create the operational alignment our progressive infrastructure needs to build a new, and specific, type of power: the power to govern based on our values. The capacities needed to govern are much different than the capacities we’ve needed to successfully elevate grievances and lead protests. In order to govern, we need political power. In order to govern with progressive and social justice values, that political power has to be independent from the two dominant political parties. That’s why a critical mass of progressive and social justice organizations is aligning around a strategic focus on building independent political power.
Settlement generally come out of city budgets, not police budgets, and in Chicago these payouts compound the city’s financial distress, leaving less money for public services and forcing cuts.
Following five years of targeted grantmaking designed to build the capacity of a field of Muslim, Arab and South Asian (MASA) organizations and strengthen civil rights protections in a national security context, the SRC is now moving forward with a renewed strategy – one that is more directly aligned with the natural trajectory of the field and serves to integrate these issues and communities into the broader rights movement.
[This report] documents how pervasive stigma and discrimination, biased enforcement of laws, and discriminatory policing strategies mean that LGBT people are disproportionately likely to interact with law enforcement and to have their lives criminalized.
The Making Black Lives Matter Initiative site will provide background on Hill-Snowdon’s MBLM Initiative that is focused on supporting Black-led organizing in order to help revitalize and strengthen the institutional and political power of the Black community. The website describes Foundation’s framework for supporting Black communities to develop the power necessary for them to thrive and introduces the Black Social Change Funders Network as a vehicle to help philanthropy better coordinate its efforts to achieve social change in the Black community.
Brown’s death at the hands of former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson sparked a national dialogue about racial inequality. It brought home the point that, just as place and poverty are social determinants of health, racial equity is an important indicator of our communities’ health. This dialogue has been a critically important step toward addressing the complex challenges and deep fissures that exist in communities plagued by racial tension and economic instability. But we at Deaconess Foundation strongly believe that in order to overcome these challenges and heal the fissures, the dialogue must be followed by action on a systemic level.
by Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac - ...And as we inch closer to liberation, we will do so in different ways, and it is important to note the differences in how we approach this important work. As a friend of mine recently said: “there’s no one right way to get free.” There are divergent strategies, however, and it feels especially important to point out two in particular: neoliberalism and Black radicalism.
