Funders, here’s the blueprint for saving democracy

Two weeks ago, I met with a colleague who was invited to a convening of funders in Seattle. He reported that the funders present were wringing their hands, unsure of what their foundations should be doing to respond to the rapid dismantling of democracy and the exponential increase in suffering communities are facing.

This week, David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy wrote a post on LinkedIn reporting similar dynamics of tentativeness among funders across the sector. David suggests several possible reasons for the hesitation, including shellshock from the cruelty and chaos unleashed by this administration, as well as funders’ lack of knowledge and confidence as to what strategies would work to counter it. While David and I agree on a lot of things, it’s this last point he makes where we may differ in opinions:

“Third, there’s only so much that funders can or should do to lead. Philanthropy’s main role is to support civil society groups, who rightly should be out front in the pushback to Trump’s actions. If those organizations aren’t coalescing around a set of promising big strategies — and there’s no sign they are — funders have limited options. They can’t bankroll grand new plans to fight MAGA if such plans don’t yet exist.

“Or, as one foundation CEO told me, ‘People keep yelling at us to give out more money, but for what?’”

This is frustrating that some funders still think this way. Because civil society groups and progressive activists HAVE BEEN proposing plans and strategies to push back against the right and advance democracy. FOR LITERAL DECADES! We have asked for more funding for advocacy and lobbying. For capacity building of both c3s and c4 orgs. For increasing political engagement. For doing media and narrative work. For strengthening pipelines of progressive leaders. Funders just refused to fund it in any meaningful level or for an adequate length of time!

I remember 15 years ago begging foundations in Seattle (one of the most well-funded regions in the world) for grants to do voter registration work and being shot down because it didn’t “align” with their “priorities” for that year. Decades of our ideas being rejected have trained many of us to stop approaching funders with strategies we think would work, because we have known, through painful experience, that many funders are mired in toxic intellectualizing, risk-aversion, white moderation, and solutions privilege—things that make most philanthropic leaders unable to mentally register strategies, much less support them.

David proposes, “The top funders in liberal philanthropy should make a pact with grantees: You all work together to devise ambitious new blueprints to save democracy that can plausibly succeed, and we will foot the bill — whatever it costs.”

Great! Let’s do it! But luckily, we already have these blueprints, so we don’t need to spend endless months creating them. These are blueprints we’ve tried for years to get funders to invest in. You want a plan to save democracy? You want a plan to stop fascism? Here it is, broken down into two parts:

FIRST, STOP THE BLEEDING:

1. Work with your legal counsel to change your founding charters so you can give out more money and fund differently and more effectively, such as funding progressive individuals, movements, mutual aid, LLCs, religious orgs, 501c4s, PACs, and so on. Stop letting policies written during different times and by people who are less likely to suffer under this regime dictate your actions in the present moment.
2. Increase your payout rate immediately. Not to 6%. Not even to 10%. Go beyond that, to 15% or 25% or 50%. Your endowments mean nothing if our society collapses.
3. Increase funding to your existing grantees. They and the communities they serve are hurting right now. Give them significant general operating funding.
4. Create funds for legal defense and offense. Defense for when progressive organizations and individuals get sued or need to be bailed out of jail. Offense to sue everyone and everything aligned with this administration and tie them up in courts. This is the strategy MAGA has been using so effectively, and we need to counter to the same degree.
5. Give significant multi-year grants to the National Council of Nonprofits, Democracy Forward, New Left Accelerator, Texas Freedom Network, UnKoch My Campus, and other organizations that have been working to save democracy. Give them 10M+ a year for the next ten years and get the hell out of their way.
6. Create self-care funds for progressive leaders. Everyone is scared and burning out. Some are carrying passports because they’re afraid of being detained by ICE. It’s hard to lead under these sorts of pressure, and grants from funders would be very helpful right now.
7. Ensure all the funds you give out are general operating. When everything is on fire, we all need to focus and be flexible. There is no excuse, none, for restricted funds.
8. Streamline your grant proposal process and timeline. Just accept grant proposals that have already been written. Do whatever you need to do so you can make grant decisions in four weeks or less. No one has time to wait for months.

MEANWHILE, FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE:

Gather your team and read Sally Covington’s report that spelled out all the strategies conservatives have been using for decades that liberal-leaning funders have largely avoided, which has contributed greatly to the situation we find ourselves in today. (This report is so vital, I’ve created a link you can easily remember: tinyurl.com/rightwingfunding)

It’s time we use conservatives’ strategies, which focuses on FIVE KEY AREAS, which I summarize here but overlay a progressive lens.  These strategies need to be funded through Multi-Year General Operating Dollars (MYGOD), for 20 or 30 years at a time, which is what the right has done, which is why they’ve been so effective.

1. Build progressive institutions: All the horrible things we’re experiencing right now are due to the work of a handful of right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute. These organizations have been well-funded over decades to do their work, which is basically implementing the other strategies listed below. We need our own equivalents of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and so on. We need our own institutions that are unapologetically progressive. And again they need to be funded for 20 years at a time and given the trust to do their work.
2. Get progressive political candidates elected: The right-wing have been unapologetic about getting conservative political candidates into power at all levels of government, local, state, nation, and even global. We see, for example, Moms for Liberty’s work to get right-wing school board members elected. Left-leaning funders must do the same. Get over your disdain of politics and fund 501c4 organizations, PACs, and other organizations that are working to get progressive candidates elected. Every single funder who cares about democracy must start finding ways to channel funding into getting progressive candidates elected at the local as well as state and national levels.
3. Shape the judiciary to be progressive: The Federalist Society’s greatest accomplishment is that it has been able to get right-wing judges placed onto the US Supreme Court and all other levels. SCOTUS Justices Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett, and others all had support from Federalist Society and its money. As I wrote earlier, this strategy has been so effective that one donor has donated the largest contribution ever to a political effort, 1.6B, to further the right-wing’s takeover of all the courts in the land. Progressive foundations have done little or nothing to counter this. You all need to fund efforts to get progressive judges elected and appointed to benches at all levels.  
4. Wrestle back control of all forms of media: The right has Fox News, Breitbart, Info Wars, podcasts, radio, and social media. They’ve even managed to turn historically progressive-leaning or centrist media such as CNN and Washington Post into propaganda machines for the right. The left, meanwhile, has outlets that are supposed to lean progressive, such as the New York Times, but these outlets are neoliberal and often platform heinous views or even support them (like NYT’s fueling of transphobia over the years). Funders need to vastly fund truly progressive journalism and media strategies at all levels and across all platforms. Create the equivalent of Fox News and other powerful media platforms. Or even better, just pool your money and buy up these platforms outright, the way The Onion tried to buy InfoWars.
5. Create a solid and expansive bench of progressive cultural warriors: The right supports and protects their individual leaders, knowing they are vital to the work of shifting the culture. This is why any of us can name dozens of influential right-wing figures off the top of our heads while we struggle to agree on a few progressive leaders. It’s not that we don’t have brilliant leaders. We do, like Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones. But they are not supported anywhere near the same level as how the right supports its leaders. Give these and other progressive leaders millions of dollars to build up platforms that would rival the right’s pundits. Meanwhile, create pipelines to increase the number of progressive voices by a hundredfold through fellowships, internships, career connections, mentorship, etc., starting from high school, as the right-wing’s Turning Point USA has been doing. Help them develop successful books, podcasts, radio shows, YouTube channels, whatever it takes to spread progressive messages.

There you go. That’s the blueprint, which we can add to as appropriate. If we do the above things, we can start advancing progressive agenda items like undoing Citizens United, changing the tax codes to make the wealthy pay their fair share, restoring abortion rights, trans rights, voting rights, and so on.

This blueprint is not something I came up with out of nowhere. People who are much smarter than I have been saying the above stuff for years now, since the Covington Report came out nearly THREE DECADES AGO that laid out all the strategies conservative funders and movements have been using that have allowed them to run circles around progressive-leaning ones and in the process dismantle democracy and prop up fascism.

So, I don’t ever again want to hear any funders whine about how progressive activists don’t propose solutions. Funders may not agree with these strategies but they need to stop gaslighting progressive activists into thinking we haven’t been proposing any. Funders just don’t want to fund them, and their reluctance for the past 40+ years directly contributed to the nightmare we face today. If liberal funders are going to have any more convenings, they need to do some soul searching and examine why—when everything is burning down—they are still hesitant to fund the strategies the right-wing has used to such breathtaking and horrifying success.