Funding Community Organising — Lessons from the US
Background
The Civic Power Fund is drawing some inspiration from the flourishing community organising ecosystem in the US. This ecosystem partly exists thanks to sustained philanthropic investment and the diversity of the groups that receive this support. Towards the end of last year, we spent some time talking to US-based leaders in this field. This short note captures some of the key insights we gleaned.
The world of US organising is incredibly rich. This note does not attempt to cover this breadth of practice. Instead, these lessons centre on conversations with intermediary funders — or other aligned groups and individuals — championing investment in grassroots community organising.
Not all of these lessons are relevant to the UK. This note considers insights from US organising, but it does not reflect the equally rich organising and social change traditions that exist in the UK. The next stage of this work is to explore which insights are relevant to our domestic landscape and how we might blend them with decades of UK learning and impact.
“One of the reasons we finally agreed on organizing was because we all agreed on the fundamental democratic nature of it. And in some ways, it’s a lot easier for a family with divergent views to agree on community organizing and the basic idea that the people who are most affected by a problem should have some say in the solutions. We may not agree on education reform — whether charter schools or standardized testing are good or bad — but we can agree that the families with kids who are falling behind in failing schools know best about what they need to achieve.” Ashley Snowdon Blanchard, Trustee, Hill-Snowdon Foundation, in the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Power Moves, 2016
Why is this important?
The Civic Power Fund is the UK’s first pooled donor fund dedicated to community organising. We invest in grassroots organising in targeted geographies and in building the broader leadership and infrastructure organising needs to thrive.
We exist because we are worried about democracy. Too many of us feel powerless and unable to change the things we care about. When communities lack agency over their lives, democracy withers and injustice is entrenched. Civic Power — building the power of communities to take action on the issues that matter to them — is vital to creating a more just and democratic society, where every person and place can achieve their full potential.
Organising and power-building led by these communities is vital to sustainable and transformative civic power. Our initial scoping suggests that the UK is currently experiencing a ‘second wave’ of organising, which combines existing local level action with Alinskyite organising traditions [1]. Yet this work is often unseen by funders and unsupported by infrastructure.
We think there is an enormous opportunity to develop the growing emphasis on place-based change pioneered by UK funders [2], by investing specifically in civic power building that can both deliver justice rooted in communities whilst strengthening democratic participation. The US giving community has lots of advice to offer around how philanthropic investment can accelerate this.
“Through recent decades, community organizing has matured, grown, and diversified. Partnerships and networks involving labor unions and community groups have spread, leading to the growth of organizing coalitions in large metropolitan areas, states, even the nation. Leadership by women and people of color has grown dramatically. Organizing among youth has caught fire in the last decade, with dozens of groups working on education, law enforcement, and environmental issues. Immigrant organizing has also increased.” Grantcraft, Funding Community Organizing: Social Change through Civic Participation, 2009
How are we defining communities?
When we talk about communities, we are considering two types of communities.
First, traditional place-based communities. We know that much of what determines your quality of life happens in your area or neighbourhood. Yet despite enormous local pride right across the UK, this pride is often unmatched by opportunities and undermined by a sense of powerlessness. Organising in targeted geographies can help communities’ take control of their lives and secure a stake in democracy. This type of place-based organising can also lead to hyper-local innovation, which can be taken sustainably to scale [3].
We are also considering the communities that are united by a common struggle or common purpose [4], and who are often excluded from decision-making and democracy because of their common identity or experience. This can include issues that span racial justice, immigrant rights, economic injustice, environmental justice, LGBTQ rights and beyond. Some of the most effective power building in these communities is happening at a place-based level [5]. The Civic Power Fund wants to support and connect these communities across and within geographies to strengthen democratic engagement.
Framing
These lessons centre around the three core arguments that everyone we spoke to has navigated.
First, tackling the cause rather than treating its symptoms is the most cost effective and sustainable route to change [6].
Second, investing in organising and building the power of communities is the most effective way to do this.
“Civic participation and policy engagement is a winning combination for foundations seeking the best possible results to achieve their goals.” Leveraging Limited Dollars, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2012
And finally, this investment should go directly to communities — through flexible, long-term, and unrestricted investment and through supporting the growth of organising leaders and organising infrastructure.
“Community organizing … brings people into the problem solving process including those who are least likely to raise their voices: members of historically marginalised groups, newcomers to the society, or people who don’t believe their participation will make a difference.” Grantcraft, Funding Community Organizing: Social Change through Civic Participation, 2009
Things to know from the outset: building an intermediary fund for organising
When investing in organising, failure is part of the model
An experienced organiser and movement builder we spoke to reminded us that ‘failure is part of the model’. You cannot expect every investment to yield immediate results, and you will not always identify the most effective organisations and leaders upfront.
But fear of failure must not stop you taking the risks necessary for success. This work is often unseen and unfunded, so it will take time to find the most effective investments. But if 30–50% of your bets pay-off, the potential for transformative change is enormous.
It is vital that you manage both your own and funders’ expectations by building this into your strategy from the outset and by showing what is possible when an investment does build civic power — i.e. why it is worth taking the risk.
It is equally important to couple this with a clear and evolving impact and evaluation framework that is co-designed with your stakeholders. This will ensure you learn from success and failure, iterate to better support your grantees, and have a robust rationale for each investment [7].
This works takes time
All the organisations and individuals we spoke to stressed two fundamental truths:
- It takes time to build an effective fund
- It takes longer to shift funder attitudes to a point where investing in grassroots organising is understood as a vital route to impact.
“A commitment to growing community organising is a long-term one… but if the organisations we were supporting could get organising off the ground, local communities could benefit for decades to come” Growing Community Organising, Mandeep Hothi, Young Foundation, 2013
This means being patient and planning for the long-term. It also means using this time to invest in relationships.
It is already established practice that how you operate is as important as what you invest in when it comes to building civic power. To achieve meaningful change, you should be led where possible by communities doing the work. Most stakeholders we spoke to encouraged us to use this time to listen, learn from, and include communities in strategy development and grantmaking processes.
This was echoed around shifting more philanthropic funding towards grassroots organising, where it is vital to build trusting funder relationships. This advice included: build your networks, learn from funders’ existing priorities and experiences, and chart a new course together.
Giving well: your role as a funder
Follow the work
This was a consistent refrain. In practice, it means…
… avoid being constricted by impenetrable intellectual parameters. Where good work is happening and multiplying, be willing to be led by it and learn from it.
… agility with purpose is a vital route to impact. For example, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, funders in the US recognised that to have impact at scale they needed to give at pace to the organisations that understood the community needs and dynamics in Minneapolis (and beyond). This followed robust evidence gathering when restrictive immigration policies swept the southern states in the early 2010s, and when anti-immigrant rhetoric and action ratcheted up following the 2016 election. Through this work it became apparent that swiftly bolstering local organisations who knew the people and politics was the best way to build a movement that could safeguard immigrant rights [8].
… focusing on outcomes over typologies. For example, the New York Foundation has done a lot of research into the enormous potential of local service delivery groups to build community power. Focusing on the cause doesn’t mean discounting the groups currently responding to the symptoms. They are often the groups closest to their communities, with the most credibility to mobilise around shared political challenges. Following the work gives you the freedom to assert this [9].
Invest in talent
Following ‘the work’ is the clearest route to identifying leaders with the capability to mobilise their communities and support long-term change. And per the first lesson — even if a particular investment doesn’t pay off, you rarely regret funding a talented leader.
This is why investing in leadership capacity building and support is vital. Power building is hard and engaging with politics can feel ‘opaque and intimidating’. Training and empowering leaders is a critical route to building sustainable and formidable civic power. Additionally, organising and powerbuilding takes time. Helping leaders connect with and draw strength from others, and encounter those ‘ah-ha’ moments that can help keep them and their communities inspired, is a vital contribution [10].
“Politics, like reading, and in order to be meaningful, needs to be taught well and practised — a lot! Politics, likewise, should be a habit and not only something we do whenever there’s an election.” Sebastian Chapleau, Headteacher and Community Organiser, 2021
Providing organising training also has wider democratic benefits. Many grassroots organisations are already doing the hard work of powerbuilding, but providing support, and parameters to work within can be the catalyst these organisations need to take this work to the next level [11]. Similarly, once an individual learns organising, not only do you boost the capacity of these change-makers wherever they go next in life, you also have the potential to contribute to the de-escalation of political polarisation by supporting leaders to discover radical yet relational change [12].
However, it is vital that this support is rooted in a grantee-led approach. This could mean providing a pot of money for capacity building that organisations choose how to spend. Or it could mean intentionally funding leaders from within a community to provide broader training and support. There are a myriad of ways to boost leadership capacity by investing directly in the talent that already exists.
Define your parameters and values
Direct, unrestricted and long-term funding is vital to the success of grassroots organising. It allows you to ‘follow the work’ and it removes many of the administrative and financial barriers that prevent smaller organisations accessing funding.
But all the stakeholders we spoke to stressed this doesn’t mean removing parameters from your investments. As is already well understood, a lack of clarity around what you are funding and why only confuses grantees and funders alike and will detract from your fundamental mission.
We heard different ideas on how to do this whilst following the work.
First, by defining what constitutes building civic power. Direct investment in grassroots powerbuilding is an intentional route to diversify and pluralise organising (so it becomes an available route to impact for all change-makers, and so communities most in need receive funding without meeting impossible definitions they are unfamiliar with).
But to know that your direct investments are supporting powerbuilding, clarity around the type of work you are looking to fund and the impact you hope to achieve is vital.
For example, when engaging with service delivery groups, the New York Foundation asks[13]:
- Is this organisation figuring out the cause instead of just treating the symptoms?
- Are directly affected people involved in decision making and strategy setting?
- Is the group organising around long-term outcomes?
Similarly, when ‘following the work’ or ‘investing in talent’ one stakeholder suggested we ask key questions to ascertain whether a group or individual is right for investment:
- Do they have a clear and committed base?
- Are they connected to or from that base and is the cause they champion rooted in their experience? Do they know the local area, organisations, and groups that are active?
- Are they interested in winning long-term change through strategies rooted in the world as it is not as they wish it to be?
This approach can help democratise organising and social change investment whilst also avoiding ‘performative radicalism’ [14].
Setting clear values from the outset is also critical. At the Civic Power Fund, not only do we see the act of building community power as a vital end in itself, true to organising practice, we want to follow communities’ lead.
However, setting clear values around the type of work you want to fund and why can help ground investment decisions. It is also a critical route to ‘calling-in’ organisations to your cause. By signalling what matters to you, you can help organisations come forwards for investment and identify common-cause with and between them — especially for groups traditionally excluded from decision-making organising around specific issues.
The Four Freedoms Fund, an intermediary fund focused on immigrant rights, does this well through their values of self determination, racial justice, inclusion and equity, and solidarity. This set of values helps to define what they give to, how they give, and why whilst resolutely following the work and investing in talent [15].
Work together to make your investment bigger than the sum of its parts
All the groups we spoke to stressed that a unique value-add of intermediary funds is giving directly to the individuals and grassroots organisations doing the work, whilst also supporting them to grow through infrastructure, connections and capacity building.
Hari Hahn discusses this in her book Prisms of the People. This looks at the vital role of infrastructure and organisations in turning the rawness of a moment into long-term civic power. She argues this is vital to sustain active and engaged citizens able to assert their rights beyond an election, particular policy fight, or specific time bound issue. All of which is fundamental to the democracy we wish to preserve.
The New York Foundation, People’s Action, and the Center for Popular Democracy also articulate this well. They all argue that smaller organisations building community power are essential to long-term democracy, but this becomes transformative when these same groups are supported to build and join wider social justice movements [16].
“[Funder] collaboratives provide much-needed capacity in areas where donors frequently struggle: sourcing nonprofits they couldn’t find alone, supporting leaders with lived experience in the communities they serve, and giving in ways that address systemic challenges.” Releasing the Potential of Philanthropic Collaborations, BridgeSpan, 2021
Making the case for investment in grassroots organising: your role as a fundraiser
Building trusting relationships
A refrain we heard over and over again was: organise to organise!
Building trusting and reciprocal relationships is a crucial part of community organising. This is no different when it comes to building a community that supports investment in community organising.
Trusting, person to person relationships are vital to bringing like-minded funders into the room and maintaining energy towards community organising. Doing this effectively means starting small, and building a larger community alongside other funders.
Act as conveners
To quote one intermediary fund leader (themselves quoting Hamilton!): ‘be in the room where it happens’ [17]. Intermediary funds and likeminded, passionate funders can play a unique role in convening other funders and organisations.
This is a vital route to create a community around an issue, which in turn helps investment, intrigue and engagement grow.
Many programme officers or grant managers exist without extensive community in their own organisations. By creating a space to bring like-minded funders together you can create a shared community that adds enormous value to individuals’ work and to the wider work you seek to fund — learning from many existing funder collectives in the social justice space.
This can also act as a space to solve collective problems and to bring funders face to face with the work — deepening their investment in the cause.
Linked to this is the value of thought-leadership and compelling communication outputs for sharing with these networks. By focusing on tailored, credible, and engaging outputs that make the case for your mission and clearly define how your work will help an organisation meet their long-term goals, you make it much easier for programme officers and their Boards to engage [18].
Deploy a movement mindset
Building this form of community is only possible if you consistently act with a movement mindset. This means celebrating the emergence of other funds and actors, sharing information and strategies, encouraging your grantees to seek other funding and avoiding competitive fundraising tactics at all costs.
Focus on the diversity of funders over the size of income
Although starting small and building a community of like-minded funders is vital, long-term success metrics should focus on the number and diversity of funders over the size of the fund.
This is a much more sustainable route to change. It means you are not overly reliant on one actor that could have too great an influence on your strategy. It also means you are not in financial jeopardy if they pull funding or encounter challenges.
Equally, if your long-term goal is to increase investment in community powerbuilding to tackle the causes of injustice, then growing the number of funders as opposed to convincing one or two outliers should be part of your approach. By changing the way the collective wind blows, you can help to build a more democratic funding future [19].
Give well and encourage good giving
From the outset, these lessons stress the importance of unrestricted, long-term giving. A key role of intermediary funds in the US has been to ‘give well and encourage good giving’. This means showing what is possible through progressive, participatory grantmaking — as established in the Trust Based Philanthropy principles — and then encouraging other, more established funders to invest in this way.
One stakeholder we spoke to raised the move from ‘metrics mania’ to ‘knowledge equity’ [20] as a clear example of success. Growing communities of practice around progressive giving, which have been carefully cultivated over 10+ years, have shifted the evaluation and learning focus away from tracking metrics-driven outputs towards more diverse data sources. These are built around the day to day experiences of grantees and an understanding of what constitutes impact in their communities. This has been aided by more direct engagement with grantees and consistent and growing recognition of the value in ‘following the work’. This hasn’t removed the need for rigorous impact assessment, but it has helped to explore ways of doing this that better reflect the experiences of grassroots powerbuilders — including by respecting the ‘oral tradition of organizers’ [21].
Alongside this community driven approach, US institutions have been successful at defining what progressive giving looks like, then measuring and tracking organisations’ performance. They haven’t shied away from using this measurement to hold organisations’ to account and apply peer-pressure for change, but have always followed up with the options of support, resources, and a trusting community of practice [22].
Summary and final thoughts
These lessons centre around our shared belief that building the power of communities is a vital route to bolster democracy and deliver sustainable change. They essentially boil down to four core ways to achieve this at scale:
- directly fund the communities already doing the work
- follow the work that is having the most impact
- invest in leaders and leadership
- build the infrastructure to make these investments sustainable.
One of the most exciting aspects of these lessons is the interdependence of them. To be grassroots-led, we must embed grantees and communities at the heart of everything we do [23]. To do this meaningfully, we must give directly and progressively. This necessitates trust-based and participatory grantmaking. And to meet our mission to grow investment in this space, we have to build a community of like-minded funders. To do this well, we must have a movement mindset. Living our values is the only way to have impact.
There is a lot more that can and should be done to tease out the key strategic questions from these lessons and to overlay them with the very specific UK landscape. There are a lot of actors already thinking about, investing in, and doing the hard work of organising for change and interrogating what makes the difference in place-based giving. There is so much more we can learn from these groups, and so much more we can do to distil the specific UK challenges that will necessitate a different approach.
And while the US organising landscape is much more fertile, this does mean that it has become increasingly challenging for new organisations to emerge or to seek funding for organising. The Civic Power Fund and other like minded funders operating here in the UK, have a unique opportunity to infuse the organising tradition where it is needed most and where there is a clear local appetite — potentially delivering even more sustainable and transformative change.
“Organizing does two central things to seek to rectify the problem of power imbalance — it builds a permanent base of people power so that dominant financial and institutional power can be challenged and held accountable to values of greater social, environmental and economic justice; and it transforms individuals and communities making them mutually respectful co-creators of public life rather than passive objects of decisions made by others” Mike Miller Organising Training Center, 1995, Neighbourhood Funders Group, A funders guide to community organizing, 2001
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[1]Kirsty McNeill, Chair of the Civic Power Fund, fleshed this out in more detail here and I have tried to explore second wave organising here.
[2]A growing movement of funders are pioneering investment in ‘place’. For example Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Oglesby Charitable Trust, who have summarised their insights from place-based local giving here; the exciting new LocalMotion initiative, a collaboration between six funders, including the Lloyds Bank Foundation, Lankelly Chase, and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, to understand what sustainable, community-driven giving looks like; and Big Local, the hyper-local grant giving programme that is putting faith in communities to spend on what matters to them. Based on two decades in this space, Rensai has also done an analysis of what good looks like.
[3]Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City is a great example of this. The charity started hyper-local and issue specific, but by building intense community engagement coupled with power-building they were gradually able to expand so that this hyper-local approach remained, but in hundreds of blocks throughout the city — providing greater opportunities for children and a greater base from which to influence democratic power.
[4]Thank you to Liz Griffin at Hidden Depth for prompting this analysis.
[5]Make the Road, which is often credited as an example of best practice in organising for change, started as a small, hyper-local, immigrant rights and services organisation in New York. By being firmly rooted in a specific place, they built a loyal and active following that grew with them. Initial philanthropic investment that focused on the powerbuilding aspects of their work was vital to this growth. We have also seen this through one of our grantees — Polish Migrants Organise for Change (POMOC). By starting their work locally, they built a committed and rooted constituency that has since grown to multiple geographies across the UK. They are still tackling local issues, but are also connecting across these geographies to have an impact on the national issues that affect Polish women.
[6]Leveraging Limited Dollars, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2012 well encapsulates this.
[7]The Civic Power Fund is developing a rigorous, yet iterative, learning for impact framework that takes this risk level into account.
[8]In her new book, Prisms of Power, 2021 Hari Hahn covers the importance of moving at speed following the 2010 ‘show me your papers’ law in Arizona. The Four Freedoms Fund and Unbound have evaluated the success of ‘One Arizona’ , the movement that emerged following this law, and credit the importance of moving at speed. This was internalized by the Four Freedoms Fund and their funders, who established a rapid response fund following the 2016 election.
[9]You can read the New York Foundation’s summary of this work here, or watch one of their engaging videos here. This quote from Bernice King ahead of MLK Day 2022 also neatly sums this up.
[10]This connection of grantees is something many UK based funders have pioneered and there was a clear sense of mutual learning in this space.
[11]A brilliant UK example of this is Grapevine, a groundbreaking organisation working with people experiencing isolation, poverty, and disadvantage in Coventry. They were already committed to full participant engagement, but by working with Act Build Change they were able to embed rigorous community organising approaches that have supported a transformative, community-power building approach to change.
[12]The crucial word here is ‘potential’. This is by no means an uncontroversial proposition, given opposition is fundamental to organising and given current political polarisation in the US. This requires much more discussion than a footnote, but there are arguments that organising can move from polarisation to meaningful opposition by reaching across the aisle to build communities united by change as opposed to divided by place or politics.
[13]This is from the report linked under footnote [3] and the New York Foundation’s full open-application criteria is here. This is a good example of a simple, clear and democratic approach — using open applications to diversify and democratize.
[14]Performative radicalism is increasingly talked about in US organising spaces as a direct threat to impactful and sustainable progressive change. This discussion between Maurice Mitchell and George Goehl is a good overview.
[15]The Four Freedom Fund values can be found here. The Woods Fund of Chicago, who focus on tackling structural racism and economic injustice through organising also have a clear and simple values statement that encourages plurality with purpose.
[16]The New York Foundation and North Star Fund, Streets to Statehouse, 2020, is a useful read on this.
[17]Listening to this while you read this note will make it 10x more enjoyable.
[18]All the organisations mentioned throughout this have countless engaging reports, videos, podcasts, think pieces that demonstrate in a simple and engaging way the impact of their work.
[19]Similar arguments are being prosecuted in the blockchain space, which is exploring quadratic funding — where match funding prioritises the number of investments over the size of investment — as a more sustainable and democratic way of prioritising funding for public goods.
[20]Knowledge Equity is a specific evaluation and learning approach rooted in lived experience.
[21]The Civic Power Fund is developing a rigorous learning framework based on pioneering approaches in UK place-based giving and US power-building giving. We are hoping to iterate and reform this based on feedback from grantees and funders. We hope this will continually help us to locate a useful middle between some of the tensions that exist between the need for evaluation and evaluability. One core aspect of this is very attentive monitoring. This is built into successful organising, through constant post-hoc analyses to judge the impact of an action before adapting future activity based on this rapid participant feedback and clear success parameters. It is also why measuring processes in organising is one vital way of capturing impact.
[22]National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Power Moves, 2016, is a good example of this.
[23]The Civic Power Fund is governed by movement builders themselves, with trustees drawn exclusively from leaders of social purpose organisations. We are using their expertise to help us navigate a movement-led approach to giving, whilst expanding our grantmaking process to embed trust and participatory approaches.
Further Reading
- Leveraging Limited Dollars, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2012: https://www.ncrp.org/publication/leveraging-limited-dollars
- Streets to Statehouse, Building Grassroots Power in New York, New York Foundation and North Star Fund, 2020: https://nyf.org/files/2020/01/Streets-to-Statehouse-Building-Grassroots-Power-In-NY.pdf
- Growing Community Organising, Young Foundation, Mandeep Hothi, 2013: https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/201
- Making a way forward, Community Organising and the Future of Democracy in Europe, ECON and ARIADNE, 2019: https://www.ariadne-network.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Making-a-way-forward-Community-Organising-and-the-Future-of-Democracy-in-Europe.pdf
- Grantcraft, Funding Community Organising: Social Change through Civic Participation, 2009: https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Funding-Community-Organizing-Social-Change-through-Civic-Participation-GrantCraft-2009-funding-community-organizing-social-change-through-civic-participation.pdf
- A BRIGHT LIGHT IN CHALLENGING TIMES, Successful coalition building and data-driven approaches in Arizona advance immigrant rights in divisive political landscape, Neo Philanthropy, Four Freedoms Fund, Unbound, 2016: https://neophilanthropy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/FINAL_One-Arizona-Evaluation-Brief_with-leadership-stats.pdf
- A funders guide to community organizing, Neighbourhood Funders Group, 2001: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/nfg/pages/447/attachments/original/1490650482/The-Community-Organizing-Tool-Box.-A-Funders-Guide-to-Community-Organizing.-Neighborhod-Funders-Group.pdf?1490650482