Calling in nonprofit leaders and professional fundraisers at organizations with multi-million dollar budgets
By Ryan Heckman
We are in an unprecedented time. Even while I write that, I think about how often I’ve heard it in the last several years. Like many of you I’ve spent a lot of time at home lately- and my inbox has been filled with responses from countless businesses and organizations informing me of their COVID-19 response. This includes 30+ emails from nonprofits asking for money.
I’ve also received an equal number of emails encouraging me to reach out to my community to connect in this time of social distancing, and uncertainty. These kinds of emails I’ve really needed as a little boost each day. They encourage me to connect with the people who love and support me and who I love and support including my community of organizers and change makers.
Something that’s interesting about those fundraising emails though is that the organizations asking me, sometimes twice a day, for money are the very same organizations that have big endowments, a long list of major donors, and access to the people and systems that currently control the vast majority of resources.
I keep asking myself, why are these organizations putting together emergency fundraising campaigns highlighting their loss of ticket revenue, or lost gains from their invested portfolios? Why are these organizations trying to squeeze money out of their constituents with appeals rooted in scarcity and fear rather than just leaning into their already abundantly gathered resources? So many organizations who are providing direct services like food, housing and health care are in need of rapid funding and these same organizations have been trying to get this funding for years and have been ignored! I keep shouting at the screen, “STOP ASKING ME TO FUND YOUR ENDOWMENT!”
This opportunistic style of fundraising has helped me see how this global pandemic is exposing a darker dimension of how nonprofits exist in our society. It’s revealing (and reminding me of) the fact that our nonprofits are built to mirror our government systems. Systems designed to provide minimal or no care for people. Nonprofits are also built to mirror capitalism, a behemoth of a system specifically designed to divide and extract resources. Nonprofits have been built like this since the beginning. They exist to mimic our capitalist government and this pandemic has revealed how deeply rooted nonprofits too are in white supremacy, sexism, a belief in individuality, and capitalistic competition rooted in scarcity.
We can see, vividly right now, how this is exacerbating the very problems our nonprofits are trying to find solutions to. For example, giant companies like Amazon are sending appeals to raise money for food banks, a desperately needed service right now. While this corporate act will be touted as benevolent and generous, it ignores completely and doesn’t fund the systemic changes necessary to prevent in the future the current massive need for food banks in the first place! We must shift our funding and our praise of funding to people and organizations working toward lasting systemic change so that in the next pandemic, people have health care, food, and housing and we don’t have to appeal to billionaires to provide basic needs.
Our nonprofit system was intentionally built to hide the necessary bold solutions to the real problems. Sonya Renee Taylor, author of “The Body Is Not An Apology,” recently said in a video on her Instagram that our society and economy is built with “diabolical brilliance.” Her comment reminds me that our social and economic systems are working just the way they were built to work. They aren’t broken. Capitalism was built by white men to benefit white men. Right now the cracks are exposed, cracks that were always there and visible to those who are not white men. For centuries hundreds of thousands of people have been screaming about the inequities of our diabolical system and were ignored or dismissed because the system was built to ignore and dismiss anyone who wasn’t a white man. As a white man, I am disgusted. I want no part in a world that values me over so many others in my beloved family. We must use this opportunity to burst open our broken system and build something beautiful and new.
Nonprofits are convulsing right now and throwing together fundraising campaigns because they have been intentionally and systemically rooted in this diabolically brilliant system of competition, scarcity, individualism and fear. That’s why I’m calling in professional fundraisers today to break through the illusions of scarcity, fear and individualism used to opportunistically fundraise. The first step is to root our organization’s communication in community and in abundance rather than scarcity and fear. This is not a marketing moment, it’s a community-care moment. Let’s harness it to radically change the focus of our fundraising to community building, care and collective responsibility.
To put it another way, it’s time to find accomplices in our work. Being an accomplice means you are acknowledging that our systems are working exactly the way they are supposed to and your job, as an accomplice, is to help dismantle the scaffold holding it up (Boston Globe, June 2019).
Being an accomplice and partnering with other accomplices in our work is another step to living in a world of abundance.
This will take enormous amounts of trust. Trust in your donors to step up and divest their faith in money as their fortress. Trust in your community to authentically co-create the solutions to the problems your organization is facing. And, trust from your constituents that your organization is on a path to making systems change. That’s why this fundraising shift must be done in community and through relationship building.
It’s scary to trust. We have been taught that to trust is to take a huge risk. Again, the “diabolical brilliance” of our capitalist society shows how it’s a system specifically designed to keep us apart. Fundraisers, let’s liberate ourselves to be in a trusting, open, authentic, vulnerable community with our donors where we can talk about broad systems of oppression and how the radical redistribution of resources can free our communities from band-aid solutions.
Rooting our fundraising in community care and collective responsibility (anti-capitalist principles), will lead us to conversations with our constituents and donors about redistribution of resources rather than about filling a funding gap. We’ll be able to talk with our donors about how the hoarding of resources has perpetuated the systems that make our nonprofits necessary and how redistribution of money is a way to disrupt the continued perpetuation of inequity. We can begin to make accomplices out of our donors.
The food bank that Amazon is raising money for will, I hope, receive lots of money. But, if Amazon is not an accomplice in the work of ending hunger, this money will only continue to fund temporary solutions while the real systemic problems that are so nakedly revealed to us right now are not being funded at all. I’m talking about wealth inequality, houselessness, an inadequate healthcare system, food deserts, and our trickle down economy to just name a few.
Nonprofits will absolutely need lots of support in the coming months. If you are fundraising for a food shelf or other essential service provider right now, I know you can create a thoughtful and powerful campaign based in the deep need for community that can be expressed through powerful messages rooted in abundance. I hope that your organization will be abundantly funded and will build the capacity, through your accomplices, to continue feeding people now and working toward the systems change needed to end hunger, houselessness, etc .
If you are a fundraiser for a large institutional nonprofit that is not providing or organizing to change health care, housing, food access, or other essential services, consider how your organization can take a back seat in raising money right now. Advocate to leadership that you lean into your endowment or other invested funds to continue your operations. Do things like clean up your database, check-in with your community of donors and other constituents to deepen a sense of community care. Ask donors how they are doing and have authentic conversation about your organization’s focus right now.
Your organization could also choose to be an accomplice with neighbor organizations that are providing essential care and organizing for systems change. Suggest to leadership strategic partnerships and introduce donors and funders to your neighboring organizations. Remember, being an accomplice means you know there is enough for all of us! That we must fight a system that makes it necessary for a food shelf, a homeless shelter, a free clinic to be the primary way hundreds of thousands of families have access to food, housing, and medical care. Your job right now is to help to fund the food shelf and work to dismantle the scaffolding holding up the necessity of the food bank.
Fundraisers, this is our time to fundamentally change the fundraising system built on the “diabolical brilliance” of white supremacy, scarcity, fear and individualism. We have the opportunity to bring it all back to our community. Let’s do it together! I’m looking forward to getting more asks in the next several weeks that are rooted in community care, authentic urgency and are inviting me and reminding me to be an accomplice in the immediate and big work that needs to happen.