Hello, there. Welcome to my shiny new website and blog!
Let me introduce myself. My name is Susan Zakaib. I'm a professional grant writer, and I just launched a brand new, itty-bitty consulting gig called Fund Your Movement, which helps movement building organizations grow their grant revenue and build sustainable grants programs. I'm excited to take this next step in my career as a grants professional.
And yet... I hate grants.
To be clear: I love the work. I enjoy writing proposals, and I love securing funding to support work that's important to me. But all too often, grants harm the organizations they fund.
Grants are exceedingly unreliable. Funding opportunities appear and disappear with little notice, often at the whims of foundation executives and trustees. Grants are more readily available to people who are comfortable with writing, and who are comfortable speaking the language of the wealthy and privileged. Grants often require grantees to shoehorn their work into foundations' narrow priorities, reducing their work to a tidy set of metrics, demographics and carefully-tailored narratives. Grants transform community-based work into a transaction between funder and grantee. The work becomes a product whose aim is to benefit the consumer—the funder—rather than the community. As a result, philanthropy has a long history of molding and undermining BIPOC-led social movements through grant funding.
All of these issues seem inevitable given that foundations that are steeped in white supremacy, and serve as tax shelters for the wealthy. As Edgar Villanueva argues in Decolonizing Wealth, "the basis of traditional philanthropy is to preserve wealth and, all too often, that wealth is fundamentally money that's been twice stolen, once through the colonial-style exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor, and the second time through tax evasion." In other words, most foundations' primary aim is not to transfer wealth to communities that need it, but to maintain their own wealth for as long as possible. This is why most foundations refuse to spend more than 5% of their assets annually—the minimum allowed by law. Although there are lots of wonderful program officers out there who do their best to support important work, ultimately most of them are bound by this reality.
(I'm only talking about private foundations, here. Don't even get me started on government grants.)
The damage wrought by grant funding can range from aggravating to catastrophic. Organizations that are heavily dependent on grants all too often find themselves scrambling to fund their staff positions, bending over backwards to meet grant deliverables, spending countless hours on grant administration, altering their work to fit philanthropic trends, mining their communities for stories that will appeal to funders, and—ultimately—putting their funders before the people they aim to empower.
These are dire problems for any nonprofit, but they are especially troublesome for movement building organizations. How can social movements achieve community-led change if foundations are really the ones leading the work?
And yet, cutting grant funding out of movement work altogether doesn't seem like an option. Foundations have enormous wealth. The assets of US foundations total more than $1 trillion. That money needs to be redistributed. It needs to support the incredible, important work of BIPOC-led organizations all over the country that are fighting for justice for their communities. The money is there. We need to get it to the right places.
So. What do we do? How do we move all that money to movement building work without inflicting enormous harm?
The only thing that will really fix the problem is systemic change. Foundations need to expand their scope, increase their annual payouts, convert project grants to general support, guarantee multi-year funding, devote more funding to BIPOC-led organizations, devote more funding to movement work, limit or remove reporting requirements, and trust grantees to do the work. These changes can't eliminate all of the challenges inherent to grant funding for movement work, but they would at least limit the damage.
Thankfully, the calls to reinvent foundation funding are getting louder, and some funders have made significant improvements to their grantmaking processes. But philanthropy writ large is changing at a snail's pace. We need to keep pushing for foundations to improve, but it will take time for this work to pay off on a large scale.
On the other hand, we can't simply wait for philanthropy to catch up. Lives are on the line. Our communities need foundation money now. How can movement organizations get the grants they urgently need while avoiding—or at least reducing—the harm so often wrought by foundation funding? Are there methods for developing proposals, budgets, metrics, and cultivation strategies that can defend grantees from the pitfalls of grants?
This is the question I'm trying to answer with Fund Your Movement, and it's the question that will guide my future blog posts. It's a gigantic, tangled mess of a question—and given that the problem is systemic, I doubt it's possible to come up with a perfect answer. But given that funding movement work is more urgent than ever, I think it's imperative to give it a try.
Parts of this blog post were inspired by Community-Centric Fundraising, conversations on the Community-Centric Fundraising Slack channel, and a recent virtual event hosted by the Movement for Black Lives DC Moneypot. If you enjoyed this post, consider sending a few dollars their way!
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