A Call to Philanthropy: Lived Experience IS Expertise We Need in Our Processes!
By Bart Westdijk
Conversation at Grassroots Fund 2019 rootSkills gathering in Providence (RI)
Credit: New England Grassroots Environment Fund
As COVID19 leaves a deep impact everywhere, all-volunteer, community-driven mutual aid efforts are emerging across communities. Leveraging Google forms, phone trees, and various social media platforms, these groups of neighbors are inventorying needs and offerings across their blocks, wards, and towns. Since March 17, the New England Grassroots Environment Fund has received well over 200 requests from such mutual aid efforts across the Northeast. We prioritize grants to unincorporated, ad-hoc efforts responding to community needs and who have few alternative sources of income.
It is the trust and relationship, built by years of being in community, that is providing resilience and support in a time of pandemic, scarcity, and crisis. There is no substitute or short-cut to the deep social capital within these local, nimble grassroots efforts. It’s based on questions like ‘how are you?’ and ‘what do you need’, with love and care at the heart of the effort.
Balancing the need for an urgent response with longer-term needs, we are now seeing mutual aid groups evolving some of their work to think long(er) term. Plenty of requests continue to focus on immediate food access/insecurity, and at the same time, mutual aid efforts are seeing the need and the potential for more sustained activity as they develop the platforms to inventory need and map the skills/resources/offerings - the assets - in their neighborhoods or towns.
Groups are seeing their role in transformative change and frame their efforts around self-determination. With the all-encompassing need that will exist for the foreseeable future, these hyperlocal efforts of neighbors checking in with and on each other will provide a key building block to be able to respond and ensure access to support on a level not easily achieved through established institutions.
Many mutual aid groups are popping up as unincorporated efforts with little formal structure and no established fiscal sponsor relationship. Platforms like Venmo offer opportunities for these ad hoc groups to bring in community donations, but access to institutional philanthropic resources is immediately limited given requirements around tax status or a track record for an applicant.
Institutional philanthropy is historically - and intentionally - structured to create a power imbalance through which a privileged few determine the allocation of resources (grant dollars). While the overrepresentation of certain (white, privileged, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, academically educated, etc.) viewpoints isn't always clearly articulated, it is nevertheless the result of dominant dynamics that are geared towards maintaining the status quo.
With this power imbalance, decisions on who gets funded, and which issues, strategies, and policies become funding priorities, are typically made with little or no input from affected communities, grant seekers, or grantees. Dominant philanthropic approaches have led to over-investment in top-down strategies and policies, and under-investment in grassroots groups and community-led strategies. What is considered ‘expert’ and ‘worthwhile’ is limited when only a small slice of lived experiences and perspectives determines the criteria.
Grassroots organizers - especially low-income BIPOC (Black, Indigenous & People of Color) communities who are most harmed by this pandemic on top of impacts from environmental degradation, economic injustice, and the climate crisis - are systemically excluded from crafting and implementing strategies and solutions. This exclusion inherently makes efforts less financially sustainable, less effective, and less relevant. As a result, dominant philanthropic practices continue to infringe upon the right to self-determination.
Sharing power means distributing the actions of decision-making, program creation, implementation, and impact evaluation across all process participants, truly blurring any rigid divide between designer and participant, expert, and beneficiary.
The current pandemic, on top of already pressing environmental, economic, and societal challenges, requires us reimagining the processes that lead to solutions. Moving towards equity, justice and liberation require unlearning dominant practices - getting comfortable with different ways of distributing decision-making authority, embracing uncertainty, and collectively imagining and creating different ways to truly be in community. This is where the Grassroots Fund's Guiding Practices come in as a practical way to dig into what that means as a day-to-day commitment across all activities.
As we see a push to reimagine, to change systems, now is the time to also really talk about the dominant culture of problem-solving and how it intentionally marginalizes the very perspectives that have to be involved in order for change to be transformative and resilient.
For philanthropy, that means facing program guidelines with an equity lens and reducing barriers where possible. It also means looking at power: who sets agendas, how are priorities determined, and which voices carry the most weight - and why - during conversations? The Grassroots Fund remains committed to participatory processes and seeks out conversations with peers to push ourselves in racial equity, trust-based and participatory practices.
Grassroots organizers offer critically important expertise and insights on problems, solutions, and effective strategies based on their own lived experiences. Without this participation and leadership, environmental, economic, and social justice objectives will never be realized. Learning and innovation are spurred by differences, broad input, and genuine reflection.
Bart Westdijk is Director of Operations with the New England Grassroots Environment Fund (www.grassrootsfund.org). The Grassroots Fund is committed to helping grassroots change-makers develop their own solutions to the complex environmental and social justice issues that affect where they live. The Fund listens to and works alongside organizers to identify, select, and access the specific tools, resources, and connections needed to create healthy and sustainable communities that are better for both people and the planet. The Grassroots Fund is committed to removing systemic and structural barriers for already marginalized voices to access funding support for projects. For many of the Fund’s grantee partners, it is one of the few (or only) funding sources that are accessible.
#DisruptPhilanthropyNOW has been on hiatus, and over the next few months, we will be sharing more blogs. #DisruptPhilanthropyNOW! is about courageously stepping forward and sharing stories and truths about how philanthropy reinforces systems of oppression and white supremacy so WE can work collectively together to radically transform philanthropy.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW THE #DISRUPTPHILANTHROPYNOW! GOT STARTED – HERE IS THE FIRST BLOG.