Fundraising Should Never Have Been Professionalized
Let's re-discover the ancient wisdom of philanthropy, shall we?
Last week, in The Future of Fundraising Is Here, I started to tell you why I believe collective giving is where fundraising needs to go next. I also promised that I’d share with you some stories about my collective giving experiences, so you can start to get a sense of what this looks like in practice — and how you might be able to try it yourself. I’m following through on that promise today.
Read on….
For You: Today’s Main Course
OK, yes.
That is a controversial title.
And yes, I partly used it because of the dang attention economy we’re all living within, where getting humans to actually commit to reading something — let alone even notice it amidst endless scrolling and ubiquitous interruptions — is quite the feat.
Scroll-stopping headlines at least get readers in the door.
And now, I aim to inspire you to stay here with my more nuanced take.
The more professionalized the work of fundraising and philanthropy have become, over the years, the further they’ve gotten from the whole reason nonprofits exist in the first place: a community noticing it has a need that isn’t being met, organizing itself to meet that need, and then organizing itself to resource meeting that need.
Almost every nonprofit started from a very pure place.
One person, or a family, or a group of community members rallied others together to achieve a mission that they all agreed was necessary for their collective well-being.
The community worked cooperatively.
Everyone gave whatever they could to help it thrive — whether their time, or their skills, or their introductions to important community players, or their testimony about the need for the mission with others who could also help, or financial resources they had the power to direct towards the work.
Everyone was invested in the mission’s success.
Everyone actively contributed, however they could.
A sense of solidarity and collective care prevailed.
And then, somehow, over time, the community around the mission became more and more remote — likely as the Industrial Revolution meant more and more people needed to earn a wage to survive… which meant people spending many hours on the mission would need to get paid… which meant there started being a clear demarcation between those who were “staff” and those who were not… which meant those who weren’t staff started feeling a lot less personally invested and backed away, so that the “professionals” could do their “jobs.”
And what hadn’t been a “job” at all…
… became one.
And then, as time passed, these jobs became more and more professionalized, into whole career paths — with professional certifications, academic degrees, progressive responsibilities and leadership, 401ks, insurance, and PTO.
Many of you reading this have this career path.
I certainly do.
So yes, I understand that this whole line of thinking can feel very threatening… because it reeks of not being able to survive, since the world as we’ve made it requires almost all of us to earn a wage to survive.
I’m not coming for your job.
Because as I said, our modern-day world requires us to earn money for the labor of our days, in order to eat and have shelter and clothe ourselves and maybe even enjoy life a little bit too… and the work of nonprofits is still essential for the communities we live in, just as has been true since nonprofits began… so those who dedicate their days to making that work possible will still need to have those jobs, earn those wages and benefits, and hopefully make a darn good living while they’re at it (because wouldn’t we want to indicate, with the highest compensation possible for these workers, how profoundly valuable their work is for our communities?).
What I am coming for is the strict demarcations we’ve created…
… between fundraiser… and donor…
… between staff… and volunteer…
… between the board… and the community served…
… between the board… and staff…
… between volunteers… and donors…
… between the community served… and fundraisers.
Y’all.
These demarcations are made up.
We made them up.
Or to be a bit more precise, people long-ago made them up… and we’ve just kept mindlessly re-enacting these scripts of the power dynamics and priorities and value judgements and character arcs — like actors in some long-ago-memorized play that we decided was the play-to-end-all-plays.
We don’t need to keep doing this.
This script is old.
And it’s tired.
And plenty of people have been telling us for years how harmful this script can be to many different people in our communities.
So what are we waiting for?
Now’s the time for new scripts.
A New Script: Collective Giving
As I mentioned last week in The Future of Fundraising Is Here:
We struggle to trust.
Anything.
Everything.
In an era when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bursting onto the scene and taking over everything from our customer service calls to our medical diagnoses, all while producing increasingly more of the content (often slop) we see everywhere online, we’re craving real humanity and human connection more than ever.
When we read a good piece of writing, we want to know that it actually came from the experience and creativity of a human being like us, or it somehow cheapens it… right?
When we receive a communication like an email, we want to know that we’re not just some faceless “contact” sorted into a “segment” by a bot that wrote a message trying to sound as familiar as possible… yes?
We want to know that we matter.
That real people care about us.
That we belong to something bigger than ourselves — something with the kind of meaning that human beings are made to make… while machines can only attempt some facsimile of what that might look like from the outside.
Machines don’t crave meaning.
Machines don’t get meaning.
Machines can’t make meaning.
But humans do all of those things.
And all of those things are essential reasons why humans have been drawn into philanthropy (root meaning: love of humanity) for generations.
The new script we need to follow is actually an old script.
Communities have been organizing themselves into collective giving circles for generations — since the beginning of humanity, I can say with almost no doubt, even though I definitely wasn’t there then.
This is how we’re wired.
And communities of color have stayed connected to this essential thread of their shared humanity a lot longer than the rest of us have, that’s for sure. Go into just about any community of color, and you will find vital, active, long-standing cultural practices of collective giving.
They’re still doing it, as they always have… but on the margins. Because the version we’ve collectively shoved onto center stage, in our dominant culture… is… not that. And of course, that dominant, center-stage version has been scripted… and packaged… and regurgitated as “best practices” for a long time now.
I figure that, having practiced that version for nearly two decades… having collaboratively raised hundreds of millions of dollars already… having earned my Certified Fundraising Executive (CFRE) designation… and, overall, having fully proved how much I understand the “best practices” and can succeed at them…
… I’m plenty qualified to point the way to something better.
I’ve earned the right to speak on this.
And isn’t it interesting, that that “better” I’m pointing to for our future…
… is actually our past?
Our dominant culture doesn’t value ancient, timeless wisdom enough.
But I do.
And part of what we’re doing here at For the Love of Humanity is shouting that honoring from the rooftops, so that more of us learn to embody it.
I’m also speaking from experience, re: collective giving.
Let me tell you some stories.
My Experiences With Collective Giving
I know that not all of us even know what we’re talking about, when I refer to “collective giving.” So let me share some of my experiences with you.
➡️ Dining for Women:
I was a baby fundraiser, fresh out of grad school with my Master’s in Social Work, in my first full-time development/fundraising job. I had a colleagued who I adored (she’s a Subscriber here; hi, Ann! 👋🏻).
She was a good decade-plus older than me, and she was so badass. Not only was she a lawyer (no small feat), working at a nonprofit to help people (a rarity for lawyers, unfortunately)… but, not long after I started, she began the intensive training needed to become a certified yoga teacher. She had a super-interesting life, full of fascinating friends and travel and engagement with a big wide world that I was only starting to experience, as a younger adult. In short, I wanted to be her when I grew up.
At some point, she invited me to come to her house. The pitch was something like this: every month, a bunch of us women gather together and put into a pot what we would have spent if we had gone out to eat together, while we eat a potluck that we all contribute to, and we learn about organizations supporting women all around the world… and then we give the money we collected to them.
For real? Sign me up!
I don’t remember how long I participated, but it was a good long while. Month after month, I’d get to bask in the presence of this amazing, multi-generational group of strong women. I got to eat food from cultures around the world (Dining for Women would provide recipes we could use from the culture we were supporting each month, and our group was pretty dedicated to doing that). I got to learn about an inspiring group of women doing something profoundly powerful somewhere in the world. And I got to actively support them.
I loved every minute of it all, for so many reasons… and I’m so very grateful to Ann for this experience.
Note: Dining for Women has, in the years since my experiences, re-branded. Look for them as Together Women Rise now, if you’re interested!
➡️ Fourth Generation Fund:
When I moved to Minnesota and was first living and working in the Twin Cities, I felt extremely discombobulated. I had started my career and grown into an adult in a whole different city, and I had long ago learned how ecosystemic this work was. To pluck myself up from my existing ecosystem… and plop myself down until a whole new one… left me not knowing what end was up.
In one of my very first networking coffees, someone told me about the Fourth Generation Fund at the Minneapolis Foundation.
I was immediately intrigued.
This was an opportunity to experience grant-making within a foundation, something that of course would draw me in as, by this point, I had many years seeking grants under my belt. This program was the foundation’s way of bringing in the next generation of donors, us younger folks, I was told. Also, I could see that this would be a great way to learn about all of the many kinds of good work, the many people, the many organizations within my new community. I signed up pretty quickly.
In this experience, all participants committed to giving an amount that was doable and meaningful for us, in order to create our pot of grant dollars. In addition, we raised more funds by putting on an event and inviting a wider community in to provide their support, and the foundation chipped in some funds too.
We collectively chose a giving area that the group wanted to explore. Then, we spent time teaching each other and learning about this area. (My first year — of two years that I participated — was focused on aging, for example.) Then, we did an environmental scan of our community to find organizations who were working in this area, and we invited them to apply for funding with proposals.
Imagine how powerful it was for me to read grant proposals, after having written and submitted them now for many years.
After our group had all read the proposals, we got together to discuss them and decide how we would allocate our funds. These conversations and decisions were very hard, which you might imagine!
But in the end, we gave out tens of thousands to, learned about, and got to start relationships with many essential organizations in our community. We got to grow relationships with each other within the group — people from all different parts of our community coming together for this philanthropic work. And we got to experience a whole new kind of giving as a collective.
➡️ The Giving Project:
A much more recent experience I’ve had is participating in The Giving Project at Headwaters Foundation for Justice. And wow, was this experience powerful.
I’ll let Headwaters describe this profound experience to you:
Giving Projects are cross-class, multi-racial, multi-generational cohorts that come together over the course of six months to move money to grassroots, community-based organizations across Minnesota led by and for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) that use community organizing as a core strategy to advance equity and justice.
Through political education, community-building, grassroots fundraising and donor organizing, coaching, and collective grantmaking, Giving Project participants develop a shared understanding of race, class, and power as resource mobilizers in the social movement ecosystem.
The program is powerful, challenging, and fun. It is a hands-on experience that will shift your thinking about money and give you tangible ways to act for social change.
Unlike my other two experiences above, I had to apply to join this one, and Headwaters intentionally created a cohort of twenty of us to represent diversity in class, race and ethnicity, and generation. We also had to demonstrate a commitment to justice, as that was what we’d be working toward together, and we weren’t taking any time to convince anyone that greater justice in our world was necessary.
This program was also much more time-intensive than the other two. Not only did we have regular meetings where we were growing community within our cohort, we also had regular learning and education to understand the issues of injustice that our potential grantees would be working on.
Even more, Headwaters staff trained us in donor organizing, and then each of us set about doing just that, having many 1:1 meetings with people in our circles to raise the funds we needed for our granting effort.
In the end, the money we raised (well over $200K) was supplemented by funds from Headwaters, and we were able to invest over half a million in organizations building power through Minnesota.
This was again an experience of reading through grant proposals submitted by many organizations… and collectively deciding how to allocate our funds as a group (again, not an easy process at all).
One especially cool feature of this one is that the grants are all two-year grants and are designated for general operating funds — both of which are ridiculously uncommon for grants for nonprofits, who need both reliable, sustained multi-year funding and general operating funds more than any other kind of support.
We Can Do It So Many Ways
I offer these examples to give you an idea of what collective giving can look like. But you can see, even among these three experiences that I — just one human being — have had, there are many differences.
At the Minneapolis Foundation’s Nobody Saves the World Alone event celebrating collective giving last week, Hali Lee mentioned that people so often come to her, very interested in collective giving but stalled, feeling like they don’t know how to start.
This is another feature of our dominant culture that I’d like to give the boot. We all seem to be so worried about doing things wrong all the time. I’ve experienced this vibe especially around fundraising, over the years.
People are always so quick to dismiss their own experiences and perspective and creativity — disavowing them and stuffing them down while they ask around for “best practices,” with a desire to find out what everyone else is doing and do that too.
Can we stop doing that?
So-called “best practices” can never be best for everyone, because every person and every organization have different personalities, souls, interests, tendencies, and more.
What is right for one will very likely not be right for another. How could one thing be the right thing for everyone?! I mean, really.
How about, instead of creating some monolithic canon of “best practices” that everyone is “supposed” to follow, we allow people and orgs to use their creativity, to design experiences for their communities… that are actually responsive to and fitting for their communities?
For what it’s worth, that’s exactly how my fundraising practice will look, going forward (give me a shout, if you’d like to see how I might be able to help you/your organization!) — and it is also why I’m excited to have started the Philanthropy Of The People section here in this publication, where we will continue to explore and discuss this work of collective giving and donor organizing.
I encourage you to join me, in experimenting with and practicing this new mode of giving… and in being a part of the ongoing conversation here!
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Conversation: Your Real Real
I really want to know your more detailed and nuanced thoughts, too. Let’s start a conversation on this topic. Visit the comments section!
You’re a Fundraiser? Find Your Community Here
Life’s been LIFING lately, yes?! Now is the time to reach out and connect with others. When you’re embedded in supportive community, even the most difficult things don’t seem so hard.
Your community is waiting for you!
Advice when you need it. Been-there, done-thats. Commiseration. Support. A place to vent. Guidance and mentoring.
All of this — and more — is what happens throughout each month…
… at Community-Weaving for Fundraisers.
Just community-based fundraisers. Gathering for (virtual, on Zoom) lunch together. Twice a month. Year-round. Chatting and supporting each other via WhatsApp in between lunches. Being there for each other.
All you need to do is show up and be present… while I guide, facilitate, organize, and create the container.
Practice: Make It Yours
I encourage you to get — and read — the book The Big We, by Hali Lee. You can purchase it, or you can find it at your library (ask for it, if they don’t already have it!).
This will help you start to wrap your mind around collective giving… and even imagine how you might practice it yourself!
A Gift for You: Something to Sit With
Collective giving shifts who gives, how we give, and ultimately what gets funded. This practice strengthens community ties, provides the space to practice democracy, and increases civic engagement.
Together, these are crucial to building a thriving multiracial democracy that underpins all the other issues of building an equitable world.
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