Friends, I feel it. Do you? The energy of our world is shifting powerfully. Brazil. Serbia. The United States. People all over the world are uniting and rising up together, prioritizing their collective well-being. Do you clock how different that feels than when we believe our lives together are a zero-sum game, where we’re all fighting for the same scraps, hoarding as much as we can get, and trying to keep as much as possible from others? What a nightmare.
But forget that. The world that’s starting to emerge instead? Holy. Moly. The hope! The joy! The almost unbearable lightness!
Today I’m here to remind us that this “new” way we’re finding is actually the original way, the way most natural to us humans, the way we’ve forgotten for far too long. And to tell you that I know deep in my bones that we can return there together.
Read on….
For You: Today’s Main Course
The many prevailed over the money.
So repeatedly says my brand-new United States Senator, the first Native American woman to hold the role in the 250-plus years of this country, Peggy Flanagan.
And as poetic as the phrase is, it’s also nakedly, literally true.
The people united will never be defeated.
We’ve chanted this at rallies so many times that we may forget to stop and think about what these words really mean: their profound truth… their guidance for our country… their prophesy for our whole world’s future.
The people united will never be defeated.
I wrote a version of this message in our last loveletter, in a reflection on the politics of Peggy’s political inspiration and mentor, Paul Wellstone, whose well-known motto was that “we all do better when we all do better:”
When my heart isn’t being broken into a million pieces by it, I find myself fascinated by the way we humans can take things that exist solely to ensure our collective well-being… and turn them into a zero-sum game.
We do this with “politics.”
We do this in “philanthropy.”
We do this all the time.
As I’ve written before here, “politics” is not some special brand of intrigue that only certain people participate in. If we’re human, we can’t not “do” politics, even though so many people love to say that about themselves.
We “do” politics no matter what.
We are irrevocably interdependent on each other.
In that way, there’s a degree to which philanthropy is much the same as politics and government. In fact, I’ve written about that here before too:
In other words, our government is the means by which we the people care for ourselves and each other.
Not every country can say this.
Some country’s governments are dictatorships.
Some are theocracies.
Some answer to kingdoms.
But the United States is none of those things.
After all, the founding vision of our country was that it would be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Those who founded the U.S. were tired of being told what to do by Kings and other powerful people completely divorced from their reality.
They wanted to organize themselves.
They wanted to govern themselves.
They wanted to choose their leaders.
They wanted their leaders to be accountable to them.
And to get there took BIG, sustained effort.
To even get to the point of founding our country more than 250 years ago, a group of humans needed to become so united that they first risked and even laid down their lives for each other. Then, they sat in rooms arguing with each other — staying much longer than any of them would have preferred — just to agree on the principles and values they could share. They made compromises. They listened to each other. They had to really labor in order to understand each other.
And they did it.
They came together.
They had to.
Because they knew.
The people united will never be defeated.
They knew that was the only way they’d succeed.
Heck, they baked-in the assumption.
“United” is in our name.
Our country worked for that unity, in the beginning.
And yet, in each of the 250 years since our founding, we here in the United States have gotten progressively less and less united.
There are, of course, reasons.
Many reasons exist for our fracturing as a people.
But perhaps none of them are quite as powerful as the stories we’ve started to believe about ourselves, about each other, and about our collective.
We get really distracted by miasmas, y’all.
We gullibly believe everything we’ve been conditioned to believe by a world around us that narrates fictions and sells them as documentary.
As such, we’ve become genuinely convinced that we’re islands, that each of us needs to look out for Number One or no one else will.
And the sad thing about that?
The more we believe this to be true, the more we make it true.
How about we not do that?
How about we believe the truth instead?
The people united will never be defeated.
Our U.S. election this week demonstrates this truth abundantly. Massive mountains of money and unchecked power and blatant corruption — and attempts by all of those things to fix the elections in favor of the money and the power and those who were corrupt — completely backfired, while an uprising of the people chose a whole new government for themselves. The people, once they started working together and getting organized, couldn’t be stopped by any other kind of force.
The people united will never be defeated.
We here in Minnesota learned this lesson profoundly earlier this year. When a masked gestapo — funded in the billions by and operating in the name of our federal government — descended on our state, we united as Minnesotans. We found ourselves becoming a rag-tag bunch of volunteers, ones with other day-jobs, fully thwarting a multi-billion-dollar army outfitted with every kind of legit weapon. We overcame the billions. We overcame state-sponsored violence, including murders and kidnappings in our names. We refused to let our neighbors be terrorized. We resisted, and then resisted some more, and then resisted even more. And before long, the Goliath to our David retreated.
The people united will never be defeated.
We ignited community-led philanthropy during Operation Metro Surge, too, while wealthy individuals and institutional philanthropy sources like foundations and corporations — the very ones we’ve so often ceded the definition of “philanthropy” to in the recent past — were almost nowhere to be found. In the chaotic weeks of what felt like a military invasion by our own government, we the people responded. Readily. Generously. Again and again. Need after need, request after request came through the overlapping Signal networks created by ordinary neighbors. And time after time, again and again, days or even hours after the original requests had rippled through, follow-up messages would triumphantly drop into our phones: “Need met! Need met! Need met again!” We Minnesotans stepped up to actively take care of each other. We embodied a “love for humanity,” a love for our neighbors, which of course has been the true root meaning of “philanthropy” all along. And as a person who has worked within professionalized philanthropy for almost two decades already, my understanding of what is possible — indeed of what is preferable — within the work of philanthropy… has completely shifted.
The people united will never be defeated.
I’m heartened to see we’ve started to live like that’s true again.
And I hope this is only the beginning of a whole new collective chapter with this truth as our abiding narrative — not only for this country, but for our whole world.
What do you say?
I want to close with a couple tidbits for you:
1️⃣ I’m encouraging you to subscribe if you haven’t already — and to stay tuned, if you already are subscribed — because, in the weeks to come, I’ll be writing a lot more about collective giving, donor organizing, and in general what I believe is the future of philanthropy and fundraising, in our new section of this publication titled Philanthropy Of The People. You won’t wanna miss it, y’all! I’ll be sharing with you more about not only why I feel this is the future of philanthropy, but also how you can start to practice these things yourselves.
2️⃣ As I write a piece like this, I want to be clear that I am no partisan. I get so tired of the splits between left or right… or Republican or Democrat… as though you have to be one or the other. I’m not. I have no allegiance to a political party. And I’ve seen those allegiances have far too many disastrous consequences in the past. Rather than leaning to the left… or the right… I go deeper. I deeply connect with my own humanity… which ensures I’m deeply identifying and empathizing with the humanity of every other human being around me. I recommend the same approach for you, too. Political parties are beside the point, in that case. Instead, we’ll all simply dedicate ourselves to caring for each other and strengthening the collectives of which we’re a part — ultimately the whole purpose of politics, when you get down to it.
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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 the Community You Need 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. Mentoring.
All of this — and more — is what happens 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
Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it:
Find a quiet place to sit with yourself.
Take a deep breath through your nose, deeeeeep down into your belly, and watch your belly expand all the way out.
Then breathe out verrrrrry slowly through your lips, pursing them as though you have a straw between them.
Continue breathing just like this, as it is like a magic trick to settle your nervous system and help you ground, relax, and be present.
Close your eyes and drop your awareness, your consciousness down, into the area of your heart.
Ask yourself what you most need right now.
Get clear on your answer(s).
Then ask yourself who you can ask to help you meet that need.
Once you’re clear on the what and the who, take a few more deep breaths… and slowly open your eyes.
Now might be the hard part: reach out to the person (or people) who came to mind, and ask them for the help you need.
See how they respond.
See what results come from this exercise.
A Gift: Something to Take With You
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