Two funder organizers share four action steps—drawn from Funders4Palestine’s new Raise the Bar tool—that philanthropy can take to strengthen their commitment to social movements and move away from practices that harm and limit grassroots organizations. Co-published with Nonprofit Quarterly.
What happens to progressive philanthropy in times of accelerated imperialism, fascism, and genocide?
The sector is experiencing major shifts that may be hard to confront, as the Trump administration—in direct coordination with private and state powers—doubles down on its campaign against civil society organizations. If funders are serious about supporting the sector, we need to apply the lessons we’ve learned from these experiences and pivot to navigate this new terrain.
Those of us committed to Palestinian liberation against a genocidal, land-grabbing Israeli regime, have had a head start on confronting and absorbing these lessons. But we know it is only a matter of time before all of us working for justice and life-affirming futures, will need to do the same. Call it the imperial boomerang, call it the canary in the coal mine, but know that the only way to defeat it is to organize.
As coauthors, we collectively have nearly 50 years of experience working within and in partnership with the philanthropic sector—Farhad as a former donor and now funder organizer, and Andrea as a program officer and a consultant for public and private philanthropy. Here, we offer our reflections on what we are learning and how to meet this moment with accountability, courage, and integrity—together.
The Limits of Progressive Philanthropy—and What Needs to Shift
There are mainstream philanthropic predispositions that prevent progressive funders from fully aligning with the needs and priorities of the communities they represent. Even in the best of times, their approach can create irreparable damage, which is only exacerbated during times of uncertainty, while disproportionately impacting the people these institutions are meant to serve.
Philanthropy’s tendency to treat silos as strategy, to assume we know better than the groups we fund, to shy away from supporting work that we consider “risky” to our institutions, to change our language without shifting our actual practices, and to get defensive rather than curious when our institutional beliefs and assumptions are challenged, are all habits of a funder culture that “knows best.” Yet many of these policies come from a misguided idea of what an effective strategy looks like.
Drawing on years of funder organizing and movement wisdom, Funders4Palestine’s (F4P) newly launched tool, Raise the Bar: A Tool to Move from Harmful to Liberatory Funding Practices with Palestine as Your Compass, provides concrete guidance for funders and funder organizers on how to identify and shift practices that may be harmful to liberatory movement-building work. Although the tool centers on funder practices around Palestine, the analysis and guidance can be applied more broadly toward values alignment and grantmaking and should be useful to any funder seeking to examine and strengthen their work on all issues.
Below, we offer four action steps philanthropy can take now, as outlined in Raise the Bar, while grounding them in our own experiences as funder-organizers over the past several decades:
1. Swap silos for solidarity.
In the words of the great and often-quoted Audre Lorde, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives.” Yet despite this universal truth, funders often limit their strategies to narrow issue areas that do not leave much room for flexibility to respond in an evolving landscape. This philanthropic practice undermines the priorities set by community-led organizations, and it also threatens their ability to secure and sustain funding. During our time as funders, we both saw examples of this firsthand.
When an organization focused on improving working conditions for women in Georgia pivoted their efforts—at the request of their base of primarily Black women—to participate in a historic (and successful) Ban the Box campaign, they struggled to secure funding. Ban the Box is a national civil rights campaign, helping approximately 70 million formerly incarcerated individuals to secure employment, by ensuring applicants are evaluated by their job qualifications rather than excluded from consideration because of their criminal history. This approach reduces recidivism and reentry, unlocking significant opportunity for women who account for about a third of all adult arrests in the United States.
The pivot was strategic and necessary because it was a demand by the organization’s base—some of whom were formerly incarcerated Black women sitting at the intersection of multiple oppressions. The organization did exactly what many of us in progressive philanthropy call for: respond quickly to specific communities’ needs, while addressing structural challenges that entrench widespread inequality. In this case, the link between the strategic shift and the intended outcome of addressing women worker’s rights was clear. At the time, Andrea was fortunate to be working in a foundation that defined women’s rights broadly and was able to support the organization’s efforts. Yet, other women’s rights funders questioned the group’s strategy and refused to fund their work, explaining that the foundation’s areas of focus were centered on women’s rights, “not criminal justice.”
Farhad encountered a similar phenomenon when a grantee in Missouri made the strategic decision to temporarily slow activity in an environmental justice campaign against Peabody Energy to better support the uprisings in Ferguson, MO, in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. This multi-issue base-building organization was doing the essential work of expanding its base and bridging its networks to meaningfully address the interconnected issues facing the BIPOC communities it served, yet to most funders—detached from the reality on the ground— solidarity with the Ferguson uprisings was perceived as merely mission drift.
As funders, we do a lot of hiding behind set criteria and shy away from supporting work that we consider “risky,” even as grantees are forced to pivot to meet shifting conditions. However, we must be willing to move from a risk-reduction stance to a solidarity orientation, particularly if we are serious about interrupting the spread of fascism and intervening to end the moral and political crises of our times. That means that if we see a group or a community facing disproportionate risk, we need to move toward them, not away from them. Our institutional stability may be important, but it will never be more important than the people and communities we support.
Unfortunately, in recent years, some US-based funders, instead of standing in solidarity have gotten bolder about punishing their grantees’ expressions of support for Palestine, often demanding that the US-based groups they fund revoke public statements, take down social media posts, stay in their lanes, and avoid speaking publicly about issues that—in the eyes of the funder—have nothing to do with their missions. What funders often fail to realize is that this kind of solidarity isn’t “mission drift,” it’s an active recognition of genocide and the common forces of rising fascism that oppress communities in the US and abroad. Groups fighting to advance justice and liberation in their communities have always understood the shared connection of fighting Israel’s apartheid, and it’s time for funders to catch up.
2. Set your sights higher and stay focused.
Those of us who work in philanthropy are so fixated on the art of the possible that we often mistake the floor for the ceiling. For example, it’s normal in our sector for private foundations to pay out only the requisite five percent of their endowments each year, even though five percent is actually the minimum legal requirement.
Much has been made of trust-based philanthropy—a framework and campaign launched by funder organizers we deeply respect, and one that has helped spark critical shifts and conversations across the sector—over the last decade. Yet many funders aim to adopt these practices without shifting the underlying governance and decision-making mechanisms that would make trust flow both ways, and without addressing a critical gap in making long-term commitments as defined by movement leaders. Funders may consider two- or three-year commitments to be “long-term,” but for movements fighting structural, overlapping oppressions, or resisting entrenched imperialism, two or even three years of support isn’t the ceiling; it’s the floor. Despite this disconnection, funders are increasingly using the language of trust-based philanthropy in their public relations, while obscuring the nature of their decision-making and the precarity of their commitments.
Echoing the principles of the trust-based philanthropy framework, Raise the Bar helps funders move from harmful practices to liberatory approaches. The tool outlines a set of philanthropic actions and strategies that are aligned with, and accountable to, the movements they are intended to support. These practices are grounded in transparency, trust, and the redistribution of power and resources to communities that have been directly harmed by systemic injustice. They ensure ongoing political education, actively repair historical harms, center community leadership, and build power across institutions to dismantle systems of oppression.
For philanthropy to truly bolster movements for liberation and justice, we must be guided by the horizons of the communities and movements leading this work—not our own. This means embracing inclusive visions and practices that seek to build the sector, and ultimately the world that we collectively want, rather than working only to protect the world and the sector we currently have. It means sharing risk rather than offloading it to grantees, listening deeply to feedback rather than defaulting to defensiveness, and admitting that only a few of our philanthropic institutions—even those that claim to embrace trust-based practices—are comfortable truly ceding power and decision-making, even if we talk a good game on panels at conferences.
We encourage the sector to move towards embracing liberatory practices. If we self-censor our radical and transformative visions to only be in service of what we assume is possible, we will fail to achieve the deep transformation we seek.
3. Be discerning about how power flows: within your institution, and the sector.
Good organizers recognize that as conditions shift, so too must their strategies. As such, they actively assess and reassess the conditions for their work to adapt to change. Philanthropy must learn from this wisdom and do the same.
We know firsthand that governance and decision-making mechanisms vary across foundations; that complex power dynamics exist within and across philanthropy and its formed networks; and that many dedicated, movement-aligned organizers work inside the sector at all levels. As funders, we each have a responsibility to be more candid with ourselves—and others—about the structural and governance limitations of funding institutions.
For those of us working within and in partnership with philanthropy, we must think beyond our job descriptions to uphold our personal integrity, especially as our institutions’ practices drift further away from their expressed values. We need to be honest about the harm that institutional decisions can cause to the entire ecosystem and ask ourselves if the inside game is still worth playing, or if we are sliding into a stance of complicity and self-preservation. And we must actively find and leverage opportunities—no matter how small they are, and no matter where they are in the ecosystem—to support the communities we are serving. Sometimes that means actively organizing within our institutions, and sometimes that means showing up to hold others in the sector accountable.
It is a classic authoritarian strategy to instill fear and pit us against each other. Combine those wedge tactics with philanthropy’s predisposition to use silos as strategy, then add a dash of conservative legal advice, and before you know it, funders are winding down support for groups that champion trans liberation, immigrant rights, Palestinian solidarity, and racial justice. We are certainly living in a reality where these direct and harmful actions are justified by philanthropic institutions and framed as “strategic.”
The most dangerous example of this is when large, private foundations cut funding without warning. For example, former grantees who asked to remain anonymous shared that a large private foundation with an anonymous donor and a multi-decade track record of trust-based funding practices, cut four major national progressive grantees from its portfolio with no notice—not failing to renew, not offering one last tie-off, but actually cancelling grants that had already advanced to the processing and payment scheduling stage rescinding signed grant agreements without any explanation.
A second example is a series of funding cuts from a major progressive private foundation, also known for its trust-based practices, that surged like a tsunami through the global feminist and LGBTQ funding ecosystem. Recent discussions with the foundation’s former grantees, who wish to remain anonymous, have made us aware that over 100 long-term grantees were notified via email that their current grant would be their last due to “shifts in our grantmaking strategy.” In many cases, these grantees had been receiving long-term, general operating grants for over a decade, working in close collaboration, so the tectonic funding shift threatened with destabilizing an entire sector—just when the support was most needed.
A significant percentage of the affected groups were intermediary grantmaking organizations that support thousands of grassroots groups located mainly in underfunded regions of the world—including here in the United States. Notably, every intermediary organization that was cut had signed a 2023 Funders for a Ceasefire letter opposing the genocide in Gaza, while none of the intermediaries that have continued to receive funding signed the letter. If punishing groups for their solidarity with Palestine was indeed a driving force behind the cuts, it would not be the first time; this phenomenon has been well documented for years and has only accelerated since October 2023.
Through our discussions, we know that these decisions were contentious, and that, in many cases, staff attempted to prevent these cuts from happening in the first place. This underscores the importance of organizing in the philanthropic sector. To be effective in our efforts requires that we engage in power mapping while asking: who are the real decision-makers in these funding institutions, what motivates them, and who do they listen to?
The Raise the Bar tool includes a section that can help funders better align their internal practices with a commitment to liberation, while avoiding harmful practices. It also provides guidance on how to organize with other funders to build collective power and educate decisionmakers (such as your board members) on the importance of solidarity and how attacks on one movement is an attack on us all.
4. Commit to shifting practices and accountability.
Philanthropy is a notoriously underregulated and unaccountable sector, but that does not mean we cannot be accountable to our values and our beliefs as individuals of conscience. Let’s be honest: we do a lot of advocating, case-making, and performing in the philanthropic sector (we are the first to admit having done this ourselves!). While it’s critical to refine our analyses, funders sometimes spend more time declaring our values than holding ourselves accountable to practicing them.
Tools like Justice Funders’ Resonance Framework, F4P’s Raise the Bar, and Funding Freedom’s Divestment Toolkit exist to support us to shift not just our discourses but our practices. We need to build and join supportive communities that are willing to make changes and take risks together while holding each other accountable. F4P and the Block and Build Funder Coalition are two such spaces, among countless others that exist across the philanthropic sector. Finally, we must invite movement allies, including our grantees, into our confidence, offering transparency about how decisions are made and how power is distributed in our institutions, while creating pathways for them to help shape our institutional transformation—even if it makes our boards uncomfortable.
Together, We Can Find Our Power, Exercise Our Agency, and Connect Our Allies
The good news is real leverage remains in the face of retrenchment. Even amidst accelerating progressive funder flights, new funders are always emerging. And the gap between the beliefs and priorities of people working in the philanthropic sector and the official policies and practices of the traditional institutions that employ them grows every day. A small cohort of feminist and other global, regional, and national funds have continued to fund boldly and broadly, sustaining support for grantees working on climate justice, trans liberation, migrant rights, Black-led movements, and Palestinian liberation, even amidst intensifying legal, financial, and logistical hurdles. And a handful of small family foundations and private foundation staff have persisted in finding ways to move money to groups that other funders have decided are too risky to continue supporting in the current political environment.
Promising new formations have also emerged: In Our Name has succeeded in raising over $6M, primarily from individuals, to support Palestinian-led work in Palestine and diaspora work in the United States. Many of the gifts to that campaign were the first gift and/or the largest gift a donor had ever made to Palestine. In 2025, Women Donors Network launched the Woven Futures Fund, a first-of-its-kind Palestinian movement-led fund and national donor collaborative strengthening the US movement for Palestinian rights, at a historic juncture in the struggle for collective liberation.
Further, as coauthors, we each co-coordinate philanthropic formations that have emerged in the last few years to build collective power to resist increasingly repressive conditions for social justice work both in the US and around the world: F4P and the Block and Build Funder Coalition. Their mandates have focused on how the struggle for Palestinian liberation connects to many other struggles that are top of mind for progressive philanthropy. Both spaces offer opportunities for hundreds of staff from private and public foundations and funder networks to connect, learn, and explore collaborations with politically aligned peers. And F4P offers an ideal space to engage for individual donors. These groups explore and develop tools and resources aimed at deepening political education, supporting funder organizing, advising donors, and creating narrative interventions that raise and hold the bar high during a period of philanthropic caution and complicity.
This is a call to funder friends, colleagues, comrades, and fellow organizers: We implore you to connect with your allies and remember why you are here. Move beyond a focus on the limitations and join us in turning toward your power, your agency, and your capacity for courage and resilience. The more of us that commit to holding the bar high in progressive philanthropy today, the more allies we’ll have in the long struggle ahead. And we need everyone right now.
