When President Donald Trump issued an order encouraging the Department of Justice to investigate the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundation in September 2025, it became clear that even large, traditional grantmakers known for their conservative, top-down approaches were not immune to politically motivated attacks. In response, over 180 philanthropies signed a joint a statement condemning “acts of political violence” while defending their freedom of speech, although many had already been quietly protecting themselves from Trump by pulling their support for grassroots movement organizations.
In one recent instance, the Asian American abolitionist organization 18 Million Rising lost a quarter of its annual budget after a major funder, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, objected to a single Instagram post in solidarity with Palestine. The organization recovered the loss of funding by relying on its community of support, including other major donors who align with their stance. This is just one example of how authoritarian power in the United States is increasingly destabilizing philanthropic funding for left organizations, even as organizing to protect and expand funding for movement work is growing. Their funder—which had previously been a supporter of left organizations—is now closing its doors and will wind down by 2028.
When we talk about organizing money, we are talking about taking fundraising seriously as an organizing vehicle, but we’re also thinking beyond it. While the concept of “donor organizing” has recently become a buzzword, a key shift underway is moving organizations beyond focusing on what gifts can be secured to how wealth can be more strategically organized and leveraged in service of movement goals.
As the right expands and consolidates their power, leftists must be strategic about the kind of money required to mount a serious counterforce and be fearless about organizing that money. This means rethinking wealth and how we deploy it, moving away from the status quo. Every aspect of the processes and relationships surrounding how wealth is managed and distributed can be challenged—from within and without philanthropy—using the kind of leadership development, campaign and organizing tools that movements know so well.
Wealth as an Organizing Tool
We are two longtime anti-capitalist movement organizers who have somewhat surprised ourselves by shifting the focus of our work into organizing money and thinking about how mobilizing money—across class divides—is a key component of movement work overall. We arrived at this conclusion through different paths, but are both very aware how relationships to money are fraught in all kinds of structural and cultural ways for people from every class position, including those of us engaged in movement work.
Of course, leveraging wealth as an organizing tool is rife with contradictions and challenges. We philosophically and strategically believe that both wealthy and non-wealthy donors can be active—but not dominant—constituents of movement ecosystems. At the same time, we recognize that class-privileged donors who participate in movements have to grapple with the extractive racial capitalism that is almost always at the root of wealth and its transfer over generations. This is not a matter of guilt or shame but a motivation to think seriously and collectively about how wealth can be transferred back to community control and, in that process, foster the flexibility and growth of those movements that are working to build a different world. It’s also an opportunity for wealthy people to confront the corrosive costs of individualistic wealth culture.
Luckily, there are now several organizations, including the Solidaire Network, the Center for Economic Democracy, and Jewish Investor Network, among others, that envision a world liberated from capitalism and are doing significant experimental work to support people and organizations. Aside from deploying their wealth in accordance with that vision, they are also supporting their peers to do the same and creating models of how to do so.
While there are numerous emotional, cultural, and logistical barriers for people with wealth to align their money with their values, it is possible. We can see examples in the stories of class traitors across decades of donor organizing, like those profiled in the anthology Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People. Looking at wealth and how to engage and deploy it holistically is an emerging field, with all sorts of creative experiments in motion. The Movement Finance Forum, for example, held an inaugural gathering in 2025 to cultivate strategic coordination between movements, funders, investors, and capital strategy practitioners who are moving toward community control over wealth. There are a number of projects in process fostering the tools needed to facilitate the just transition of wealth—from divestment screens to collective shareholder advocacy and investments in regenerative economies.
In donor circles committed to leftist organizing, we are seeing mobilizers leverage wealth as a tool for a range of strategic actions. This includes campaigning for collective divestment from harmful corporations invested in weapons and fossil fuels, engaging in shareholder advocacy to create public and private pressure, and making demands of political officials in support of wealth redistribution measures, such as housing justice campaigns that limit landlord power.
A recent innovation is donor networks and movement organizations that encourage high-net wealth progressives and leftists to map their relationships to those in power and to better understand how their proximity to centers of power can serve our movement objectives. One such example is pressuring corporations to end their collaboration with ICE from unique angles.
Money, Power, and Contradictions
Understanding the reluctance to think about money as a crucial part of organizing is key to building power across social classes. Many of us associate “organizing money” with wealth and feel excluded and intimidated—rightfully so—due to personal experience and historical use of wealth to control, suppress, and oppress communities. This makes sense. Our economic system is rigged, extractive, and exploitative.
Of course, wealthy donors, from foundations to individuals, have also often exerted power and control over movements. Most wealthy individuals and organizations are giving away fractions of their wealth, while still multiplying what they hold onto through investments. While foundations are required to give away 5 percent of their assets, they generally continue to use the other 95 percent to maximize their profits, often through investments in the very corporations that the movements they fund are trying to fight.
The same is true of individual donors, though they don’t have the same five percent requirements. What does it mean to be invested in Chevron while supporting the water defenders of Standing Rock? Or holding stock in Palantir (which is supplying both ICE and the IDF with the data to commit their crimes), while supporting the people of Minnesota? For those who have access to the stock market, even if it’s only through retirement funds, it can be difficult to disentangle investments from the kind of indexed funds that most people are invested in. It takes knowledge and tenacity to align your wealth with your values.
For movement organizers, our opposition to capitalism and the damage it has incurred on our lands and peoples can obscure the reality that anti-capitalist movements still need funding. Vu Le, author of Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy: Unlocking the Full Potential of a Vital and Complex Sector put it this way recently:
Because we see how awful capitalism is, it’s understandable that people would recoil at the thought of using money, the symbol and vehicle for capitalism, to solve many of the problems directly caused by capitalism. We often bring up Audre Lorde’s quote “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But here’s the thing, while we’re debating the merits and morality of money, the right-wing has been using it without qualm, and extremely effectively. To the right, money is just a tool to accomplish their goals.
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We hope that by sharing the story of our hard-earned lessons as organizers engaging with money, even when it feels uncomfortable, we can spark necessary conversations about how to unabashedly integrate this set of tactics into our movement toolboxes.
Organize Money Across Class
Chanelle: “Twenty-five years ago, I held my first legal defense fundraiser in a working-class queer bar. Tickets were only $5-$10—exactly what I was comfortable asking for as a working class organizer. A few months later I organized another fundraiser for the fund, this time in a ritzy gay cocktail bar where tickets were ten times more expensive, and in one evening, we raised as much money as I would earn in that entire year. Both times, the room vibrated with hundreds of queer people who enthusiastically wanted to give us their money so we would continue to defend our communities from the police. But the success was also confusing. Was it okay for us to ask for (and get) so much money? How should we fundraise people from such radically different class backgrounds? How should we pay for our activist movements?
Since that introduction to fundraising, I’ve made my peace with money and become fearless and strategic about it, so I could get millions to frontline organizers. In that time, I’ve known many working-class organizers who would sooner risk arrest at a protest than ask a wealthy person for a $5000 gift. Now I live for a juicy conversation about money and leveraging its power. I train organizers on raising money, and I work with wealthy progressives who are struggling with the enormous (and real) responsibility of their wealth, confused about how much money they actually need, and navigating the tricky terrain of family and money. Getting clear about money and power through support and training allows them to make big impacts on the world, while also settling into more peace and purpose around money, within themselves and with their families.
As the base-building lead of Resource Movement, Jon McPhedran-Waitzer recently shared with me the following: ‘Historically rich people are moved into action by fights for democracy, and I’m seeing a significant number of rich people radicalizing. I think we have a generational opportunity to bring them deeper into movement work or further up the ladder of engagement. But they need political education on their stakes in the fight against fascism and culturally specific support on divesting from wealth culture.’
What I’ve learned over 25 years in movement is that most activists experience some confusion about how we should relate to money or are intimidated by its power. I also know that we all win when organizers meet people where they’re at, through support, compassion and strategy around money.
Align Wealth with Values
Rebecca: “As Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for ten years, I thought a lot about money—how to raise enough of it, what could be done with it, and what couldn’t be done without it. JVP has always approached fundraising as a form of organizing, with a paid membership model and a large number of small donors who are also active members.
But even with this orientation, and even as someone who thinks of myself primarily as an organizer, I wasn’t yet thinking of wealth as a key pillar that needed to be contested and organized.
In the more traditional sense, donor organizing is like any other organizing—donors invite their friends, familles, and colleagues to join them in supporting organizations, just the way organizers bring in new members. But in the case of Palestine, there were overt and unspoken limits to that organizing within philanthropy and donor networks. For example, even in the early 2020s within even progressive foundations it was acceptable to talk about Israel’s occupation, but not about Zionism itself. Smear campaigns, legal threats, specious accusations of antisemitism, and whisper networks extracted a cost that made donors of all types wary of funding work for Palestinian freedom. The well-funded and well-organized opposition, meanwhile, was not only seeding and funding support for Israel, but the tactics to repress our movement.
Clearly, if we are playing to win, money is a crucial piece of the puzzle. And as any good organizer knows, you need people with skin in the game to organize effectively. So who better to challenge philanthropy to shift their practices than donors themselves?
Palestine is just one example. Behind every radical movement—from indigenous sovereignty to climate or reproductive justice to prison abolition—there is a struggle to move funders beyond support of palatable reforms towards fundamental change.
This revelation led to a new project Funding Freedom, to test out strategies to organize and challenge philanthropy to support Palestinian liberation. We started running funder cohorts around the same time that student encampments were urging their universities to disclose and divest in line with the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which led our cohort to focus on the divest/invest framework. Learning more about the divest/invest framework with our cohort helped me understand how we shouldn’t just be considering the funding that donors give to movement organizations, which is generally a fraction of their wealth. Not only can donors be challenged to make sure their own portfolios aren’t profiting from corporations actively harming our movements, but they can themselves be transformed from passive givers to active participants in movements, utilizing their assets to be brought into the service of movements through tactics such as collective divestment and shareholder advocacy.
Enabling a Vision for a Liberated Future
These principles can sound abstract, but there are impressive cases in progress that model an entirely different relationship between philanthropy and the movements they support. For example, the Kataly Foundation—even as it spends its significant wealth down—has transformed every aspect of its operation and is transparently sharing what that looks like with funders and movement organizations. Beyond just resourcing partner organizations at scale, they are prioritizing dignity, trust, and relationships with partners at every level, from due diligence to grants management. At the same time, they are using the tools of divestment and shareholder advocacy to make sure they are not profiting from the forces that they are pledged to fight.
The Kataly example illustrates that it is possible for donors and philanthropy to play an essential role in making the bold, creative, power-building work of movements sustainable, abundant, and free to set their own political horizons. These kinds of experiments can be replicated and scaled up.
At a moment of such perilous danger for our cities, our country, and our world, we need to fight for power in every way possible. If we’re not taking seriously the obligation to organize those with wealth, we are leaving power on the table. We are missing crucial opportunities to strengthen our movements by returning wealth accumulated through extractive practices into the hands of communities where it belongs.
