Investing in Life: A Vision of Solidarity & Collective Liberation explores how philanthropy can become so effective in supporting transformative change that it ultimately works toward its own irrelevance—helping build a future where collective wellbeing and life itself are truly centered. Through essays, analysis, and insights from social justice movements, the series highlights the extraordinary courage of communities that organize, resist, and build alternatives in the present while laying the material foundations for thriving futures. With Palestine as a compass, the series traces the profound connections between the struggles for collective liberation and our shared commitment to life-affirming futures for all.
Philanthropy is sitting at a crossroads.
At this juncture, at a moment of deepening repression and rising authoritarianism globally, a question of existential importance emerges.
Will progressive philanthropy shift its practices to distribute money at the speed and scale needed to enable a life-affirming future for all?
Across the world, we are confronting converging crises that are no longer theoretical or distant. Entire populations are navigating genocide and war, ecological collapse, authoritarian expansion, mass displacement, racialized criminalization, economic extraction, and increasingly sophisticated systems of surveillance and technological control. And as part of this unfortunate reality, philanthropy is entangled in the drivers of these outcomes, while hoarding wealth and power in service of the few.
Will progressive philanthropy shift its practices to distribute money at the speed and scale needed to enable a life affirming future for all?
At a fundamental level, the mission of this sector is to promote the welfare of humanity and invest resources toward the public good. Yet, at a time of a polycrisis, the overall response from philanthropy remains tepid, at best.
Foundations have retreated from politically targeted movements under pressure. Philanthropic institutions have issued public statements about justice, while their endowments remain invested in industries driving war, displacement, fossil fuel extraction, surveillance, detention, and ecological devastation. Communications teams carefully calibrate neutrality, while frontline communities absorb the consequences of political silence. Funding continues to be trapped behind bureaucracy, while grantmaking timelines move slowly amid rapidly escalating crises. Further, philanthropy’s response to Palestine offers a revealing lens into how donor systems can undermine movements for liberation and justice around the world.
When an institution like the Vatican comments with more political conviction and moral clarity than the bastion of Human Rights philanthropy, we know the sector no longer appears to be rooted in its mission.
Philanthropy’s response to Palestine offers a revealing lens into how donor systems can undermine movements for liberation and justice around the world.
And yet, while philanthropy retrenches, grassroots communities continue to do what they have always done: organize, resist, adapt, and care for one another with deeply grounded politics of love, solidarity, and commitment to each other. Grassroots communities around the world are exemplifying an unwavering commitment to their mission and the communities they serve.
Mutual aid networks feed families—even as they are being abandoned by institutions. Indigenous land defenders protect ecosystems from extraction and destruction. Grassroots organizers create systems of safety against state violence. Community-led health initiatives respond where healthcare systems fail. Local educators, healers, farmers, caregivers, and movement builders sustain life under conditions many institutions would deem impossible.
Communities fighting for survival need a philanthropic sector that recognizes that all our lives are at stake, and it moves with that understanding.
Communities fighting for survival need a philanthropic sector that recognizes that all our lives are at stake, and it moves with that understanding.
Palestine Has Always Been the Canary in the Coal Mine
Since the 1990s, philanthropic interventions in Palestine have been shaped by political and economic agendas that reinforce rather than challenge Israel’s colonialist dominance. These interventions, by design, obstruct liberation rather than advance it.
Historically, and still today, grants to Palestinian civil society organizations are often politically conditioned, penalizing efforts that are rooted in liberation frameworks. The sector rewards institutionalized or corporatized models that fragment society and humanity, while demobilizing collective resistance. Humanitarian aid and philanthropy alike have entrenched dependency, mimicking a common scenario across post-colonial contexts: weakening the grassroots infrastructure that once formed the backbone of Palestinian self-determination.
In recent years, these dynamics have grown more extreme. Since October 2023, approximately $20 billion in US military aid has flowed to Israel—adding to the billions of dollars that, for several decades, have already been distributed. On top of these government investments, Jewish-identified philanthropy has raised over $2 billion for Israel since the current genocide began. Meanwhile, philanthropic institutions that claim progressive priorities have escalated their punishment of organizations aligned with Palestinian liberation, by cutting funding and pressuring grantees to stay in their lanes, by discouraging or explicitly prohibiting cross-movement solidarity.
The current moment presents a critical opportunity for philanthropic actors to collectively move toward genuinely transformative, liberatory practices that center justice, community leadership, and systemic change.
As detailed in the 2025 Funding Freedom report, funders frequently impose restrictive grant conditions and selectively fund initiatives that align with their political comfort zones. This type of selective funding undermines movement autonomy and fractures collective power. This is a crackdown that is not just financial; it also uses Palestine as a wedge issue to discipline the broader justice ecosystem. Meanwhile, Israel and its allies are advancing ever more dangerous plans: humanitarian bubbles, concentration camps, speculative real estate-driven reconstruction, and further entrenchment of genocide and occupation through securitized aid.
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Progressive Philanthropy Must Do Better: Here’s How
Despite the rising tide of global fascism and hostility, efforts to hold philanthropy accountable are steady and growing—this includes calls to redirect resources to grassroots Palestinian organizations.
The current moment presents a critical opportunity for philanthropic actors to collectively move toward genuinely transformative, liberatory practices that center justice, community leadership, and systemic change. Moving in this direction requires the sector to make a seismic shift towards embodying intentionality, humility, and deep accountability—both internally and toward their external practices—to support the movements and communities most impacted by their funding decisions.
Without these commitments, even the most well-intentioned philanthropic efforts can reinforce the very systems they hope to dismantle. This is what scholar and author Audre Lorde warned of: lasting, transformative change to dismantle the “master’s house” cannot come from the “master’s tools”—the same structures and approaches that produced the problem in the first place. Reform alone is not enough. Transformation requires rejecting the same tools that enabled the mass extraction and accumulation of wealth, embracing instead liberatory funding practices. In philanthropy, that means rejecting the entrenched logics of hierarchy, control, extraction, paternalism, and risk aversion that preserve institutional power and the status quo.
The sector itself was created through systems of inequity, and it remains shaped by them today. These extractive systems are rooted in colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperial expansion, enabling massive wealth accumulation through exploitation, theft, and dispossession of marginalized communities.
Today, philanthropic institutions hold trillions of dollars in assets, concentrated largely in countries that amassed wealth through colonial and imperial domination. In the US alone, philanthropic assets grew from roughly $1 trillion in 2019 to $1.5 trillion by 2024—all while the legally mandated annual payout for foundations remains at just 5 percent. And although foundations can increase their grantmaking to exceed this mandatory threshold, it is not a standard practice. In addition, donor-advised funds (DAFs) now hold over $250 billion in assets, which have no legal payout requirements and serve as inaccessible black boxes for private wealth management.
Accountable funder practices look like this:
- Actively pushing back against harmful power dynamics on inter-personal and institutional levels, including extractive funding and colonial legacies in philanthropy; and
- Committing to transparency, shared power, reparations, wealth redistribution, and responsiveness to communities’ evolving needs and priorities.
The good news is that there is a growing body of resources to support this shift alongside an intentional amplification of funding practices, rooted in solidarity with social justice movements. For example, the In Our Name campaign, the Funders4Palestine’s (F4P) Giving Guide, and Grassroots International’s Solidarity Philanthropy report.
F4P’s recently launched Raise the Bar tool joins those efforts, offering lessons on transformational allyship and on shifting power, resources, and decision-making to those most impacted, both in the context of Palestinian liberation and for social justice movements globally.
When We Raise the Bar for Palestine, We Raise the Bar for All of Us
As a collective of funders, we aim to lift philanthropy’s eyes to the ultimate horizon of a world where wealth and power are no longer hoarded. We challenge our peers to raise—and hold—the bar high toward building pathways to exercise shared power and true democracy in service of justice and liberation, in solidarity with Palestine and social justice movements around the world.
We created Raise the Bar as a resource, offering lessons that are broadly applicable to any funder seeking to liberate their funding practices. In this tool, Palestine is positioned as a critical lens and litmus test for philanthropic practice because it exemplifies how even the most progressive funders often fail communities resisting occupation, colonialism, and systemic violence. This recognition of Palestine as an illustrative compass is intended to strengthen our global movements for justice by not only recognizing the impact of the sector’s actions on communities, but also actively challenging philanthropic tendency to fragment struggles.
When assessing philanthropic practices and identifying the shifts that need to be made to meaningfully advance social good, a focus on the sector’s actions related to Palestine invites a deeper reckoning—one that confronts philanthropy’s complicity, recognizes past and current harms, and advances liberatory practices. This moves us toward the transformative funding that is urgently needed to build justice and systemic change.
As such, Raise the Bar helps pave the way to move from symbolic recognition among philanthropic actors toward establishing accountability and concrete practices that reinforce solidarity, reparations, and support for self-determination. It was designed to help funders and funder organizers identify and address harmful philanthropic practices, so they can support justice and liberation movements from a place of deep solidarity and authentic partnership.
It distills insights that draw from many years of practice and learning among members of F4P community and the Palestinian liberatory resourcing initiative, Rawa. It also builds on research carried out by Funding Freedom. This practice-based guide is designed to:
- Guide learning and assessment for deeper values alignment
- Offer standards for identifying harmful funding practices to build a shared accountability framework
- Shift norms and practices and build pressure for change at individual institutions and across the sector as a whole
We implore public and private foundation staff and leadership, individuals of wealth and philanthropic networks seeking to organize the philanthropic sector to consider this central question: What will it take to support philanthropy to move from words to deeds—with Palestine at the core and our shared humanity as the compass?
For more on this topic:
Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
