Fundraising as Democracy: Honoring a Legacy, Claiming Our Moment

From the nation’s founding, communities in this country have fought for the power to govern themselves—and fought to extend that promise to everyone it excluded. The Declaration of Independence promised liberty and justice for all and delivered it to the very few. But people didn’t wait. They organized.

Two hundred and fifty years of that organizing looks like this: Black fraternal orders and mutual aid societies founded in the colonial era—the African Union Society, the Sons of Africa, the Prince Hall Masons—that provided pensions for widows, aid for the poor, and fuel for the abolitionist movement, even as states passed laws to ban them. It looks like mutualistas in Mexican American communities across the Southwest after 1848, pooling resources to help newcomers settle, preserve culture, fight segregation, and build schools. It looks like Indigenous peoples practicing giveaways and potlatches as forms of community bonding and shared prosperity—a vision of philanthropy rooted not in charity to the other, but in recognition of the interdependence between giver and receiver.

As Lisa Durán’s research has shown, philanthropy in communities of color has a long and vibrant history, shaped by the traditions of immigrant homelands and the shared experience of struggle. Reclaiming that history is essential to understanding who has always held this democracy together.

The growing consolidation of wealth and power is fueling authoritarianism, and the roles that social justice fundraisers play— mobilizing resources, reclaiming wealth for the common good, rebuilding civic life, and restoring our democracy—matter more than ever.

Kim Klein and Stephanie Roth, who recently announced the winding down of their fundraising consulting firm, have spent decades lifting up this critical work. Through the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, and the Money for Our Movements conference, they trained generations of fundraisers to see the role differently: not as the “charity”-money people in organizations, but as people who mobilized many others to bring their resources to the struggle—and they communicated the significance of that struggle as part of dismantling the intersecting systems of oppression across race, class, and gender that shape our economy, our society, and the nonprofit sector itself.

By supporting everyday people—in the thousands, over decades—to mobilize resources through grassroots fundraising, GIFT also changed the demographics of who was typically the paid development staff, with many poor and working-class folks of color holding those leadership roles. The Grassroots Fundraising Journal continued to offer an organizer mindset and methods for fundraising for over 37 years, helping so many of us to gain experience and train others by sharing the practical experiences of raising money within communities and movements.

I didn’t set out to become a fundraiser. I came to it accidentally, when the recession hit in 2008 and nonprofits were among the few organizations hiring, desperately needing to raise money just to survive. But I came to the work already radicalized, shaped by the 2004 Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex conference at UCSB, where I first encountered the idea that big philanthropy is itself a symptom of the exploitative systems our movements are fighting. Finding Klein and Roth’s work gave me a framework for holding both truths at once: that fundraising could be a site of contradiction and a site of power.

Today, as Klein and Rogth wind down their consulting practice, we want to honor their legacy and build from it. The stakes have never been higher. The growing consolidation of wealth and power is fueling authoritarianism, and the roles that social justice fundraisers play—mobilizing resources for a just transition, reclaiming wealth for the common good, rebuilding civic life, and restoring our democracy—matter more than ever.

The beauty of people who fundraise is that we are many. We exist inside and outside of the nonprofit industrial complex. We are parents holding restaurant nights for our kids’ schools, neighbors passing the hat after a family’s house fire, faith communities tithing to keep their doors open and their pantries stocked. We are the mutual-aid networks that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the government fell short and communities stepped in to feed, house, and heal each other. We are also the professional fundraisers working inside organizations to move resources toward justice. But fundraising is not a profession so much as a practice—one that has always belonged to everyone.

Fundraisers don’t just know how to ask. They know why to ask: they carry deep knowledge of the issues, the communities, and the political moment that should be shaping organizational strategy from the inside out. Within social justice organizations, the most successful campaigns happen because fundraising is not delegated to a back room but integrated as a core strategy.

This America 250 moment is ours to claim. Since the nation’s founding, people have come together—across race, class, and generational divides—to create the thriving communities we need.

Whatever form it takes—whether at the strategy table or in the community—the act of pooling resources carries the same underlying conviction: that for every right we have, we also have a responsibility to each other, to the land we share, to the communities that came before us, and to the ones yet to come. We pool our resources to ensure our communities are safe, our schools have books, our families have healthcare, our neighborhoods can recover from climate disasters, and that all of us have dignified livelihoods. This is not charity. It is democracy at work. And democracy works best when everyone chips in—proportionally, progressively, according to what they have.

Fundraisers are among the most essential practitioners. They remind us of the fundamental value of love and care for one another and for the land we live on—the basis of a democracy that is truly just and equitable. And fundraisers across social justice movements are ensuring that resources flow not only toward immediate material needs but also toward restoring civic life and achieving a popular democracy.

This America 250 moment is ours to claim. Since the nation’s founding, people have come together—across race, class, and generational divides—to create the thriving communities we need. Those stories won’t tell themselves. Fundraisers are part of how these stories get told and how they get funded. At their core, fundraisers are doing the work of reclaiming economic power for all people. Every day, we make the case that everyone chips in according to what they have. In doing so, we build the culture and the constituency for something larger: a democracy where progressive taxation funds the systems that meet our collective needs. That is the vision Kim Klein and Stephanie Roth handed us. It is ours to carry forward—and to win.