Community organizers and leaders have long stressed the need for philanthropy to make greater investments in nonprofits’ infrastructure. Despite this, many organizations, particularly those that are led by people of color and engage in the vital but often thankless work of movement organizing, don’t receive sufficient funding support overall, much less for capacity-building and organizational development. Now, with a “historic” commitment, a major funder is broadening its work to fill that need in the Golden State.
The California Endowment (TCE) recently announced an $85 million investment to fund the creation of the Movement Innovation Collaborative, a statewide effort looking to catalyze infrastructure support. Developed by organizers and movement leaders, the collaborative aims to create interconnected networks to strengthen and scale power-building organizations to create lasting, transformational change in California. It is the largest single investment in TCE’s history.
Funding for the Movement Innovation Collaborative comes from TCE’s $300 million social bond, which it issued in 2021. Shortly after George Floyd’s death, TCE’s board came together to discuss how the foundation could address racial injustice in the U.S., as well as the ongoing pandemic. The foundation made the decision to issue the social bond to move more money to grantee partners without having to reduce its regular grant commitments. TCE’s social bond followed in the footsteps of other big funders making similar moves at the time, most notably the Ford Foundation.
“We decided we wanted to invest the lion’s share of resources in what movement building organizations and community organizers have been asking for from philanthropy for a long time, which is infrastructure support,” said Dr. Robert K. Ross, TCE’s outgoing president and CEO.
As TCE stands up its new collaborative, marginalized communities in the state are facing a series of intersecting crises, including around housing, health education, food affordability, living wage jobs, clean air and water, and the impending threat of climate change, all of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. According to Miya Yoshitani, co-executive director of the Movement Innovation Collaborative, these crises prompted community leaders and organizers to come together. Although organizers have made some progress in the state, there hasn’t been enough work to build up the organizing capacity of communities, which is necessary to achieve transformational change.
“We’ve been investing in power-building work,” Ross said, citing as examples victories in expanding California’s Medicaid program to undocumented families and the reduction of juvenile incarceration in the state. “It’s democracy at its best, and in our view and in my view, the work of community organizers and grassroots leaders is the most important work in the nation. It’s undervalued. It’s underappreciated. But the only way we’re going to get to a thriving, multiracial democracy in this nation is through the work of community organizers and systems change.”
Trust-based philanthropy
To set the work in motion, TCE worked with some of its leading grantee partners who do community organizing and movement-building work for health, equity and social justice to better understand what this infrastructure funding should look like. During an 18-month planning process, the endowment engaged with more than 500 community members and organizers from across the state through convenings, conversations, interviews and surveys to gain a better grasp on the issues organizations were facing. Participants reported a need for greater support for leadership development, convenings, strategic communications, narrative change, and healing and restoration.
Organizations that participated in the planning process include AAPIs for Civic Engagement, Black Equity Collective, California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Indigenous Circle of Wellness, Khmer Girls in Action, Million Voters Project and the Transgender Strategy Center. On top of TCE’s main commitment, additional funding for the design process and core strategy pilot was provided by the James Irvine Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, the McCune Foundation, the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and the Weingart Foundation.
“For us, it really was an exercise in trust-based philanthropy when you invite those that are closest to the work at the grassroots level to inform our grantmaking strategies,” Ross said. “And in this case, we really turned the keys to that care over to community organizers to inform us about how we should support their work.”
This isn’t TCE’s first foray into trust-based funding. Between 2010 and 2020, one of its signature programs was Building Healthy Communities, a $1 billion initiative to address health disparities in 14 vulnerable communities through power-building, advocating for statewide policy change and narrative change. Building Healthy Communities also sought to address social determinants of health and promote racial and health equity.
“What we learned is that the more we paid attention to the strategic wisdom of grassroots leaders, the better our impacted results were,” Ross said. “So the more we trusted their insights and wisdom from a strategic vantage, the more incredible the results for systems change and policy change were.”
At the same time, Ross said, trust-based philanthropy was becoming “part of the lexicon” of philanthropy, particularly in progressive philanthropy. TCE decided that was the path forward and expects its incoming president and CEO, Brenda Solórzano, will help the foundation go even further down that path when she takes the reins in September.
Taking collective action
According to the Movement Innovation Collaborative, California power-building organizations face a number of challenges that keep them from having the impact they want. These include insufficient and inconsistent funding, worker burnout, isolation and siloed learning, as well as a lack of scale, connectedness and coordination.
To make a dent in those problems, the Movement Innovation Collaborative is focusing on five core strategies, which were created with the input of power-building partners, community members and organizational leaders from across the state.
The strategies are: (1) movement strategy and innovation, which will create spaces for learning, evaluating, problem-solving and innovation to advance power-building; (2) intergenerational leadership development; (3) a statewide hub for programming and training resources, as well as shared learning and spaces to align and scale regional efforts; (4) healing justice and sustainable work culture; and (5) a network of community-owned regional innovation centers which will provide physical spaces where people can gather.
“The real heart of this work is about building support for people… all across California to be able to take collective action to transform the state for the better,” Yoshitani said. “We want people to be able to have the places where they and their neighbors and their families and their friends… can come together and dream and plan how they want their communities to be in service to their most critical needs and to build the communities that reflect the health and wellbeing of future generations.”
The only way to reach that level of transformation, she said, is to build stronger and more resilient organizing and power-building infrastructure in the state.
Yoshitani hopes that the collaborative’s efforts will draw thousands more organizers into the power-building space, and that new, durable and resilient community organizations will grow across the state, especially in underresourced regions like the Central Valley, the Inland Empire and the Central Coast of California — essentially everywhere outside the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
In addition to increasing the capacity of movement-building organizations and helping train more community organizers, TCE also hopes that the collaborative can serve as a national model.
“When you invest in the agency of grassroots organizations and communities and build their power and you do so in the spirit of full inclusion and belonging, you get systems change,” Ross said.
He added that the proposal’s approval was an emotional moment for TCE’s board. “I’ve never seen anything like that… It was unanimous [with] everyone saying ‘aye,’ and there were a lot of tears in the room, recognizing the hard work of those movement-building leaders and having the opportunity to design something that our board was enthusiastically and unanimously supportive of,” Ross said. “So it was a very powerful moment and probably the highlight of my career in philanthropy.”
