Why Now is the Time to Fund Solidarity

Funders can create lasting change by supporting relationship and trust building among social justice movements.

Since taking office in January, the new administration has issued a barrage of policies and executive orders threatening essential American values such as free speech, equality, and checks and balances. This onslaught threatens decades of progress on racial and gender equity, climate justice, and other pressing social issues.

Nonprofit organizations, movement lawyers, and grassroots organizers are quickly stepping in to protect hard-fought civil and human rights. But limited resources often force them to work in silos and with little or no collaboration.

To challenge growing authoritarianism, protect past gains, and continue making progress, philanthropies must provide funding that creates time and space for leaders and organizers to form deep, long-term relationships across movements.

What is transformative solidarity and why do we need it?

Deepa Iyer of Building Movement Project, a strategist who has helped shape our grantmaking, defines “transformative solidarity” as a method of building relationships that support ongoing learning and joint organizing while nurturing trust, risk-taking, and mutual accountability. Unlike transactional partnerships, this vision of solidarity prioritizes building, maintaining, and deepening relationships. In the process, people evolve together in ways that create stronger movements that can withstand opposition and practice healthy conflict resolution.

Transformative relationships are the foundation of transformative work. During the 1960s civil rights movement, faith-rooted organizers in Black communities issued a clear call to action for advocates and people of faith to join their campaign for racial equality. That solidarity produced hard-fought civil rights victories at the local and national levels and, over time, continued tipping the scales toward justice for all.

Transformative solidarity continues today through the multiracial, multifaith movements to protect and restore reproductive rights, as well as efforts to protect Medicaid—struggles that have taken on fresh urgency in recent months. When transformative solidarity guides a movement, leaders work together consistently over time and their focus evolves as priorities shift.

Efforts to resource transformative solidarity

Recognizing the power that philanthropies can build by investing in transformative solidarity, the Proteus Fund recently launched the Solidarity Collaborative with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The fund supports a cohort of social justice leaders in building action-centered solidarity relationships with one another. The program provides resources for private convenings, the development of a solidarity project to further mutual goals, and coaching from the Building Movement Project. The Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, JPB Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Righteous Persons Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Fetzer Institute have joined us in supporting this work.

The Solidarity Collaborative launched at a pivotal time for members of the inaugural cohort. “This political landscape will challenge solidarity as particular organizations and groups are targeted and at risk,” said collaborative member Jamie Beran of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. “There is a real opportunity for collaboration between cohort members to demonstrate our unwillingness to be divided.”

The collaborative is designing projects that will leverage solidarity to tackle urgent social issues. For example, as immigration policies separate families and incite fear throughout communities, some cohort members plan to work together across races, faiths, and regions to provide political education, reverse discriminatory policies, and advance positive narratives about immigrant families.

Overcoming barriers to practicing transformative solidarity

Transformative solidarity doesn’t just happen. While building the Solidarity Collaborative, we identified three actions funders must take to cultivate transformative solidarity across movements:

• Help leaders build on solidarity formed in times of crisis. The crises that the new administration created during its first 100 days in office led to a spike in solidarity statements and actions. “I’m seeing more solidarity now than I’ve seen in the past 15 years,” said cohort member Dom Kelly of New Disabled South. “People increasingly recognize how attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion are attacks on disability justice.” Philanthropies must fund efforts to build solidarity as crises are happening to increase impact. For transformative solidarity to take hold, we must also fund solidarity beyond the immediate crisis. This is the most effective way to nurture long-term relationships that are based on deep trust and grounded in shared values.

• Invest in long-term solidarity infrastructure. Leaders say they need more than rapid-response, emergency funding. They need time and space to build deep partnerships across movements. Long-term funding is what ultimately builds time to shape stronger narratives and policy agendas that lead to lasting impact. By investing in long-term infrastructure and providing leaders with the time and space needed to build cross-movement relationships, funders can support leaders in developing common language and narratives, a shared policy agenda, time and space to convene, and rapid-response mechanisms that allow transformative solidarity to take hold and evolve over time.

• Practice what we preach by breaking down silos in philanthropy. Many foundations focus on specific issue areas and become trapped in silos that limit their imagination and collective power. In this way, philanthropies mirror and exacerbate the same challenges their grantees face. By creating long-term infrastructure for solidarity within philanthropy, funders can strengthen the quality and impact of their funding practices while also providing mutual support and protection against rising political threats to the sector.
   

This funding approach, like transformative solidarity itself, cannot wait. As cohort member Kelly said, “This political climate requires us to break out of our issue silos and find ways to work and be together to fight for liberation. I want to be able to call on my fellow cohort members, or they call on me, to respond in critical moments and ensure we have a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-disabled and nondisabled coalition leading this fight.”

Funders must create the conditions that build and sustain these coalitions. This starts with nurturing diverse leaders with common values who are ready to respond to challenges instead of reacting. This is how we can protect the progress our ancestors fought for and won.

About the Authors

Terrance Pitts is program director of the Solidarity Collaborative at Proteus Fund, a philanthropic intermediary that connects funders to the frontlines of social justice to advance racial, gender, queer, and disability justice, as well as an inclusive, fully representative democracy.

Rachele Tardi, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focuses on supporting leadership to advance health and racial equity.