Justice Funders puts our values into practice through our Innovation & Action Lab. We partner with philanthropic and movement leaders to design, pilot, and scale both innovation and collective action that advance social movements.
Our current project is Movement Commons.
Movement Commons is a national campaign to re-imagine and practice transformative, regenerative, and collaborative approaches to building power and resourcing social justice movements. We bring together development staff in local cities and sites across the country to catalyze collective action that shifts practices away from scarcity and competition and towards abundance and cooperation, builds collective stewardship over our shared movement bases and resources, and promotes effective, values-driven ways to use technology as a means to nourish and support the political journeys of everyday people.
Justice Funders believes that a just and thriving world cannot be achieved if institutional philanthropy is constrained by its ingrained practices that uphold the accumulation of wealth and power, while perpetuating systemic social and economic inequality. We recognize that philanthropic capital has been — and continues to be — accumulated through the extraction of wealth from low-income communities and communities of color. Therefore, we believe that philanthropy must undergo a deep, systems-level transformation whereby financial assets are redistributed to the communities most impacted by injustice by transferring the management and control of those resources to social justice movements that are advancing racial and economic justice.
It is when movements — rather than philanthropic institutions — have the economic power and self-determination over how resources are allocated, that they can leverage their political and cultural power toward advancing systemic change for a Just Transition.
To take responsibility for supporting our movements to build intentional practices and infrastructure to collectively steward those resources, Justice Funders is cultivating deep collaboration among social justice movement organizations, rooted in abundance and cooperation, to develop transformative approaches for raising and stewarding resources that build power for movement ecosystems.
Institutional philanthropy does very little to disrupt this pattern, positioning groups in competition with one another for resources, demanding more time and attention with them and seldom allocating resources toward cross-organizational capacity building or collaboration.
In particular, supporter engagement is now defined by three pervasive factors:
Movement Commons engages development staff in local movement ecosystems across the country to shift from transactional to transformational fundraising practices.
Our model is unique because we focus on development staff as powerful change agents, who have the ability to build practices and infrastructure for collective stewarding of movement resources in ways that build power for movement ecosystems.
Movements Commons helps to transform social movements in the following ways:
1. Movement Commons convenes and cultivates deep collaboration among social movement resource mobilizers.
2. Movement Commons promotes new models and provides direct technical assistance to movement-building organizations to move from transactional to transformative engagement with individual supporters, particularly small and mid-size donors.
Through Movement Commons, Justice Funders seeks to nurture a nationally connected network of development staff of movement building organizations across the country that are building a collaborative infrastructure to both collectively steward the commons and launch powerful cross-organizational interventions and campaigns.