“Most of the easy ways are the wrong ways.”
Part 2 of my interview with Ludovic Blain.
What a time! The surge of momentum and energy unleashed since Biden dropped out has been massive. I’m feeling it, especially as I read about 44,000 Black women who joined a Zoom call on Sunday that lasted until midnight and raised $1.5 million. And then I read about the 53,000 Black men who raised over 1.3 million on Monday and the 10,000 white people who showed up on a call to defeat MAGA that same night.1 Wow!
To be clear: Nothing is guaranteed. There is so much more organizing, door-knocking, phone-banking and fundraising to do. As Billy Wimsatt from Movement Voter Project (MVP) wrote in a recent email, here are our marching orders: 1. Fund local organizing like our life depends on it. 2. Get out the vote in swing states. 3. Rally your networks to do the same.
Ok. Back to our original programming!
Friends, this one is a doozy. Chock full of timely and provocative reflections. Part 2 of my interview with Ludovic Blain, Executive Director of California Donor Table, one of the longest tenured groups funding the working class, people of color led ground game (and power building efforts) we need to win. Want to read Part 1? Click here.
For ease of reading, here is a summary of the topics covered:
Thoughts on ‘following the movement’ in philanthropy
The role of CDT in strategy development, moving more support to groups after they win, and how to help create a healthy regional ecosystem.
Keeping wealthy donors committed and backing long-haul strategies.
The challenges in creating multiracial coalitions as well as multiracial communities of wealthy donors.
The impact of super rich donors, reflections on big philanthropy and the benefits of organizing individual wealthy people rather than foundations.
Winning elections is not enough; improving our ability to wield power and govern.
150-year vision of success in a declining empire.
All right. Let’s jump in.
MG: How do you think about the balance between following and leading as a funder? As a young white inheritor, I was given strict marching orders, “You follow movement! Give them money and get out of the way!” You’re a working-class Black immigrant from the Bronx. That’s not how you roll. From what I’ve seen, you and CDT have played a more active role in setting strategy and shaping the agenda. Can you talk for a moment about how you navigate that question.
LB: Nowadays many of us in both institutional philanthropy and donor organizing are not floating above or separate from our grantees. I’ll be more explicit — we’re no longer wealthy white straight men and women. We are directly impacted by injustice and have experience fighting against it. I am Black in Alameda County, my wife is Latina, and our son is Afro-Latino. He goes to public schools. Our household is mostly immigrant. I have skin in the game in many ways. I have a personal stake in the political outcomes in my neighborhood, region and state. I am getting pulled over by cops. I am invested in how my son is treated in his public school. I care about the safety net for the elders who live with us.
Given that being true of me and my staff, I am comfortable that CDT engages with our grantees in more than just an arms length funding transaction. We aim for more of a symmetric accountability based on shared values, landscape analyses, and the emotional maturity needed to work through the hard stuff.
I also want to challenge this idea, or at least a simplistic reading of the idea that ‘philanthropy should follow the lead of movement’.
I think it’s so important to find out, who is this ‘movement’ philanthropy is referring to? Who is deciding who is in or out of ‘the movement’?
If it’s the wealthy donors (or foundation staff) picking the leaders they’ll follow by deciding that ‘the movement’ is last year’s grantees, I'm not buying that definition…just like when politicians pick their own constituents, we oppose that and call that gerrymandering. And if ‘the movement’ as selected by funders is a bunch of left organizations with more rhetoric than base, that won’t bring about liberation. Because the reason these groups are able to be so left is they are small enough to maintain unchallenged ideological purity…by not allowing in, nor engaging with, the community members that don’t agree with them.
If unions and progressive elected officials, both of whom are elected (and funded) by large bases, are not amongst the folk we are listening to and following, philanthropy won’t succeed. Neither can ignore dissenting voices easily, they have to engage them and at least neutralize them if not change their minds.
I’m unwilling to blindly follow a set of organizations that may or may not represent a real base of community power and support. And that’s because I absolutely believe that wealthy progressives should align their philanthropy and activism with a strategy that centers multiracial working class power building.
MG: Where and when do you intervene on strategy development and where do you say, you know, “you all you need to figure this out, that's not my role as your funder”?
LB: We don't tell people which policy/initiative/candidate campaigns to work on. But we do tell them they need to make decisions on certain things, either way. And sometimes we have the responsibility to tell them that the reality is we have money to do this thing, and not another thing. And you can do what you want, but we don’t have money for every activity.2
On the policy or initiative or candidate, or other short term outcome, we’re not weighing in. Even when we’re helping groups start up and I find myself temporarily on the board, I haven’t taken a vote on those topics.
What I will press on is to really know, what is your capacity? What is it going to take for you to meet your goals? And what do you think is next? I want to know for the sake of the organization, to be able to share with other groups and to help guide my team.
Of course, sometimes we piss people off by shifting money to new strategies. For example, in 2012 we realized we were helping progressive, mostly people of color, win races but the c3 funding ecosystem was not helping them after they win. Groups we fund have had a number of electoral successes who’s post-election c3 progressive governance needs were ignored by foundations. In numerous cases, the unmitigated backlash from these electoral victories led to recall campaigns and other forms of attacks. Recent Bay area examples include SF DA Boudin, Alameda DA Price, State Senator Wahab, and Antioch councilmember Torres Walker, just to name a few. So we shifted money to helping progressive elected officials govern by supporting organizations like Local Progress, Legislative Progressive Caucus and Center for Policy Initiatives. The groups that had won and then been unable to support their candidates sufficiently post election were ecstatic. At the same time, that was hard for the groups that are trying to win races and getting less from us for that. But we have some information that they don’t. We’ve seen that if you win, it sucks if there’s no ongoing support. And we want to change that dynamic.
The core thing is that we always push for a collaborative approach. We try to get groups who are in the same region not to have to compete with each other for our money. We're asking the groups to come up with a plan together, which we would fund. We don’t want to be saying “hey, we have money for three groups. The ten of you should compete with each other to apply to us.” We want them to be like, “Hey, if we got $500,000, you tell us how we should split it up? How would our larger crew of organizations be more likely to win if we got that money?” That's the conversation we’re trying to incentivize on the practitioner side.
And to get to that place takes training on the philanthropic and individual donor side. By making the foundations and individual donors actually collaborate, they come to know how shitty of an experience it can be and how much resources it takes. They learn that most of your meetings are not kumbaya. So then the funders don't have unfair expectations of the grantees to be like “You had one meeting. Why didn’t you figure it all out?” Instead the donors are hopefully like, “Well, damn, we had ten meetings and we didn't figure anything out, and we have enough money to have as many meetings as we want. So we're going to fund you all for at least 11. We don't expect you to be more efficient than us. And if you are, then you just have some additional funds in your grant to use as you like.”
MG: I assume it wasn't always easy to keep these wealthy donors engaged in a long term process where they're losing elections. What have you done to keep the wealthy folks in it for the long haul?
LB: First, from the beginning of CDT, we had some collective understanding amongst the donors and amongst the groups that it was going to be a long term thing. It also was true that we had far fewer donors when we were losing consistently, even though we were losing forward.3 We had to train donors to know we were going to lose for a while and stick with it anyway. We just had to be honest. Sometimes we got unexpected wins, sometimes we got unexpectedly crushed. I think we just built a community of groups and donors who realized that it was on all of us, together, to figure out what to do next. There was no one from DC or from some other place or state that was going to come and save us.
And, as we began to win, we got more buy-in. We could show a track record of success and more wealthy people learned what we were doing and jumped in.
MG: Are there any other reflections you’d like to share on this work generally?
LB: Most (wealthy) donors are white and the country is becoming more and more majority people of color. And more political contestation isn't just between white folks and people of color anymore, it’s also amongst people of color. More and more, doing this work requires racial understanding 501, if not 701. Creating multiracial coalitions that we need to win is going to continue to be very complicated and uncomfortable for everyone, including people of color. I think people should expect messiness, lack of clear ways forward, and very few kumbaya meetings. Almost every step will be hard. Worth it, but almost drudgery. We are making this road by walking.
If you look around and it looks pretty neat, then you should examine whether you're on the right path. There's no easy way. Actually, most of the easy ways are the wrong way. So if you're on an easy way, that's likely the wrong way. A lot of what is needed right now is grace. This moment requires what I would broadly call Rockwoodian interventions on maturity. Can we maintain our adult maturity while having all these complicated, de-centering, discombobulating experiences along the way? And if that's what's happening in your work and in our movement building, it might not feel okay, but it's probably actually okay.
Another thing that we haven't quite talked about is how the racial distribution of wealth in this country impacts donor organizing. We have a lot of wealthy white folks who are not really accountable to anybody, so they can literally fund whatever they want (for good and bad). Many wealthy people of color are in a different situation. Their wealth might be mostly due to their income, so they’re accountable and dependent on the wealthier person who’s paying them. Or they don’t own all of their wealth, the bank or other lenders do. So they are vulnerable to leverage because other rich people or institutions could cut them off for spite or ideological reasons.
So it’s a weird thing that actually we have sets of white folks who are more able to be ideologically bold with their wealth, and are motivated to do that because maybe they don’t like their grand-parent who made the wealth in an oppressive way. They are able to do both the right thing (take a progressive stand) and also do the rebelling thing at the same time. A win-win for them!
Whereas for the people of color with wealth, they’re often new money, so it's their kids who might be the leftist rebel, but the money hasn’t passed to them yet. The older generations are still in charge, and they are more conservative ideologically because they’ve had to be to get the money in the first place. And wealthy people of color are likely to pay a higher price for being ideologically bold because of the increased backlash they’ll face from their overwhelmingly white wealthy peers.
Racially diversifying the wealthy donor base doesn't necessarily positively impact the ideological mix of the donors, even while it expands the experiences of the donors.4
MG: Damn. That is a powerful and provocative point. I love the nuance you are bringing here.
LB: Thanks. Lastly, with increasing inequality and wealth concentration, every year we have new ultra rich donors who enter the field with a big splash. But so many of the new big ones have been disappointments. Many of the biggest donors have come in and mono cultured whatever issue or constituency they've funded. They scare off the other donors who were already funding on that issue because this new person is 50 times richer than everyone else. He says he's going to fund the whole thing. You don't need to do it. And then for the most part, all of these big donors leave within 5 to 10 years. Tom Steyer’s engagement in the youth space is an example of what happens when a big funder monopolizes a space, and then quickly leaves it.
So many of these ultra rich donors don't even stay for a decade.
So I have to say, I want to give a big shout out to George Soros because for all the shit that I and other people gave him early on in the history of the Open Society Foundations [OSF], he and it have been a loyal and reliable funder in a lot of criminal justice, economic justice and pro-democracy work. If you were to get on a boat 25 years ago and you could see the future, you would get on OSF's boat, not Ford [Foundation] or any number of the other big foundations that have floundered throughout the decades.
There's really a challenge to philanthropy when individual donors are more strategic than institutional philanthropy. I mean, at least, individual donors can stick around a lot longer on any given issue than the foundations. There is a revolving door of foundation leaders every 5 or 10 years, who inevitably want to redo their foundations’ theory of change and everything else. And whether they're right or wrong, nothing meaningful gets done in 5-10 years. Real change takes a longer commitment, which individual donors are more often able to make.
MG: I don't know if this is exactly what you're saying, but a big conclusion that I want to be able to share with all this writing is that organizing a bunch of individual wealthy people is often much more doable, and effective, than trying to get institutional funders to do anything together.
LB: Well, in many ways, the individual donors are less stuffy than many of the biggest foundation boards. And it can be a little bit clearer how to get individual donors to grapple with their privilege, compared to getting the top 2 or 3 levels of a foundation to do so. With foundation staff, they’re often protecting the legacy of a dead rich person. At least when we’re talking directly to a wealthy person, they’re alive and we can discuss their legacy in real time and help them develop it further.
MG: Yes! They are the person with the power to make the decisions right now.
What are 1-2 projects you’d like to see prioritized in progressive organizing of the rich in the next 5-10 years?
LB: The Left is really good at opposition but our power building gets weak the closer it comes to power wielding. I think we have a fetish about speaking truth to power, so when we actually have the capacity to wield power, we value speeches over the hard work of negotiation. We value the most famous progressive Congress members who have the biggest Twitter accounts over elected officials like Pramila Jayapal, who's actually negotiating in the room.
We need more people focused on the phrases and the commas, the sentences and the clauses that progressives get to put into policy when we win power. I don't mean policy wonks. I don't mean think tanks. I mean act-tanks like San Diego’s Center for Policy Initiatives, or the national Liberation in a Generation. It's the governance stuff. It's the power wielding and governing together. I want wealthy progressives and left movements in general to invest waaay more there.
Most Blue [i.e., Democratic run] places are only good compared to Red [i.e., Republican run] areas. And many of the Blue places are run by people of color. So we actually have d\Democratic people of color governance in a lot of jurisdictions and it sucks. And it doesn't suck because every single one of those individuals suck.
That’s a progressive movement issue to the extent that we think the politicians we elect were good on their first day and mysteriously got worse after that. Elections only elect people, get them hired as it were. After they’re elected, what’s next? How are you going to work with them, not just protest them?
We have failure after failure of power wielding at the local and state level. That means that even when Democrats take some power federally, we have very few policies, practices or lessons learned to figure out, for example, what exactly to tell Obama or Biden (or hopefully Harris!) to do.
There’s this assumption that having Democrats in power is enough. Then we're totally shocked when we have 51 Senate votes and two of them are Manchin and Sinema, so we don't have 50 votes. Or how bad some Democratic Black mayors are, like Eric Adams, Lori Lightfoot. I’m not singling out Black folk, we could go down the list of every demographic. Too many donors believe that the number of Democratic votes in a legislative body is the same as the number of votes we have for a bill. Coincidentally, since so many major donors live in Blue states and Blue cities, almost everywhere wealthy progressive donors live, we see the limits of our current ability to wield power and govern effectively.
MG: This is all so interesting and I want to get you back to the original question, what interventions would you make specifically in the work of organizing the rich towards justice?
LB: What I’m saying, in part, is that the shiny object fundraising strategy5 works more for oppositionality than for governing, which is what we have seen after Trump was defeated and Biden was elected. Fundraising numbers are down. Opposition is poetry, governing is prose.
MG: What is needed to shift that dynamic where fundraising goes down as soon as we win?
LB: At the most basic level, we need multi-year commitments to build durable, long-term electoral organizing infrastructure. CDT’s donors commit to multi-year giving in whatever tax status they give in. Transformational giving requires a multi-year commitment.
But what we really need is wealthy donors who understand the medium and long term strategies. We need donors to understand that we invest in places that we are absolutely going to lose for the next two, 4 or 6 years. There are some places where no amount of money is going to have any Democrat elected, never mind progressive ones, at least in the short and medium term. So the questions become, are we losing forward? Are we building infrastructure? Are we increasing an understanding of the dynamics between the groups and between the donors who fund those groups? Are the relationships aligning behind a shared strategy?
For example, at CDT we did not expect to have immediate or even medium term electoral wins by investing in San Diego, Orange County, the Inland Empire and the Central Valley. But by investing over more than a decade, through expected losses and some fluke wins, we helped local groups close the gap, which meant at the start they were less of a drag on statewide race outcomes, and then as the local and regional groups grew, they started to change the electorate and develop winning strategies….and wherever you are, your democracy was saved by those regions going significantly to Democrats taking the House in 2012, 2018, and will again in 2024.
The other piece about building progressive governing power is that we need individual donors and foundations to understand their different and complementary roles. Foundations have to fund in places before progressives can win elections, helping community groups build their bases and build power. Then individual wealthy donors fund the electoral wins with their c4 and PAC dollars. Then foundations can, and must, come in and fund the act-tanks needed to govern effectively. We need individual donors and foundations to not only know their lanes, but also know the timing for when to move the money in their control. In Oakland, after non-partisan [c3] money built an educated mass of voters, partisan money [c4 and PAC] produced wins at the mayoral and city council levels, and then foundations stepped in to provide governing support [c3 dollars] at the municipal level.
Individuals and foundations often don’t know how to work together. Program officers think they’re better than donors. Donors don’t understand philanthropy or want to deal only with the trustees, not the program officers. Everyone needs to get over their egos and work together, particularly in local geographies where there might not be a huge amount of progressive dollars.
MG: What's your 150 year vision of success around organizing the rich?
LB: Part of my family's African-American and part is Haitian. On the Haitian side we had the first successful slave rebellion 220 years ago. And we've been paying for it ever since.
So 150 years feels long. And it's not necessarily that long.
In 150 years, climate change will have already come to a head. And the US is a declining empire. Those two changes will create chaos, an upending of society, and opportunities for immense and intense rights and wrongs. And that doesn’t even take into account that Republicans are as anti-democracy now as both parties were during and for decades after slavery, so it’s hard to know what January 2025 is going to look like, let alone 2174.
For wealthy folks, I think the work to get more support to multiracial movements will continue. They’re going to need to continue to be committed, savvy, disciplined, and giving robustly. And they will need to allow their money to go towards really, actually, seriously reducing wealth inequality. I want those of us doing this work to be able to code switch across the different wealthy communities, to know how to move them and draw them in.
For all of us, there are lessons to learn from immigrants about what we’re going through right now. When Trump got elected, many US folks were freaked out. My dad, who was from Haiti, was like, “Oh, I’ve seen plenty of dictators in my time and here’s how it happens…”
My dad had a whole other lens that scared a lot of folks with parents born in the US. Then I’d talk to my immigrant friends and they would get it and be like, “That’s exactly right! When my family was in Argentina, we saw some real bad things. And we’re not there yet. This is bad but what we really got to watch for is…”
As we navigate this next 150 years, those of us in the US are going to need to listen to our immigrant neighbors who have experienced some version of what we are going through now.
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Hot damn. Thank you Ludovic.
There is a SURJ call for White Men against MAGA, tonight, Thursday, July 25th, 8-9pm est. Register here.
When I read back over this answer recently, I was like “but what about the importance of general operating support! (ie. giving unrestricted dollars that the organization can use for whatever purpose they want) Ludovic shared with me that the whole “general operating support” v “program support” debate is a c3 frame. He wrote me, “one can not give general operating political funds, because unlike c3 funds, political funding (whether that's candidate or initiative-focused) requires reporting, which means both the giver and the recipient need to know what the funds are for, and report accordingly.” There is much more to say about all this and I’m writing this footnote as a way to bookmark an important and related conversation for another time.
What does Ludovic mean by ‘losing forward’? I’ll answer that with a quote from Ludovic, “winning is better than losing, but you can lose in a way that makes it more likely you're going to win in the long term and you can win in ways that makes it likely that that's your last win.”
I’m sure my friends at Donors of Color Network have many important thoughts and reflections on this section, and broadly on the topic of organizing people of color with wealth. I recently interviewed DOCN’s Executive Director, Isabelle Leighton, and look forward to posting it sometime soon.
Ludovic talks about the ‘shiny object fundraising strategy’ in Part 1 of this interview, towards the end. He is referring to the practice of fundraising and motivating wealthy people to give based on charismatic, ‘shiny’ individuals, rather than a shared commitment to a strategy.
"By making the foundations and individual donors actually collaborate, they come to know how shitty of an experience it can be and how much resources it takes. They learn that most of your meetings are not kumbaya. So then the funders don't have unfair expectations of the grantees to be like: you had one meeting. Why didn’t you figure it all out?”
I appreciate this point because it emphasizes how effective it is to learn-by-doing. Rather than operating from a place of hypothetical, intellectual argumentation, we need to double down on spaces where wealthy folks are invited to work together in ways that enable a lived experience of what it takes to set individualism aside and collectively organize over time to advance a shared strategy. Rather than focusing on getting people to adopt an understanding **before** doing a thing, we might recognize that they'll gain an understanding **through** doing a thing — and have the added benefit of making valuable contributions in the process.
This was powerful, and the part about navigating how we go about organizing wealthy folks of different backgrounds really resonated with me. Having been organized and politicized as a young person with wealth and class privilege, who is biracial but presents as white and whose white father controls the family wealth, I had to learn the hard way that the way I was moved towards wealth redistribution (the "win-win") did not vibe with most of my BIPOC peers. Our history of racial capitalism is rife with examples of communities of color who were able to begin building wealth in this country only to have it violently taken away. Things are no different now and we can't forget it. Thanks Mike for this great interview and Ludovic for these insights and calls to keep taking the hard ways if we truly want to live in a different world.