Giving Compass' Take:

• Funders from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI) collaborative provide five insights on how philanthropic governance can fortify social movements. 

• How can your philanthropy support social movements and their missions? What is the relationship between activism and philanthropy? 

• Read more about activist philanthropy and systems change. 

The coronavirus pandemic poses a challenge and opportunity for governance funders. There is an immediate need to support transparency, participation and accountability efforts as integral to the pandemic response. There is also an opportunity to reinforce calls for more fundamental societal change – a rethink of the social contract.

People taking to the streets worldwide to demand justice and equality despite health risks. They are banging pots and pans not just to express support for health care workers but to protest scandal and government failings. And these movements are having an effect – recent polling suggests a sharp uptick in support for policies previously considered more radical, such as wealth taxes, measures to limit corporations profits from the crisis, or a rebalancing of social spending in support of equity.

This is a moment when governance practitioners can reinforce and complement broader social movements. Yet the reality is that those connections have proved hard to forge and sustain. Social movements have focused on systemic change and shifting power – typically a long-term process. Governance funding has largely supported groups embedded more in the technical realm of policy reform, accountability for service delivery, and opening up government within current power structures.

What can funders do to learn from and link these two approaches?

This is a question that funder members of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI) collaborative are wrestling with. Five points from initial research and conversations stand out:

  1. Invest in relationship building between social movements and more specialised governance practitioners.
  2. Be patient. 
  3. Think beyond traditional governance labels.
  4. Adapt funder mechanisms to enable more effective support to social movements and coalitions of governance actors. 
  5. Do no harm. 

Read the full article about social movements and governance by Michael Jarvis at Alliance Magazine.