Giving Compass' Take:
- Megan Ming Francis explains how philanthropy can alter the original goals of social movements due to power imbalances.
- How can philanthropists ensure collaboration is happening without co-opting leadership? How can donors strike an equitable balance with activists when working together on grassroots projects?
- Read about how funders can support social movements.
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Sometimes philanthropists — even the most well-intentioned ones — can “capture” the social movements they fund and then steer grassroots organizations and activists away from their original missions.
We explore this phenomenon of “movement capture” by looking at one of the most celebrated achievements of the civil rights movement: the 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The plaintiffs in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case were represented by the NAACP, which had been supported financially over the years by the politically progressive Garland Fund.
Megan Ming Francis, associate professor of political science at the University of Washington says the narrative is not accurate. Francis critiques the longstanding, celebratory narrative about the collaborative relationship between the two organizations.
“I basically uncovered a different narrative,” Francis explains. “The narrative that I disrupt is the traditional narrative about the education desegregation campaign being a collaborative effort between the NAACP and the Garland Fund. It was a bit more fraught than what we have thought it to be,” she explains.
To find answers, Francis focused on the way that scholars selectively approach primary source material. “In my research, what I decided to do was to very much privilege and take seriously the words and the protestations of the Black NAACP leaders,” she explains. “What some researchers had done in the past was to privilege the narrative coming out of the Garland Fund.” By centering Black voices, Francis concludes that the NAACP leadership “were not fully comfortable about the interaction with the Garland Fund.”
Even so, Francis says NAACP leaders decided to take up the mantle of educational equity, which, while vitally important, was a priority of their funder. Francis says the NAACP’s main focus at the time was supporting anti-lynching legislation and fighting mob violence against Blacks.
Read the full article about philanthropy and social movements by Amy Costello at Nonprofit Quarterly.