The past several years have seen dramatic growth in social movements demonstrating their dissent through public mass mobilization and acts of civil disobedience, from Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future to the massive protests by Indian farmers. According to one study, the number of protest movements tripled from 2006 to 2020. But despite this meteoric rise in popularity, protest movements often claim that they are underfunded, under-resourced, and ignored by philanthropists.

They are right. Throughout history, protest movements have been the instigators of several instances of large-scale social change, and they deserve greater funding to continue. Funders should direct a greater proportion of their resources towards protest movements, to build a stronger ecology of social change. Given how even woefully underfunded protest movements have had catalytic impacts in bringing about large-scale positive change, supporting young, upcoming protest movements might be one of the most impactful things philanthropists can do.

Protest movements often don’t have official legal structures, formal leadership teams, or governance policies, which can make it hard to identify what we are talking about. For the purposes of this article, we can consider protest movements to be social movements—an informal collective of people pursuing a shared social goal—who utilize protest as one of their main tactics in bringing about their intended social change (though not to say that protest is their only tactic). Common examples of such protest movements could be Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or the Suffragettes in the 1900s “Votes for Women” movement.

To examine the claim that protest movements deserve greater funding, we can compare the funding allocated to protest movements versus charities and NGOs working on similar issues. For example, consider Extinction Rebellion (XR), one of the most well-known climate movements over the past several years: The figures shared by XR Global puts their annual income around £750,000, based on the 2019 and 2020 figures. In comparison, Greenpeace International puts its annual income for the same period at about £75 million, roughly a thousand times larger. The Sunrise Movement in the US draws in much more funding than XR, but is still dwarfed by large environmental charities such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Given that movements are unpredictable, it can be hard to know which ones have the highest chances of success. Below, I outline various factors that philanthropists and advocates should look for in protest movements when deciding whether to support them.

  1. Clear Purpose and Shared Values
  2. Strategic Theory of Change
  3. Clear Governance and Processes
  4. Ambitions to Scale, With the Planning to Make It Happen
  5. Diversity and Unity

Read the full article about protest movements by James Ozden at Stanford Social Innovation Review.