NCRP analysis of available Foundation Center data shows that between 2006 and 2016, just 9 percent of total foundation grantmaking intended to benefit communities of color, poor people, immigrants, incarcerated people, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities was for policy change, advocacy and systems reform work. The rest, we can reasonably conclude, was for work more “acceptable” to foundations like direct services.

In the same decade, just 0.8 percent of all grantmaking for community and economic development was for strategies specifically designed to build power, like organized labor, tenant organizing and community organizing more generally. In the same decade, foundations directed 16 times as much funding to business and industry.

This reticence of philanthropy to fund movements and direct action isn’t new, of course. Just a handful of foundations played any kind of meaningful role funding the Civil Rights Movement, as we documented a few years ago in Freedom Funders.

If we want to win, if we want to be effective, we must stop reflexively and perpetually deciding to fund groups that “know how the system works” instead of choosing to fund grassroots organizations led by people of color that employ tactics that make us uncomfortable – tactics that challenge that system directly and sometimes confrontationally.

Read the full article on the social justice movement by Aaron Dorfman at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.