Infrastructures of giving
I started the Blueprint series in 2009 when it became clear to me that the world of "philanthropy" (501 c 3 s and foundations) in the USA was more myopic than I'd thought. I wanted that narrow dyad to understand that it did not control how we associate and assemble to make change, nor how we finance it. This is also the point of my last book, How We Give Now.
We can make a fairly accurate prediction of foundation giving in 2025. First, find the average, collective asset base of the foundation world over the last 60 months (See Candid, The Federal Reserve). Second, find the average spend out of foundations each year (see GivingUSA and The Urban Institute). Multiply one by the other and you'll be amazed at your predictive prescience (Look at that - AI! Uh no, multiplication).
But we the people come together in lots of ways that don't involve nonprofits or foundations. And these ways - informal networks, mutual aid, neighbors helping neighbors, coffee klatches, community groups, how we spend/boycott, what news orgs you support with your eyeballs and subscription dollars - are legion. They don't need a public face (or government registration) so they're harder to find with AI, prompt engineering, or keyword searches. They move money via cash apps or on crowdfunding platforms. Whatever number your maths produced when doing the multiplication problem in the above paragraph, it will be more interesting to see how much money GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms move. (These platforms, especially ActBlue, are quite vulnerable to politically-motivated digital sabotage - and identification of users). When crowdfunding surpasses foundation giving, we'll know we're fully in the landscape I started sketching in Blueprint 2010.
To be clear - crowdfunding is biased and skewed toward those with resources. It is no more democratic than foundation giving in that regard. But it does allow for creative naming, some degree of donor obfuscation, and a few layers of intermediation to slow down the digital goons. There have been lots of foundation matching grants for projects on crowdfunding platforms over the years - an idea worth considering for donors looking to support individuals/families without declaring their work as oppositional to the government.
I've written before about how these online platforms were "becoming" critical giving infrastructure and how they - as such - deserved a much closer eye from regulators in terms of what gets shown, how they handle tax exemptions, etc. That has not happened, perhaps to the good. All kinds of efforts can raise money on these platforms, allowing for all kinds of obfuscation.
Waking up everyday as an individual afraid for my safety is not entirely new (I'm a woman in America for crissakes. Also Jewish, gay, disabled - it's a quadfecta for the current administration), but it now lives in a much deeper place in what some of my ancestors would have called "my kishkas." It's important that we in civil society anticipate the government's tactics and arrange ourselves accordingly.
There are real challenges to c3 nonprofits and foundations, and they are terribly important to the ongoing project that is democracy. But they are not - by any means - the only tools we have to assemble, associate, and express ourselves. The smarter the formal organizations get about safety and digital security and lawsuits, etc. the better. But let them simultaneously get smarter about the broader context of change making tactics and tools that communities have always used, and are likely to depend on now as ever.