Three More Uncomfortable Truths Grassroots Movements need Funders to Understand
By Evie Muir
What does it mean to truly feel resourced? This is a question I find myself constantly preoccupied with as the founder of Peaks of Colour, a nature-for-healing, grassroots community group by and for people of colour. As racial justice organisers we are so often fluent in the language of scarcity; how we negotiate funds, navigate expenses, share resources, make something out of nothing, all whilst feeling the insatiable hunger for change. The philanthropic sector’s role should be to feed the starving mouths of movement spaces, and ensure we have everything we could possibly need to continue this work. However the truth is that so many of us are forwarding revolutionary change from a place of empty, and that funders play a direct role in exhausting us.
In my previous piece, ‘Three Truths Grassroots Movements need Funders to Understand’ I discussed how short term, project funding does nothing but cement organisers in the present conditions of their own survival. In this piece I delve deeper into three more specific infrastructural, communal and cultural examples of how this manifests. We need systems change, and we need a complete transformation of the funding sector as we know it. It is my hope that this piece may contribute to this.
Our work requires us to build at scale, your funding doesn’t even support us to lay the foundations
As the genocide in Palestine began to unfold last October, I was acutely aware of my own – and by extension, Peaks of Colour’s – inability to step up with the undivided attention and presence our Palestinian family deserved. I watched with admiration and love as our comrade elsewhere, were able to pivot their attentions, double down on their efforts and apply pressure to areas which held space for the Palestinian community. I had numerous ideas of how Peaks of Colour could also play our part, but implementing these felt monumental. I was burnt out, floored by seasonal depression, and I was writing a book and running an organisation alone. I tried to show myself grace, but was struck by a more infuriating truth: that there was a direct correlation between how helpless I felt and how under-resourced we were.
This was financial – in that the funding we had received only months earlier had already been allocated to ongoing projects leaving no room for reactivity – but it was also infrastructural. Earlier that year we had undergone the tedious process of establishing an organisational bank account for Peaks of Colour. The process was gruelling and had taken four months of unpaid labour to actualise. Yet less than a year later we were finding ourselves having to adopt a different financial structure entirely. We had realised that the more progressive funders who aligned with our work were increasingly requiring organisations to have a fiscal host. So, at a time where all our efforts should have been directed towards fighting for the freedom of a people suffering under genocide, I was entirely preoccupied with our own organisational insecurity.
Grassroots spaces have the power to topple institutions and forward revolutions, but our present reality positions us as always having less resources than those whose fascist rhetoric threatens our humanity from all angles.
When we talk of the current state of funding, I think of this irony. The needs of our local and global community are evolving at a pace that the current funding model does not hold space for. It has us overwhelmed and under-resourced, chasing our tails while the world around us is crying for our urgency – not the pseudo-urgency capitalism forces upon us, but true life-or-death urgency on the frontlines. Grassroots spaces have the power to topple institutions and forward revolutions, but our present reality positions us as always having less resources than those whose fascist rhetoric threatens our humanity from all angles. What we need in times of crisis is momentum. We need to be able to amplify and mobilise. We need the capacity to be responsive. We need the ability to pivot in order to meet ongoing and developing needs. The only way we can do this is if we have strong infrastructures that can weather the multiple storms of our current political climate. This requires being resourced to scale.
Intra-community beef is hindering liberation. We need time and space for extensive conflict resolution to be a funding priority
The nourishing local and national ecosystems by and for organisers and artists of colour that I have been invited to be part of over the years are undoubtedly what I am most grateful for in this work. The more I am part of spaces where love and care are abundant, however, the more I come to reflect on moments elsewhere where conflicts both new and spanning generations ultimately result in the fragmentation of our collective work towards liberation. I believe a key contributing factor to this conflict is trauma. As racial justice organisers we all come to this work with multiple, intersecting and overlapping experiences of harm, some of which we are working through, and some we are yet to address. That one person’s healing journey comes into tension with someone else’s should not be surprising. The issue is that we are not equipped to hold space for these tensions when they arise. So, traumas are triggered, sides are drawn, feelings are hurt, trust is broken, loyalties are betrayed, grief is embedded and opportunities are rescinded. What remains is a community of skilled, passionate, loving, yet human, flawed and imperfect organisers who find themselves at an impasse.
Anyone can collaborate with those they already consider their friends and allies, but an abolitionist politics recognises that liberation demands coalition, and this requires an expansive and dedicated commitment to conflict resolution.
This is where we must also acknowledge the role the philanthropic sector plays here. When the embers of conflict are burning, our lack of time, energy, capacity and space all add fuel to the fire. As does the competition and divide and conquer politics stoked by a landscape of funding. The funding sector also consistently asks us to evidence our intent to collaborate in our bids. But as the New York-based creative studio, Intelligent Mischief, poses: “What if we treasured accountability and repair as a means of navigating conflict in our relationships?” Anyone can collaborate with those they already consider their friends and allies, but an abolitionist politics recognises that liberation demands coalition, and this requires an expansive and dedicated commitment to conflict resolution. This depth of relational repair may seem idealistic to many, but it is exactly the possibilities that lie beyond the scope of our present imagination that we need funders to resource.
Some of the most meaningful work is unquantifiable, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be resourced.
Once when speaking with another founder whose organisation would be considered more traditionally “successful”, I found myself telling them of the community-facing work we were doing that year. “Is that it?” they said, mockingly, before reeling off the many and varied ways their organisation’s work was expanding. Despite there being pockets of change within philanthropy, it is this kind of work that funders still hold a preference for. Work that models a quantifiable, measurable, predictable capitalist projection of growth, and whose outputs can easily be evidenced in monitoring and evaluation forms. For many organisations like ours however, most of the work takes place behind the scenes and underground and represents a slow, intentional, grounded practice that is hard to translate to an Excel document.
What our practice has taught us however is that perhaps the most pressing aspect of this work in need of resourcing is our ability to rest and heal. As Tricia Hersey writes in her book, Rest as Resistance, our relationship to rest should not be “to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism. What we have internalised as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labour. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: “We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.”
When we are afforded the time and space to truly rest we realise that this is not an inactive proposition. It requires our individual basic needs to be met and our organisational infrastructures to be robust as a non-negotiable starting point.
When we are afforded the time and space to truly rest we realise that this is not an inactive proposition. It requires our individual basic needs to be met and our organisational infrastructures to be robust as a non-negotiable starting point. It requires a deep, embodied, communal and nature-allied healing of past traumas. It requires land that is stewarded by us, so that we no longer have to ask permission to rest in white-owned spaces. These are but three examples of what we now understand we are lacking throughout this journey of regenerative activism, and it is these actions that funders should be resourcing as a financial priority. Perhaps we could then begin to redefine the work of funders as one of gentle accountability. Where if the budgets we are working with are not substantial enough to allow us to prioritise our own emotional and physical needs within them, the funders’ role is to ensure our rest is resourced.
Evie Muir is a nature writer and founder of Peaks of Colour – a Peak District-based nature for healing, grassroots community group, by and for people of colour – whose work sits on the intersections of gendered, racial and land justice. As a Northern writer and organiser based in Sheffield, Evie is interested in writing as a form of healing and resistance. Their debut book, ‘Radical Rest’, explores Black Feminist, Abolitionist and nature-allied approaches to activist burn out and will be published by Elliot & Thompson in July 2024.
