All Money and Power to the People: Using Grassroots Fundraising to Fund Our Liberation

Foundation funding’s drying up, the State’s cutting basic social services, and social justice groups are doing even more with less. This workshop is an organizers' strategy session on funding our movements: How can we raise the money we need to take advantage of the political and economic moment and push forward large-scale changes? How can we shift the conversation from institution-building to movement-building, from a capitalist “competition/scarcity/individual” mindset to a “movement abundance/collective power for collective liberation” mindset, and mobilize sufficient resources for our work?

We’ll use popular education to look at how U.S. social movements funded their work in the past, how groups are running joint grassroots fundraising campaigns that work today, and how communities are using grassroots fundraising to take back their organizations. We want participants to stop fighting over bread crumbs and be inspired to work together to take the whole loaf and the oven it was baked in.