A progressive movement requires funders and donors to co-create change with grassroots organizations.
We are building Illinois Community Power Fund to be a statewide organizing home for funders and donors to deepen investment in the state’s progressive ecosystem, sharpen your understanding of why and how to redistribute power and capital to organizing, and build relationships, and engage in meaningful co-strategizing.
Donors and funders have a role in movement too. Let’s explore and sharpen this role for you.
Donor organizing* provides an alternative to traditional philanthropy models that are deeply transactional and de-center the voices of movement leaders.
Instead, donor organizing brings donors into strategies of building power and making structural change.
It asks donors to think through questions like:
Where can I be most useful in campaigns?
Who do I know who can move the campaigns forward strategically and monetarily?
What is my own power and how does it relate to the work I’m investing in?
*We use the term donor organizing to refer to a strategy that is moving both institutional funders and individual donors.
We are creating a community for donors to show up as their whole selves; a space where folks can think through their stake in the work, how we might move Illinois Community Power Fund and our grantees’ work forward, and what it means to invest in bold and transformative ways.