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The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 to “challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums and to establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art.” Yet since its inception, the museum has been marred by white supremacy and wealth inequality, often reproducing the very practices that its creators aimed to eradicate. Founded by three wealthy arts patrons—including a Rockefeller—the museum has often failed to live up to progressive standards. From collections filled with artifacts of colonialism to bloated executive salaries, the museum remains a space where existing global inequities are reproduced.

This spring, members of the group International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF) led a campaign titled Strike MoMA, which included 10 weeks of action that aimed to highlight the historic and ongoing racism and imperialism of the institution. The protests drew together a broad coalition of community members ranging from artists and activists to staff members. While the 10 weeks of action began in April and concluded in June, the coalition remains engaged in a long-term project of reimagining one of New York’s largest art institutions.

In recent years, MoMA has increasingly come under fire for receiving funding from donors whose sources of wealth are tainted by connections to industries such as weapons manufacturing, fossil fuels, or pharmaceuticals. Strike MoMA itself was catalyzed in part too by the relationship of recent board chair Leon Black to Jeffrey Epstein.

MoMA’s funders are not just behind-the-scenes actors, as is the case with many institutions. In fact, the museum’s top donors are often board members whose wealth supports entire collections, gallery wings, and new buildings. As the Strike MoMA coalition writes on its website, “Their billions in assets hang on the wall, works of art twisted into ornaments of repression and ciphers of extraction.” In return, these donors are seen as cultural benefactors serving the public through their generosity to the arts—often masking the nature of their fortunes.

The role of museums in rehabilitating the reputations of wealthy donors with questionable income streams is no secret, but criticism of museums who enable these wealthy villains has steadily increased over the past few years. In 2018, artist Nan Goldin led protests at several museums throughout New York and London against the Sackler family (the manufacturers of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin). One of the protests was staged at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and called for the museum to stop accepting money from the Sackler family. In 2019, artists Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett penned a statement for ArtForum blasting the Whitney Museum for accepting large donations from then-board member Warren Kanders. Kanders’ company Safariland provides a variety of tactical supplies to police and military forces throughout the world, including tear gas that has been used against protestors across the globe from Gaza to Ferguson.

Enter Strike MoMA. The coalition’s actions throughout the spring called attention to different facets of oppression perpetuated by the elite funders of MoMA: gold mining in the Dominican Republic, Israeli occupation of Palestine, and more. From marches and banner drops to circles of music and dance, the protestors gathered to bring awareness to these issues—but gathering itself was also the point. As stated on the Strike MoMA website, “What matters is being engaged in the struggle and breaking the dependency-complex that MoMA has created for art, ideologically and materially.” The 10 weeks of action provided an opportunity for individuals from disparate identities and cause areas to come together and build capacity as a united front against elite museum culture.

This process of creating a concentrated base of people power dedicated to the arts—one that does not rely on tainted donations or powerful billionaires—is the broader project of Strike MoMA. The coalition aims to reclaim the museum as a site of art for and by the people; as their manifesto asks, “Why strike MoMA? So that something else can emerge, something under the control of workers, communities, and artists rather than billionaires.” They ask all of us involved in the arts to consider whether these institutions work for us, and if not, what we could rebuild in their place.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Nationwide, the past year and a half has been marked by both COVID-19 and a rising movement against anti-Black racism. Both have driven home the dire need to advance equity. In western Massachusetts, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts (CFWM) affirmed our commitment to racial justice work and set out with new resolve, only to be confronted (yet again) by the vast scope and scale of the challenges.

No single sector can advance and sustain equitable change on its own, be it government, nonprofits and philanthropy, or business. Worse, each has too often contributed to the opposite—namely, inequity. These problems are compounded by vast regional inequality. In philanthropy, for example, one study found that per-capita philanthropy in the Mississippi Delta was 40 times less than in New York City ($41 per capita versus $1,966).

Systemic change requires patient capital, creativity, and commitment. Philanthropic dollars may be less scarce in western Massachusetts than the Delta. But they are a good deal less plentiful than in Boston or New York City. To act effectively, we’ve had to combine our local knowledge and networks with external resources. During COVID-19, such partnerships changed from being “nice to have” to “must haves.”

Some background: Since 2013, I have led CFWM, a medium-sized community foundation that serves about 700,000 people living in 69 cities and towns, including the state’s third-largest city and its most rural county. The foundation has $200 million in assets and in 2019 invested over $10 million in grants, scholarships, and interest-free loans across our region ($20 million in 2020). These resources are significant, but pale when compared to our neighbor, The Boston Foundation, which has $1.3 billion in assets and distributed $126 million in grants in 2019 ($215 million in 2020).

According to Philanthropy Massachusetts’ Giving Massachusetts report, excluding grants to private and community foundations and higher education institutions, Hampden County, one of the three counties we serve, received less than $100 per capita in funding, compared to $1,900 per capita in Boston’s Suffolk County.

Turns out the health disparities, educational outcomes, and poverty rates are quite similar in metro Boston and Springfield, and philanthropic dollars per capita are 19 times, or 1,800 percent greater, in Boston to help address those challenges. Yes, the cost of living is 20 percent higher in Boston; still, the resources are vastly unequal. Traditionally, money that is made in and around Boston stays in and around Boston.

Our situation is hardly unique. Surely many small-to-medium sized cities, towns, and rural communities have similar stories to tell. But how can one address this mismatch?

Building equitable communities requires changing hearts and minds as well as systems that have perpetuated harms over hundreds of years. That means we need more effective ways to connect larger funders to those with lived experience, hyper-local networks, and grassroots advocacy expertise to work together to shape the solutions.

This is easier said than done. First, smaller organizations often face major resource constraints. To connect local knowledge with external groups requires trusted partnerships. A second complication is that often those potential external partners are the very institutions that help create or maintain the inequity in the first place.

Therein lies the rub—the great mismatch in size, culture, systems, and trust. How does a $2 billion philanthropic organization—or the federal government—share power and work with a whole host of smaller partners immersed in communities? How do they connect with the organizations that are critical witnesses of and responders to emerging needs, and whose priorities and operations may be totally different?

One response is to shift resources to groups with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) leaders. Investing greater dollars into BIPOC communities, businesses, and nonprofits is a great first step. And while many are heading in that direction, including CFWM, some are realizing that implementation can generate unintended challenges for smaller organizations, like an IRS snafu called “tipping,” where a large contribution from a single donor to a 501c3 public charity causes that organization to fail the IRS public support test and is therefore “tipped” out of public charity status, or complex reporting requirements that handcuff small businesses or community agencies.

Community foundations bring a unique set of tools for this work. We focus on a specific geography and, if we do our work well, we are embedded in our communities, listening and responding. We can usually accept large contributions without affecting our public support test, unlike smaller community-based organizations. We can then move those dollars from the larger contributor into the community to be used by those with local expertise and trusted networks that can shape solutions that specifically address local needs. We can accept non-cash assets like real estate and shares in a family business and turn them into grants and scholarships. We do complicated fund accounting and can bear the reporting brunt.

Here at CFWM, we are actively exploring new models and learning from groups like the Association of Black Foundation Executives, PEAK Grantmaking, and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, all of which have long advocated for grantmaking equity. Many colleagues across the country have been testing new models and practices. We also learn from other community foundations in small cities or rural regions, who, like ourselves, struggle with resource constraints.

While we are still learning ourselves, I want to share three recent partnerships that might provide some clues regarding how smaller foundations might work with more resource-rich external partners to both secure resources and advance equity. One of these launched in 2018 and two in 2020—the first, with a $2 billion private foundation; the second, with a small network of private foundations joined by thousands of donors; and the third, a direct partnership with the state government. In each case, partnerships allowed for more resources to reach our community in support of equity goals. Of course, each partnership had its own unique features and complexities. Navigating those complexities is a critical part of philanthropic equity work. 

A Private Foundation Partnership

Three years ago, the Barr Foundation sought to expand its arts programming beyond Boston to reach the entire state and turned to five community foundations to do so. Barr recognized that these foundations could help the state’s creative sector become more equitable and enduring. Barr began by providing a planning grant to learn more, develop trust, and co-create a model with these five foundations.

Barr’s initial three-year commitment evolved into a 10-year partnership that comprises cohort learning, data and research, convening, planning, grantmaking, measurement, and evaluation—all of which expand the capacity of the foundations to be stronger, more effective community leaders. Barr has amplified access to capital, expertise, data, and learning while community foundations have brought forward their local expertise, trusted relationships, and ear-to-the ground knowledge. As partners, we need each other to inform our work, to create greater impact, and measure change.

The key learning from this partnership so far is that to work effectively and equitably, the partners must start with an intentional focus on developing trust and shifting any power imbalances, real or perceived. We worked at that by planning together, co-creating the program, and by building in regular opportunities for learning and reflection. This required investing more time than initially imagined, more resources devoted to communication and convening, and a shared commitment to learning.

Partnerships in Collaboration with Community and Private Foundations

When our world turned upside down in March 2020, the Boston area witnessed an outpouring of philanthropic support. A small group of private foundations observed many other areas of the Commonwealth hit equally hard by the virus lacked access to that scale of giving. One8 Foundation, a private family foundation, took the lead and partnered with Lauren Baker, the first lady of Massachusetts, to raise money to support communities in the rest of the state. That led foundations and more than 17,000 individuals to pool resources and create the Massachusetts COVID-19 Relief Fund. That effort provided $32.2 million to communities with fewer philanthropic resources to lean on.

To deploy those dollars effectively, the Massachusetts COVID-19 Relief Fund turned to the community foundations across the state. In a radical shift in emergency fundraising, the Relief Fund recognized the unique position and role of community foundations to distribute philanthropic dollars quickly to where they were needed most.

CFWM received large grants every three weeks from the Relief Fund, which were redistributed the same week to food providers, healthcare organizations, shelters, senior programs, and others responding to the crisis in every corner of our region. We employed an equity lens in doing so, which would have been hard for the Relief Fund to have done well directly. We received calls, email, and notes from community-based organizations expressing their appreciation for the speed, streamlined process, and lean reporting requirements, all of which reinforced trust.

Partnering with State Government

The Massachusetts legislature took notice of the Relief Fund partnership. It saw larger funders connecting with local expertise and trusted networks via community foundations providing locally informed, streamlined, and accountable fund distribution processes. When the legislature realized that many residents were unable to access federal CARES Act relief funds, it allocated $15 million and turned to 14 community foundations to quickly distribute those dollars. The funding went to support immigrants who often had no or limited access to federal relief. This initial partnership is leading to another, with community foundations statewide working with the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development to distribute over $30 million in federal funds to support people who are food insecure.

State governments and hyper-local community-based organizations have distinct characteristics and behaviors. If state governments only work with larger, more well-resourced organizations because they work in similar ways, then inequity will persist. So, communities must find ways to close gaps and advance equity. This will require concessions and compromise. There were numerous conversations between the state and community foundations to finalize process and reporting rules. Each had to give up something. Making these partnerships last will require fundamental power shifts in how state government works with philanthropy, which may be difficult to achieve when not in a state of emergency.

Emerging Lessons

Each of these partnerships had an external funder (private foundation, pooled emergency fund, or state government) with significant resources but without the local expertise to effectively disburse funds. Meanwhile, the local on-the-ground agencies and organizations had the community knowledge but not the resources. This partnering is nascent for us and not perfect, yet we are learning how it can help create a more equitable system for distributing community support.

We are learning the cost of cultivating this kind of partnership as well. Staff cannot magically expand their capacity to carry out all the communications, data collection, and reporting such partnerships require. Amid COVID, we had to bring on additional communications experts and a contracted program manager. Most small-to-medium sized community foundations pairing up with government and other large funders will likewise need increased capacity for data collection, analysis, and reporting. For CFWM, we also needed to increase our skills, knowledge, and abilities around intercultural competence, inclusion, interrupting racism, managing conflict, and culture change. To accommodate more partnership opportunities in the future, CFWM will need to add additional staff resources to support accounting, data collection, and reporting.

A similar logic applies within our communities. At CFWM, we recognize that many smaller groups—especially in Black and Indigenous communities and communities of color—don’t yet have the staffing resources to respond to a federal proposal or collect and manage the data for complex reporting. Partnering to build this capacity is a critical part of equity work. Looking anew outside of our sector—coupled with testing, learning, and sharing—will help us to better respond.

Even with the cost of additional skill development and capacity, these three partnerships demonstrated a much more efficient and more equitable way to drive more funding to community-based organizations. It’s clear that local nonprofits and residents better understand the issues in their communities and therefore can more creatively and effectively respond. And what these experiences also taught us is that it’s not simply about more money getting to these local organizations. It’s about repairing inequity, building trust, strengthening capacity, and creating the partnerships that will produce meaningful progress in and beyond an emergency.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

I want to first say that I think that the conversation around narrative has been very contrived, that narratives are a set of ideas or beliefs that have been refined over time that accumulate, and so when we talk about shifting the narrative, I think that it makes it sound like it happens one organization or one individual at a time, when really it happens with all of us in community with each other, and so—I’ll be as brief as possible. So, every issue, every campaign, every policy that organizations spread, as we talked about, comes with a built-in story, right? These are complete with characters whose values are in some way threatened; a moral dilemma; a solution rooted in our vision of society, in our worldview; and a call to action that helps us imagine, or to create something new or something different. Each of those stories has a narrative genealogy—that’s the oral, written, or otherwise known account or record of the central values, ideas, and beliefs or motivations from which those narratives have evolved. And so our society possesses this structure of interconnected parts and subsystems that influence each other in really systematic ways, and within that structure, stories and narratives are the glue that holds those parts together.

So given this, we’re not just trying to change narratives, as we talk about it kind of capriciously sometimes, but we’re trying to build narrative power, and power is such an important part of this conversation. A narrative power is a type of power that shapes the norms and the rules by which our societies live, and we know that powerful and wealthy operatives use institutions like commercial media and social media and organized religion, which come complete with predetermined biases, to propagandize and shape the often unspoken and pervasive norms and beliefs and values of a society, and so this serves to maintain a particular social order. It’s so important to just like zoom out a little bit and remember that like these narrative strategies preserve a social order in which white people and white Western ideas are rendered supreme, and in this paradigm, whiteness subordinates Blackness, capitalism is central to our existence, and the land is subservient to humans. These norms and beliefs and values are then codified into society through legislation and regulated and controlled through policing and social stigma.

So, unlike traditional “marketing for good” strategies, when we build narrative power for social justice, it requires the use of counternarratives, and this is one of the strategies that I really want us to consider in developing our narrative shift goals. Counternarratives are narratives that are derived from the most marginalized individuals and communities, and these narratives use their insight, their wisdom, their knowledge, their know-how to be able to build a more inclusive vision of society and to reimagine our existence and expand the dimensions of what we consider normal or acceptable, and in this way, we replace dominant narratives with diverse and inclusive stories. Narrative power necessitates that we not only center the experiences of the people in closest proximity to oppression, but that we also work towards models whereby those who are most impacted are part of leading, identifying solutions, setting priorities, creating policy agendas, and shifting narratives about human value, and so when we disrupt existing narratives, one of the things we have to remember is that stories are never told separate from larger power structures, right? That narrative is really a key element of the mode of production in which these elements that we’re talking about really function, and so one thing that we do at the Movement for Black Lives is we think about whose stories have been left off the table. When we talk about increasing representation for spokespeople, why that matters is because the stories that we’re telling actually help us to see—and by “see,” I mean perceive of, understand, and be immersed in—a different way of living. And non-homogenously, because history books, the media, those often tell us homogeneous stories, and we’re seeing a huge attack on critical race theory right now. Why wouldn’t anybody want to know more about widening conclusions, about whose experiences and stories have fomented our democracy? In part, they’re trying to stifle that because they would like for the homogenous ways in which power currently exists to continue to exist.

So, narrative shift, again, doesn’t happen one organization or one individual at a time, and there are these kind of preassembled archetypes that govern human lives, and that, coupled with kind of state repression, really impacts how people are able to galvanize and mobilize, but our job is to expose those narrative genealogies, those old antiquated stories that lead people to oppress others, and to build a new vision of society.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

I love this question about experimentation, because it’s central to how I approach building narrative power. I was first introduced to design thinking by my mentor Sujatha JC Dawson, who is a professor of management practice at The New School, and it was just the kind of intervention I needed to stop making years-long comms plans and instead practice an emergent approach to communication strategy. Many of us are taught really to believe that we need elaborate strategies to succeed in building successful movements and campaigns, but what we really need is agility, humility, discernment, and strong relationships, and it’s my experience and assessment that it’s the soft skills, coupled with rigor and consistency, that win lasting change. Especially in heightened movement moments, agility is so important.

So, I’m moving from the assumption that we are using divergent methods to measure progress or success for social movement efforts, but as a student of movement building and narrative power, I explore growth in progress cycles across months, years, decades, and centuries, and through the prism of protest cycles. Protest cycles are the cyclical rise and fall of social movement activity, and sociologist Sydney Tarrow defines protest cycles as “a phase of heightened conflict across the social system with intensified interactions between challengers and authorities which can end in reform, repression, and sometimes revolution.” In other words, we’re really looking and analyzing at how uprisings shape attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors over time. All of that is experimentation, because the challenges that we face as narrative strategists are significant, including that we are stigmatized for our ideas that really rail against the status quo of power, like the idea of abolishing patriarchy or defunding the police, and so to me experimentation really exists in this air of curiosity, and I’m asking myself this question: How, under complex infrastructure of state and political domination, do stories get to be told, and how do new ideas and visions of accountability and transformation get to be born?

And so just to look at one really quick example around “Defund the Police”—I promised to come back to this—as one experiment: was it effective? It really depends on how you define “effective,” right, and this is why experimentation is so important. We have to try different things. But I would say yes. Like, it was. The use of social media, the uprisings, the 50-state call to defund, brought mainstream attention to abolitionist arguments that the problems are institutional, that they’re systemic, and that the only way to reduce harm is to take power and funding away from the police. So, even if people were unhappy about it, what we learned is that they were still talking about it—pundits, journalists, congresspeople, academics. They were like “No, no, no, it doesn’t mean ‘this,’ it means this.” I’m like, that’s exactly the point—to give folks that something to carry a broader message in, which the concept of Defund did. And it did it in a couple ways. One, people actually did defund police departments. This isn’t a new kind of argument; people have been divesting from policing for a long time, but it worked. It was effective in that way. We saw 840 million dollars in direct cuts from US police departments and at least 160 million dollars in investments in community service, so we’re seeing shifts. And it doesn’t happen overnight; again, people would say, “Oh, was #MeToo successful? It looks like they’ve gone away from the media,” I’m like, well, the media stopped covering it. It doesn’t mean the organizers aren’t still organizing, or survivors aren’t still demanding justice, right? The other thing is that if we look at like effectiveness and change in our experimentation, we can look at impacts in election trends. We saw that in the elections, the “Defund the Police” demand really illustrated how people felt about change. It helped people to decide how they were going to engage in the elections.

Another thing is that we saw support rise for BLM. Eighty-six percent of Biden supporters were favorable toward BLM, and so that’s really illustrative of whether or not our experiments are working. Looking at the polling data and making assessments, and public opinion data—not tethering ourselves to that, because it’s only one way of measuring change and effectiveness, but it is a significant way. Then, finally, another way of looking at the success of this particular effort is looking at its impact on the Democratic Party and political institutions, right? So, it caused huge political agitation within the Democratic Party last election cycle. It set off a whole chain of events that are still unfolding. They’re spending tons of money to figure out what the impact of our demand was on them, and in a post-election analysis, 60 contested Congressional races in 2020 featured broadcast tv ads regarding “Defund the Police.” They spent 33 million dollars. They spent 33 million dollars.

So, experimentation, right? What is success? I mean, you really have to determine it not based on the status quo determinants of success, but you have to look at what is meaningful change over time. How are we seeding doubt? So, if we’re not changing narratives overnight, perhaps we’re seeding doubt in people’s minds that the ideas that they believe are real, or that what is politically possible is actually politically possible, or what we’ve been told is possible is possible.

And so, I think, in closing on that, the Defund experiment is incredibly powerful. It’s incendiary, even, and it has permanence in public discourse that other similar demands such as “Divest/Invest,” or even “Reimagining Public Safety,” don’t have, and so my assessment is that the demand strengthened the bargaining position of moderates and normalized their demands, and that we should keep using it because, truly, for narrative shifts to occur, social movements require constant adaptation, evolution, integration, co-creation, and experimentation to create conditions for new belief systems to emerge.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

This is my 10th year building narrative power for social movements, and I’ll talk a little bit more about what narrative power is and how we deploy it, but in that time the field of strategic communications has grown profoundly, and that’s one significant change that we’ve seen—more and more institutions working to eliminate oppressive systems and build inclusive ones are coming to understand that stories and storytelling are the backbone of an inclusive society, and how they’re told defines whose lives are valued and whose are not, and that narrative power shapes all other types of power, such as social power, economic power, and political power. And so the growth of this field is instrumental in defending democracy and building genuinely inclusive societies over time, and it’s been the critical efforts of communicators and organizers, whether they call themselves that or not, whose work is rooted in understanding and centering the challenges, and experiences, and insight, and wisdom, and stories, and knowledge of everyday people who are experiencing domination and exclusion, that have changed the hearts and minds of people that have set political agendas, and that have transformed culture to create a more equitable society.

And so in recent years, social change communicators, who are deeply embedded in community-based struggles—and I’ll talk a little bit more about what I mean by grassroots framework later—they have used the power of cultural work, of digital organizing and journalism, of storytelling to combat the ascent of the far right. From women-driven movements in Argentina, to Poland, to #MeToo here in the United States and the Movement for Black Lives, issues rise and fall from the media all the time. But it’s our job to maintain that existing drumbeat, and also to infuse a kind of radical assessment into strategic communications and power building. So, growth in this field is incredibly instrumental to long-term power building efforts, and organizing those communicators toward a radical narrative framework is a big part of that shift, and it’s a big part of the role that I play in the movement, and I want to just tell you a little bit about the Radical Communicators network, which I mentioned earlier.

So, this community of practice has over 5,000 members globally, and it’s a good example of how we optimize the field, enlarge opportunities for growth—when we have opportunities for growth. So, RadComms creates infrastructure that communicators need by facilitating collaboration between and across movements, by sharing and incubating strategies, by creating in-person and virtual events to build trust and relationships and community building, but also to leverage resources—democratize those resources to share them—and to create more opportunities for people in the field who don’t have access to significant resources because they work at forums and large institutions.

What’s different about RadComms, although I founded the network, is that it is completely decentralized. It’s organic, it’s driven by people in the field, and it’s not tied to any individual organizational brand. This is incredibly important; we are not using market-based strategies for liberation. We believe that our job is to be a conduit for grassroots communicators, to disseminate radical frameworks for strategic communications into more mainstream and academic spaces, and to train people up in narrative power strategies that democratize our field, that put people closest to oppression at the center of our efforts, as opposed to marketing or marketing strategies, which in many ways are antithetical to true freedom and liberation.

We believe what sets us apart is that we don’t sacrifice principles or ethics for strategy, but that the most important role that we can play is to build narrative power for social movements. So, we organize an already connected group of people and change makers, and in the last year we’ve seen that group grow significantly, so lots more people entering the field coming in, which is why it’s so important for us to take the time to offer political education, professional development, and also relationship building so that communicators coming in are doing it from a place of genuine and meaningful radical transformation, as opposed to kind of just tinkering around the edges.

And then I want to name just one other quick development that I’ve been tracking from a narrative perspective, which is that the progressive sector is becoming more and more honest about the fact that we don’t always agree about how change happens. We’re ditching fake unity and homogenous strategies, which in my opinion is an excellent thing. So, one example from last year, during the 2020 uprisings in the US and globally, “Defund the Police” permeated the streets, the airwaves, the halls of Congress, the digital spaces, and it transcended borders and regimes, languages and culture, and it quickly became a rallying cry of the globally oppressed. Instances of police terror and the resulting uprisings gave us narrative strategists an opportunity to proliferate visionary messages and build narrative power for ideas, and stories, and policies that advanced innovative approaches to community safety and peacekeeping, but when Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and our allies made the demand to defund the police, we were shamed and stigmatized on a national level by “progressives,” people who were really upset with us, you know, and they reached out to us, like, wagging their fingers telling us all the ways that we were being “divisive” and “unstrategic.” And I just want to point to you that this happened when I was the comms director at Black Lives Matter. This happened to us. They said, “Why are you saying, ‘Black Lives Matter’? Can’t you just say, ‘Black Lives Matter, too?’” It was just people being really afraid of a radical assertion that “Black lives matter” and wanting us to kind of water it down in some ways.

But it wasn’t just people in nonprofits; it was also the president—the incoming president and the former president—who were chastising us, right? People wanted to know why we couldn’t say things like “Reimagine Public Safety”—which, by the way people are using that frame—or “Divest from Policing.” Why were we saying “defund”? The reason why this is important is that these ideas that we’re espousing now are unpopular, but that’s what tends to happen with civil rights work. They will be the norm in the future; in the meantime, we’ll be considered kind of provocateurs. But I want to point to something that maybe won’t be reported on in kind of long-form analyses of last year’s power-building opportunities, which is that we played a flanking role to the moderates and to the centrists who won kind of progressive-ish wins in 2020. So, a positive radical flank effect can occur when the bargaining position of moderates is strengthened by the presence of more radical groups (i.e., us) and those radicals can provide a militant foil against which moderate strategies and demands are redefined and normalized—in other words, kind of made more reasonable. So, it’s kind of simple psychology: We offer constituents something wild and shocking to them, and kind of more pacified and reformist ideas become appealing, and this is why it’s so important.

So, I’ll talk later about the successes and challenges of “Defund” as a demand and as a modern example of systems and belief change, but in terms of engagement, communications and mobilization for social movements, both the growth of the field and the emergence of different factions, have made our ideas more potent and are allowing us to get to the root of the problems instead of tinkering around the edges of those problems.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.