Nonprofit leaders tied to the Black Lives Matter movement are calling for grant makers to support their sweeping new policy platform by providing money for general operating expenses and ideas that require comprehensive social change, not just a light revision.
Leaders of the movement released a list of demands Monday that include free health care and education for black people, the creation of a universal basic income, and reparations for slavery. They also want to dramatically reduce society’s reliance on police and prisons.
“There’s been this critique, in particular among philanthropists, that the demands are unclear,” says Carl Lipscombe, legal and policy manager for Black Alliance for Just Immigration. “These are our demands. This is our vision.”
Reform, the nonprofit leaders say, is not enough.
“We’re seeking transformation,” says Zachary Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “Deep, systemic, and structural change is necessary.”
The agenda calls mostly for government action, but its creators — activists and representatives of nonprofits and grass-roots groups known as the Movement for Black Lives — also hope to inspire grant makers to support social and political change that may fall outside their comfort zones.
“Band-Aid solutions don’t move us in the direction we need to move in,” says Charlene Carruthers, national director of Black Youth Project 100.
Demands to ‘Shift Power’
Mr. Norris called for grant makers to support grass-roots organizing efforts by asking movement leaders how financial and other resources can help them “carry the work forward.” Some foundations, including the Chicago Foundation for Women and MRG Foundation, and participants in the Funders for Justice collective, are already providing money to activist groups, while others have told The Chronicle they are seeking to maintain a “balance” between community demands and government proposals.
M Adams, co-executive director of Freedom Inc., urged grant makers to do more than give money to single campaigns that address distinct issues. She challenged institutions to support work that cuts across program and organizational barriers so that grass-roots groups can collaborate rather than compete with each other for grant money.
More pointedly, Mr. Norris called for grant makers to distinguish between policies that “actually shift power to black people” and those that just tweak existing systems to “simply create new processes that allow continued exploitation by the powerful.”
Change sometimes happens slowly, Mr. Lipscombe says, and he doesn’t view anything currently being considered “as going against this platform or hindering transformational change.”
But other leaders expressed skepticism of popular proposals for improving police departments, such as simply requiring more training, mandating body cameras, or relying on civilian review boards “that are hired and handpicked by the powers that be,” Mr. Norris says.
“So many of us have put too much out here on the line to go home with anything short of freedom. What cannot be is that the only thing changed is that police have five more hours of training to go through,” Ms. Adams says. “We need to be looking at solutions that put more power in the hands of community members instead of giving more resources and power to the institutions that are causing harm.”
Growing Coalition
The collective that created the platform grew out of a July 2015 conference called the Movement for Black Lives National Convening, where several thousand people gathered to learn about and celebrate racial-justice work.
Over the past year, representatives from 28 organizations, including the Black Lives Matter Network, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, and the National Conference of Black Lawyers, crafted the platform. They worked in person at retreats and remotely by phone, email, and shared online documents.
They arranged their demands into six broad categories: end violence and discrimination against black people; pay reparations for historical and contemporary wrongs; invest in communities rather than police, the military, and prisons; work toward economic justice; grant communities control over institutions; and make the political process more democratic.
So far, more than 35 additional organizations have endorsed the platform.
“It was an incredible process, an incredible feat to accomplish, and I think that so many organizations came together shows us the amount of possibility in this movement,” Ms. Adams says. “Not only do we have the ability to be active in the streets and wage ongoing campaigns on the ground and practice direct action, we have the ability to create a vision.”
