Charities that work on similar issues can sometimes feel like they’re fighting each other for attention and money. For small organizations that struggle to attract significant financial support, this can be especially demoralizing.
A quartet of New York City nonprofits that work to assist people affected by racism, poverty, transphobia, and homophobia are rejecting that mind-set. They share not only a commitment to economic, racial, and gender justice but also an office building and a fundraising vehicle.
All working out of the Miss Major-Jay Toole Building for Social Justice in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, the leaders of the Audre Lorde Project, Streetwise and Safe, FIERCE, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project began planning a shared fundraising effort in 2012.
The groups wanted to build their coffers, but they also aimed to strengthen their ties to each other and honor two longtime activists who inspire their work and for whom their office building is named. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, an African-American transgender woman and a veteran of the Stonewall Uprising, founded the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project. Jay Toole, a queer activist, co-founded Queers for Economic Justice and Jay’s House.
The key question driving the collaboration: How to combine resources, support each other, and reduce feelings of isolation and competition? The answer was a giving circle — a grass-roots group of donors pooling their money to support shared causes. The nonprofits established the Miss Major-Jay Toole Building Giving Circle and set a goal to raise $67,000 for all four groups, plus the activists.
It’s not a traditional giving circle: Rather than outside donors, it consists of staff, board members, clients, and volunteers with the participating nonprofits. And rather than asking members to merely give money, the circle asked them to contribute time, energy, and knowledge to design a fundraising campaign that would celebrate the strengths and resources of the people they serve — people of color, youth, and LGBTQ people.
They hoped to educate donors and potential supporters about the challenges of attracting dollars to serve these groups. And they sought to teach more employees and board members how to raise money, so those skills wouldn’t be held by just a few people in the organizations.
The Process
Staff members from each organization met on several Saturdays to build relationships with each other and explore the value of the work each group does.
They shared stories about how their communities have survived oppressive conditions. They brought in trainers to help employees acknowledge and develop ways to overcome entrenched inequality that put nonprofits that serve and seek support from minorities at a financial disadvantage. And they discussed traditions, like food, art, and music, that have thrived in their low-income communities and made them special.
They decided to make this last theme the foundation for their fundraising campaign.
The Events
They groups devised projects and events to “engage the community in ways that normal fundraising doesn’t,” says Krystal Portalatin, former co-director of FIERCE. “We really wanted to bring people close to us as a way of building long-term investment.”
So they created opportunities to involve their clients in projects that showcased their talents and perspectives.
First, the members of the giving circle created a quilt to represent their struggle for freedom from oppression and asked people in the community to sponsor a patch — and contribute a message to be inscribed on that patch — for $5 to $50.
Then the members organized a guided hike in Central Park on which, for $35 to $75, donors could learn how urban development has negatively affected people the nonprofits serve by limiting their access to public open spaces. The offer included a guide featuring facts about local history as well as hiking tips.
Finally, members of the circle hosted three meals with wine tastings, one each in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, asking for donations of $50 to $100. It also sold a cookbook of recipes reflecting the cultures of the people they serve.
The Results
The efforts raised $40,000. Although that was short of the original target, it provided an honorarium for the two activists and bolstered the groups’ modest budgets of $500,000 to $1 million each.
More important to the organizers, though, the nonprofits successfully pooled resources, introduced themselves to new people, and conveyed the message that “you don’t have to choose, you can give to all of us,” Portalatin says.
The nonprofits plan to maintain the partnership, which Cara Page, executive director of the Audre Lorde Project, says reflects their clients’ shared “story of survival” and taught the groups how to fundraise in ways that showcase the value of their communities.
“I can’t stress enough how transformative this process has been for me,” Page says, because it revealed other forms of wealth in their communities and showed that “our worth isn’t only tied to dollars.”