Boring Revolution Field Research

The philanthropic sector is currently experiencing a period of major risk paralysis. Realizing that old frameworks had failed, funders were spurred by the events of 2020 to think in terms of big, ambitious system-change strategies that can reconfigure how we relate to one another and the planet. Yet, repeatedly, their proposals have faltered in the face of stiff opposition from the “back office” of philanthropy. Accountants, legal counsel, investment committees, and grants management teams have all too often placed obstacles in the way of new funding strategies, clinging to business as usual. The Boring Revolution means dismantling the professional risk frameworks that underpin this resistance, because it is often the apparently “boring” details that uphold the wealth defense industry. Three primary issues have contributed to this pull back:  - Right-wing backlash increasing fears of becoming a target. Attacks on DEI programs and racial justice initiatives have made funders leery of landing on the radar of conservative organizations for lawsuits or threats to their teams. The litigation targeting the Fearless Fund in the US deepened and spread these concerns. In parallel, anti-Palestine movements have targeted efforts to support the Palestinian people. The deplatforming of intermediaries moving resources to Palestine and the opening of government investigations into support of “terrorist” organizations have sparked wider concerns around funding international social justice work. As a result, pledges to support BIPOC communities have increasingly gone unmet. - A shifting government regulatory context curtailing desire for innovative practices. With the onset of COVID-19, many communities launched mutual aid and solidarity funds to flow funds to both individuals and businesses. Funder interest in supporting this work has declined as the pandemic has subsided, while government scrutiny into these funding mechanisms has only increased. Bureaucratic requirements associated with this work have redirected charitable funding to traditional nonprofit outlets rather than moving funds directly to places where they can address inequality and enable direct redistribution of hoarded wealth.   - Cost assessments leading to cut backs on infrastructure offerings. In 2020 and afterwards, numerous philanthropic and nonprofit organizations began to implement a broad range of new impact-focused practices, such as impact-first investing, grants to businesses, or unrestricted long-term funding. In order to push the boundaries, these approaches incurred costs that many donors have subsequently decided are unsustainable, despite the impact being achieved. Criticisms of trust-based philanthropy in particular have led to risk-aversion across the field, pushing donors to invest in traditional approaches instead of embracing change.  Given this context, administrative teams, legal counsel, and philanthropic advisors across the field have been counseling a more conservative approach for their organizations and their clients. The result has been a chilling effect on the field. Rather than leaning into bold new strategies to confront the crises of our time, risk paralysis and unwillingness to problem solve is taking the charitable sector backwards, unwinding many hard-won gains coming out of 2020. Organizations are skirting rather than embracing innovation, while wealth hoarding has only gained momentum. Work supporting BIPOC communities has been the most hard hit, shutting down many effective strategies that were just starting to bear fruit.

Despite having a basic outline of the factors shaping the emerging philanthropic retrenchment and capital flow blockages, more granular research is needed to understand the structural “back office” issues and potential solutions. Possibility Labs will lead a rapid Boring Revolution Field Research project, providing a landscape analysis involving interviews across the field, focusing on conversations with the legal, grants management, accounting, and investment teams that are standing in the way of wealth distribution. Values-driven appeals to philanthropic donors to redistribute their wealth will continue to founder if we do not have detailed understanding of the institutional interests that resist redistribution, nor will we be able to design effective strategies to change the professional standards behind wealth hoarding.  Possibility Labs will focus this Boring Revolution Field Research primarily (but not exclusively) on intermediaries. Intermediaries provide a wide range of back office services to the field, centering administrative capacity in their organizational structures. They often also operate at a scale that makes it more likely they can take on bodies of work that individual donors or smaller foundations cannot. Despite this, they are also very responsive to perceived risk, given how any missteps can pose issues for the multiple partners they serve, as well as being more conscious of cost factors given their reliance on earned income. These conditions therefore make intermediaries critical bellwethers for what are common offerings and strategies in the sector as well as for mapping the knock-on effects of cutbacks. Their decisions – particularly in terms of hoarding wealth – ripple out to affect the thinking of both private foundations and public charities. We will interview administrative, leadership, and programmatic staff at these intermediaries, as well as speaking with donors that have relied on intermediaries for services. Questions will focus on perceived risks related to accelerating fund disbursement strategies, relationships between donors and “back office” staff, professional standards and how they relate to internal workflow creation, and perceived opportunities and/or solutions related to these issues that can unlock more capital from the wealth defense industry.   Our team will use this research to produce publicly accessible information about the state of the field. Many in the field have tracked the challenges most directly tied to their work, whether the Fearless Fund litigation or the rollbacks of trust-based philanthropy, yet little synthetic information has been produced about sector-wide trends or the cross-sector “back office” practices that lead to wealth hoarding. This research will have an applied focus, oriented towards dismantling the professional risk frameworks that underpin resistance to the redistribution of wealth. The pressing need to transform the practices of accountants, legal counsel, investment committees, and grants management teams will guide every step of this research project.

The philanthropic sector has the potential to play a critical role confronting the social and environmental crises we face. Removed from the market dynamics that often subordinate impact to profit, philanthropy should be the site of catalytic experimentation, testing new approaches and accelerating breakthroughs when they happen. In addition, in the absence of government regulation to disrupt egregious wealth accumulation, philanthropy is one of the primary routes to redistribute wealth. There is more than enough money in the world, yet continued philanthropic roadblocks limit the effectiveness of this route to hack the wealth defense industry. If philanthropy remains stuck in a risk paralysis mentality, the sector will be forced to mitigate the harms caused by existing issues rather than trying to solve them.  The Boring Revolution Field Research will have three primary outcomes:  - Building on findings surfaced from the landscape analysis, but also grounded in Possibility Labs own experiences problem solving for our philanthropic partners, we will produce a series of technical guides documenting how philanthropy can redistribute wealth. These field guides will serve as a manual for practitioners, sharing legal considerations, business models, potential workflow and system designs, and templates useful for each topic. They will also provide clear rationales for the outcomes of different kinds of wealth redistribution in terms of the types of systems change options they enable (such as universal basic income or impact-first investing). Potential guide topics include: grants to non-exempt entities, non-extractive compliance, fiduciary duty in philanthropic contexts, the benefits and limits of community deterioration as a charitable purpose, and recoverable grants.  - This research and subsequent guides will undermine the rationale behind professional frameworks that automatically reject risks associated with the unknown. It will target the professional and institutional excuses that underpin the wealth defense industry and show that alternatives exist and are expedient, compliant, and profoundly impactful. This work will not just untangle risk analyses, but also fundamentally change the ways accountants, legal counsel, grants management teams, and other operations staff view their roles. This initiative will enable them to see themselves as the drivers of social and environmental change, recognizing the importance of administrative infrastructure in shaping what is possible for all of us.  - This initiative has the potential to force organizations to consider how existing tools and frameworks are rooted in the wealth defense industry. Is a grant really about changing lives or mitigating harms caused by capitalism? Encouraging funders to think in terms of big systems change strategies first requires giving them the data to understand how their existing “back offices” are holding them back (and profiting off of their risk aversion and wealth hoarding).