After a summer of unrest, groups on the frontlines of the new civil rights movement are hoping for a massive uptick in financing.
Organizations around the Black organizing world are seeing an increase in fundraising. The Black Lives Matter Global Network in June reportedly raised $10 million in one day during the height of the demonstrations.
“This is a watershed moment for all black-led organizing groups,” the group’s managing director Kailee Scales told the New York Times. “It is the moment when our allies and individuals have joined our call for justice.”
Watershed moment
The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of U.S. groups pursuing economic and racial justice, brings together stakeholders and activists from around the country to advocate for policies like defunding the police, reparations for Black people in the U.S., economic justice and more.
As Inside Philanthropy reported in July, the coalition was part of a call to funders in June that asked backers for $50 million in 2020. The Movement for Black Lives raised a total of $2.7 million in 2019, indicating a sense of major opportunity from the coalition.
Funding has increased for affiliated groups and collectives across the board. According to reports, June marked a significant uptick in donations for local and national Black-led groups like the Minnesota Freedom Fund—which had to turn people away after having their coffers filled to bursting in the wake of demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd.
Shock as motivation
“The recent murders shocked a lot of people into a conscience around what we’ve been saying the whole time—Black life is in danger, and we need to create alternatives to police and incarceration to take care of our folks,” Charles Long, Movement for Black Lives’ resource coordinator, told Inside Philanthropy in July.
Melissa Berman, president and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, told the Associated Press in June that the sea change brought on by the protest movement in funding to groups in the Black Lives Matter sphere is indicative of a deeper change to how the funding world looks at organizations like the Movement for Black Lives.
“Both individuals like Michael Jordan and corporations like Google across America are making much bigger commitments than they have in the past,” said Berman. “They are also increasingly willing to name the problem as racism and not use euphemisms.”
Handling increased funding
With that change has come an unanticipated problem: how to handle a massive cash increase in a way that continues the pressure from the protest movement while ensuring public safety.
“Now, we are just going to be looking at ways to codify that and make it into what we want to see, which is unarmed people dealing with situations that don’t have to get violent, in which nobody has to lose their life,” Long of the Movement for Black Lives told Inside Philanthropy.
Groups around the country hope to see continued funding increases, especially for lesser-known organizations, as the Mississippi Center for Justice’s Vangela Wade wrote for Fortune in September.
“This wave of funding is much needed,” wrote Wade. “For too long, organizations supporting Black lives have been unable to generate as much funding as white-led organizations.”
