Money For Change: Social Movement Philanthropy at the Haymarket People's Fund

1. Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION The problems facing us are ours to solve. It is we here in our community-through our study of our conditions, through learning together how other oppressed people have solved their problems, and through our concerted action-who will decide the fate of our community. (quoted from flyer issued by the Boston youth group, Free My People) Copyrighted Material E ACH WEEK, ON SUNDAY EVENINGS AT SIX O'CLOCK FOR SEVERAL years in the early 1990s, fifty or so Boston young people, parents, and teachers met at the Church of the United Communiry in the primarily African American neighborhood of Roxbury. The meetings were open to the public, and people who attended were mostly young African Americans and Latin Americans, more women than men, some preteens, some in their twenties. They talked about the issues they faced-violence, drugs, unemployment, inadequate schooling, police harassment, troubled relationships between young women and men-and they strategized about what they could do to help each other, improve the circumstances of their lives, and get powerful people in the ciry to listen to them and address their concerns. Stating as its goal "to build a student/youth movement in the Boston area strong enough to playa role in stopping the self-destructive spiral of violence that surrounds us," Free My People/Youth Leadership Movement received a $2,500 grant from Haymarket People's Fund in June 1989. 1 It was the first independent grant they had ever received. By 1992, as I consider in the next chapter, Free My People had become a visible group that the Boston power structure had begun to take into account. Haymarket People's Fund is a small New England regional public foundation , also called a "public chariry," headquartered in Boston.2 Founded over twenry years ago, in 1974, it has given away over $7 million in grants to progressive local social change/social movement organizations like Free 2 Chapter 1 Copyrighted Material INTRODUCTION 3 My People. Haymarket's grantmaking is unusual because its money goes exclusively to organizations ofthis kind and because people who come from these organizations (or ones like them) make the grant decisions. Haymarket has been described as the "protorype of (he alternative funds," offering "a democratically representative alternative that is close to the kind ofphilanthropy that might truly be for the public good" (O'Neil 1989, 148; Odendahl1990a, 184). In the early 1990s, Haymarket gave away approximately $400,000 a year to local communiry groups working on issues ofpeace and international solidariry , workers rights, housing and homelessness, environment and safe energy, health, antiracism, gay and lesbian issues, women's rights, and disabiliry rights.3 Haymarket is a founding member ofthe Funding Exchange, a national network of fifteen similar social change foundations around the United States, headquartered in New York Ciry.4 From February 1990 to May 1992, I did intensive field research at Haymarket People's Fund. I attended and took detailed notes at over three hundred hours of meetings; conducted forry in-depth interviews with board members, staff, and donors; had innumerable informal conversations; and reviewed documents back to 1974.5 This inside look at how a funding organization operates is unprecedented . Foundations, both private and public, have hesitated to let the public see up close how they make grants and raise money. In allowing this book to be written, the people at Haymarket People's Fund are participating in breaking through this secrecy. Foundations that give money to social change/social movement groups are out of the ordinary.6 Based on a survey ofsocial movement funding by private foundations from 1955 to 1980, sociologist Craig Jenkins estimates that less than 1 percent of the total goes to support this kind of activiryJ He concludes, "Foundations that fund social movements are innovative and relatively unconventional actors in (heir own world. Foundation support goes overwhelmingly to established charities and nonprofit institutions " Oenkins 1989b, 294). Based on this estimate, approximately $40 million to $80 million dollars of the total $8 billion given out by private foundations in 1991 would have been given to social movement groups. This ethnographic case study ofHaymarket explores the inner workings Copyrighted Material 4 Chapter 1 of raising money and giVIng it away to progressive social change/social movement organizations. Haymarket calls this funding "Change, Not Charity."8 This study is also about organizational change, since the years 1990 to 1992 were a time of major transition...