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

7. Beyond Diversity: Building a Multirace, Multiclass, Gender-Equal Organization

7 BEYOND DIVERSlTV: BUILDING AMULTIRACE, MULTICLASS, GENDER-EQUAL ORGANIZATION The reason Haymarket has [diversity] is because it has to have it to be a legitimate progressive organization. The organization is not worth existing if you don't have it multiracial. The success ofHaymarket owes a tremendous amount to feminism. Women senergy helped to unleash it. Copyrighted Material T HE FIRST SPEAKER IN THE COMMENTS OPENING THIS CHAPTER is an African American man who is a member of the governing board at Haymarket People's Fund. The second speaker is a gay white man from one of the regional funding boards, and the third is a white man who is a donor. Their remarks are typical of how people there spoke about the high priority of building a multirace, multiclass, gender-equal organization. In this chapter, looking at both interpersonal and institutional levels of action and interaction, I focus on the challenges and struggles that building an organization of this kind entails. I show how people at Haymarket dealt with these challenges and struggles. I layout what people at Haymarket believed was needed to create an organization that moves beyond diverse representation to being fully multirace, multiclass, and gender equal. Of special importance is how accomplishing this goal would change the structure of Haymarket's fundraising and the relations berween fundraising and grantmaking and the different people who did them. This new vision is preliminarily defined in Chapter 5 as one of a fuller donor-activist partnership that reaches across class and race. In the course of this discussion, I revisit several issues and events discussed previously in this book, analyzing them through another lens and specifying them further. Haymarket's primary goal is to fund grassroots organizing that brings together marginalized people in their own behalf-to improve their own 132 Chapter 7 Copyrighted Material BEYOND DIVERSITY 133 lives and challenge structures of wealth and power in the larger society. "Marginalized people" means especially women and men ofcolor, workingclass and low-ihcome people, white women, and gays and lesbians. To fulfill its commitment to turn grantmaking power over to activists like those from its grantee constituencies, Haymarket must include at its center marginalized people who are organizing in their own behalf. People spoke about this practice in varying language as the organization 's commitment to activist control, constituency control, or community control. l In the early 1990s, this commitment was beginning to expand beyond grantmaking to fundraising and to overall power in the organization -pardy because the governing board was assuming more importance and was composed almost entirely of activists from each of Haymarket's nine grantmaking boards, activists who wanted power to reside more with them and less with staff. People in the organization saw this commitment as a fundamental principle underlying their efforts to be muitirace, multiclass , and gender-equal. People at Haymarket, as explained in Chapter 2, also saw diversity (especially racial diversity) as important for "good grantmaking." Grantmakers (funders) who are themselves people ofcolor, who know and are known in communities of color where important organizing takes place, have special knowledge when it comes to assessing the claims of "good organizing" made by grantee groups. Furthermore, as the African American man quoted above suggested, if Haymarket is going to identifY itselflegitimately as a politically progressive organization-if people there are going to be seen in the community as movement insiders-then they must confront the issues of race, class, and gender that progressive-movement groups define as so crucial. As a starting point for the kind oforganization Haymarket strives to become , women and men of color, working-class and low-income people, white women, and gays and lesbians have to be represented in substantial numbers on Haymarket's governing board, funding boards, and among the staff. Unlike Haymarket, many organizations that seek to "diversifY" their membership stop at representation. People at Haymarket believe that while this is necessary, it is not enough. Beyond simply being there in numbers, the voices of marginalized people must be heard loud and clear, and they Copyrighted Material 134 Chapter 7 need to have full and equal access to power in the organization. At Haymarket , the two main centers of power are grantmaking and fundraising: the power to make decisions about grants and the power to raise money. It was at these centers that change was afoot. The kind of organization Haymarket strives to be is revealed, first, in...