As corporate $ pours in to influence policy & as Trump Admin seeks to enact its agenda, why would mission-driven philanthropic institutions step out of advocacy arena for fear of having "undue influence." Don't we need more speech & advocacy, more challenge and debate, not less?
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For years I have heard liberals in philanthropy lament that there isn't more funding of advocacy and efforts to influence policy .... and say that the conservatives know how to do it better.
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Now I see lots of hand-wringing that it's anti-democratic to influence policy ... but isn't the answer to do advocacy in a way that elevates the voices of the vulnerable and those who often aren't heard? Isn't that a key role of philanthropy and nonprofits at their best?
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Replying to @philxbuchanan
Yes. We need to work toward a society in which winners take less. While we’re here, there are ways to give that self-aggrandize, bypass gov’t, shore up an unjust system, and sustain the power distribution that will make Trump-like events keep happening. And there are better ways.
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Replying to @AnandWrites @philxbuchanan
And those better ways, in my view, come with shifting from giving back to giving up, from crowding government out to crowding it in, and, above all, as you say, making it for and about the communities being fought for, with them at the wheel.
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Replying to @AnandWrites @philxbuchanan
My concern would if we worked to defeat Trump in ways that bolstered the conditions that put him in power, so that the defeat abetted his resurrection in new forms.
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Many who do this brave work fighting Trump and depend on rich donors tell me privately how they feel degraded, overruled, and richsplained to by their backers. There must be ways of using that money that don’t replicate the very power dynamics the donors purport to be fighting.
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