Many of us engaged in social activism spend a good deal of time reading about and discussing social movements—how they started, who was involved, how they succeeded, when they ended or what they morphed into, and sometimes where they went wrong. Those of us who have focused much of our activism on fundraising often ask, “Where did they get the resources to do the work they did?”
In this section, we look at two movements—the struggle for LTBTQ+ equality, and the fight for immigrants’ rights—which represent a small percentage of social movements that have brought profound change, often for the better, around the world. Both of these movements are contemporary and are needed today as much as ever. We focus on these two movements because they provide valuable fundraising examples and lessons for social change organizations.
With these chapters, we are not presenting a comprehensive history of the financing of social movements, but a sample of how some organizations that have been instrumental in the LGBTQ+ and immigrants’ rights movements generated funding and people power.
The purpose of this section is to show how organizations have successfully used the frameworks and techniques we have outlined in the previous TEN sections of this book. The nonprofits described in this chapter also exemplify how fundraising for social change means mobilizing thousands of people and their many gifts—their money, their time, their networks, their assets, their thoughts, and their hopes. Money is one very important feature of a successful social movement, but is not the only feature.
These chapters were researched by Stan Yogi, who, in addition to his expertise in fundraising, is also a historian. We hope that the stories in these chapters will inspire you to double down on your commitment to build a broad base of donors, recognizing that true change comes from providing opportunities for people to participate in their own liberation in whatever ways are possible. Organizations working for progressive social change must be supported by those agents of change. Fundraising and organizing are siblings, and success in both requires mobilizing many people. The stories in this section show how some organizations have done that successful mobilizing, first by necessity and then by design.
