Environmental Funders and the Grassroots
By There is a criticism of funders on the left that is so old and familiar as to have become cliché. It goes like this: The right’s funders have spent the last 30 years building a bottom-up movement. The wealthy conservatives who give money view the heads of movement institutions as trusted peers, so they are content to give without strings attached — their money is “patient.” The right now has institutions and infrastructure that recruit young people, pay them enough to live on, mentor and train them, and send them out into the courts, local politics, and think tanks.
The left’s funders, on the other hand, have pursued high-profile national legislative wins. Their money is impatient and results-based. Institutions receiving the money are treated like untrustworthy employees, forced to submit endless progress reports and beg anew for money every year or two. The result is short-term thinking and number-pumping. Young people are treated like chattel, given unpaid internships and asked to accept poverty. Grassroots organizing and local politics are neglected in favor of D.C.-focused lobbying meant to influence elites.
When it comes to environmental philanthropy, this familiar critique is, at least in broad outlines, correct. What’s more, environmental funding tends to be extremely siloed; there’s little overlap with broader issues of social and economic justice. Basically, a few big D.C.-based green groups get the bulk of the money, to be spent effecting federal legislation and policy, while smaller community-organizing groups go hungry.
When reviewing Douglas Bevington’s book on grassroots activism and the ancient forest campaigns, I particularly highlighted Bevington demonstrating how grassroots organizations had to run an end-around on the big greens, whose commitment to fundraising and having a seat at the table made them adverse to any kind of radical action. Little has changed on that front, although I’d also argue that, unfortunately, the level of environmental radicalism is not as strong as it was two decades ago either.
Roberts makes a convincing case, noting that the top-down big-organization lobbying strategy has not been effective. Not a single major piece of environmental legislation has passed Congress since the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990. That’s 22 years of an ineffective strategy. That’s not to say that the legislative strategy should be ignored, but, like the labor movement, the big greens have had a very difficult time reconciling themselves to the fact that their once brilliant legislative strategy has become completely ineffective. Environmentalism has more residual public popularity than unionism and so there’s more room for immediate payoff by feeding money to grassroots organizations. This seems like an obviously good idea, at least as an experiment, but there’s a multi-decade history by environmental funders of keeping their distance from the hippies and the freaks. I doubt that’s going to change overnight.