On Being Called a Traitor and Saying Thank You

I first became interested in class traitorship because I had already been called a gender traitor and of all the slurs I’ve received as a queer person, I found this one tasted less like an insult and more like freedom. To betray patriarchy, to walk away from the tight inheritance of toxic masculinity, to refuse the script of heteronormativity, these were not losses. They were instinctively correct states of being. The people who called me traitor meant it as a putdown. I received it as a reflection of their internalised distortions, not mine. So when I later encountered the term class traitor, I remembered that sometimes the accusation is a map. It tells you exactly which structure you have stopped serving, exactly which master you have disappointed. The question became: what other allegiances needed betraying? What other comforts need walking away from? What if the queer art of dis-allegiance, the refusal to love what you were told to love, was transferable? What if it could be applied, toward the owning class, toward those with way more than is humanly needed?

The Original Betrayal

To speak of class traitorship is to immediately confront a definitional violence. The term itself presupposes a primary allegiance, a motherland of economic position to which one naturally belongs and to which one owes faithfulness. But what if that belonging is the original betrayal? What if allegiance to one’s class position, particularly when that position is secured on the backs’ of others and the plunder of a planet, is already a treason against something larger, older, and more real than any tax bracket? This is the inversion at the heart of any serious wealth-class analysis: the recognition that the “we” of class solidarity is a cramped and ultimately suicidal fiction when it excludes the ecological and proletarian commons upon which all life depends.

The Seduction Problem (Making Treason Desirable)

We must be honest about a key strategic failure. The left has largely made class traitorship sound like a punishment. Renunciation. Guilt. A lifetime of joyless penance and apologetic eye contact. This is a disastrous framing. The wealth defence industry, with its army of accountants, estate planners, philanthropic advisors, and family office consultants, protects concentrated assets from redistribution and it understands desire. They make retention seductive. They sell legacy, safety, dynastic fantasy, the warm narcotic of intergenerational control. If we are to build functional allyship with those in the wealth class who might yet choose differently, we must make class traitorship more seductive than what it betrays. Not easier. Not comfortable. But alive. We must make it clear that what you lose in allegiance you gain in belonging, to a project larger than your name, to a future your money cannot buy, to a selfhood unhaunted by the knowledge of what your comfort costs. As Resource Generation’s Money Stories toolkit insists, the question is never just what are you giving up? but what are you coming home to? The class traitor does not simply renounce; they rejoin. They trade the gilded isolation of private wealth for the messy, muscular solidarity of the commons. That is a better offer. We need to say so.

You Have Been Programmed

The clinical dimensions of this work are rarely given their due. ismatu gwendolyn, offers a crucial insight when they identify the ways capitalist arts train our neural pathways, literally rewiring our brains, to perceive individual wealth accumulation as collective victory. To break this trance requires something closer to deprogramming than to political education. It requires understanding that your brain has been colonized by a story about success that is slowly killing you and everyone you claim to love. This is where the psychological labour of class traitorship becomes indistinguishable from what we might call, with apologies to Deleuze and Guattari, a schizoanalytic project. Deleuze, in his late essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” wrote: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4). The weapon here is not a doctrine but a dis-allegiance, a deliberate unraveling of the identitarian ties that bind you to your class position. Deleuze and Guattari understood that capitalism operates not merely through repression but through the production of desire itself, we are made to want our own enclosure, to libidinally invest in the very structures that extract from us (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972). The class traitor, then, is engaged in something more intimate than political realignment: they are engaged in a reprogramming of desire, a reorientation of what feels like home, like safety, like a good life.

Psychological Costs of Dis-Allegiance

This is devastating work. To betray your class is to become illegible to your family, your colleagues, perhaps even to earlier versions of yourself. It is to sit in rooms where the casual language of inheritance, investment, and property value circulates like a shared mother tongue and feel yourself going mute. It is to recognize that the comfort you were promised, the comfort you may currently inhabit, is structurally dependent on the discomfort of others, on the slow violence of extraction zones you will never visit, on supply chains that disappear human hands into the smooth surface of commodities. The class traitor does not get to feel righteous about this knowledge. They get to feel implicated. And then they get to act.

Resource Generation’s Money Stories (2019) offers a practical companion to this grief. The toolkit is built around facilitated storytelling, young people with access to wealth narrating their relationships to money, inheritance, and justice, and it treats the emotional labour of dis-allegiance as central to the political work. One cannot redistribute what one cannot first face. The stories in Money Stories reveal a recurring pattern: the moment of rupture is rarely ideological first. It is relational. Someone loves someone across a class line. This is not weakness. This is how the cage door opens, through the heart, not the doctrine.

The Liberal Trap

What separates the class traitor from the merely guilty liberal is precisely this question of action. Gwendolyn, drawing on James Forman, draws a sharp line between the revolutionary who seeks to seize and transform power structures and the liberal who endlessly discusses change while preserving the conditions that make change impossible. Liberalism, in her devastating formulation, is “the refusal to engage in principled ideological struggle” (Gwendolyn, citing Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 1972). It provides the aesthetic of radicalism without the substance, the black square on Instagram, the land acknowledgment before the keynote, the diversity and inclusion initiative that leaves the policy untouched. The class traitor, by contrast, understands that true radicalism is easily identified because it always meets institutional pushback. If the system is not threatened by your art, your career, your philanthropy, your speaking fees, then whatever you are doing, it is not class treason. It is interior decorating.

Sankara’s Necessary Traitor

And yet: class traitors are not the vanguard. Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, understood this with characteristic clarity. He did not believe the revolution would be won by class traitors, the masses would win it, or it would not be won at all. But he insisted that class traitors were necessary to any revolutionary process. The trained professional, the doctor, the engineer, the agronomist, the lawyer, who turned their training away from private accumulation and toward the people’s project was not a romantic figure. They were a logistical one. Sankara’s government actively recruited such figures, not to lead the masses but to serve them, to place their expertise at the disposal of collective liberation rather than individual enrichment. This is the precise calibration the class traitor must hold: not saviour, not vanguard, but resource. Not the architect of the revolution, but someone who shows up with tools and asks where to swing.

This reframing matters strategically. The wealth defence industry depends on making the owning class believe they are the protagonists of history, that their genius, their risk-taking, their vision is what builds the world. The class traitor refuses this script without swinging to the opposite fantasy of abasement. Sankara’s model offers a third position: the traitor is useful, necessary even, but not central. The work is to hand over the tools and then to follow, not lead. This is the humility that distinguishes solidarity from philanthropy.

Weapons, Not Possessions

Here we arrive at the crux: class traitorship is not a performance of renunciation. The goal is not poverty as moral theatre. The goal is the strategic redeployment of resources, financial, social, cultural, cognitive, toward the destruction of the conditions that produce wealth on one side and immiseration on the other. This requires a theory of redistribution that is material, not symbolic. It means looking at your salary, your assets, your networks, your platforms and asking: what would it mean to treat these not as possessions but as weapons? What would it mean to redirect them not toward the reproduction of your own comfort but toward the construction of a world in which that comfort is no longer structurally dependent on someone else’s precarity? As Gwendolyn insists, this is “never really a question of whether people are able, it’s a question of whether people are willing“ (Gwendolyn, “Class Traitor,” threadings 2024).

The Frame Is Planetary

The planetary dimension of this work is not a nice add-on; it is the frame. There is no meaningful class analysis that stops at the human. The working class is not a species apart from the web of life; the proletariat breathes air, drinks water, depends on pollinators, and is already dying from the metabolic rifts that capitalism has torn through the biosphere. To fight for the working class without fighting for the conditions of life itself is to defend a body while poisoning its bloodstream. Class traitorship, understood planetarily, is the recognition that the hoard is not a harvest, that what the owning classes have accumulated is not wealth but a massive and lethal subtraction from the commons, ecological, social, psychic. To betray that class is not to lose something. It is to begin the long work of giving back what was never yours to take.

Living Inside the Question

None of this is comfortable. The psychological terrain of class traitorship is marked by grief, isolation, and the constant temptation to retreat into the warm bath of liberal respectability. It is easier to recycle, to buy ethical chocolate, to cry during a documentary, to post a quote from Fanon or Federici, than it is to look at your own material position and ask what it would cost, in relationships, in identity, in felt safety, to genuinely sabotage the structures that prop you up. The class traitor does not get to skip this question. They get to live inside it, which is another way of saying they get to live inside the truth.

This is the alliance that matters: not the cheap solidarity of the charity gala or the impact investment portfolio, but the slow, unsexy (nay horrifying) and psychologically grueling work of allying with the proletariat and the planet against the class that raised you. It is a betrayal that is also a homecoming. You were never meant to love your inheritance more than your world.

The work now is to make this treason irresistible. Not just easy, but irresistible. Because the wealth defence industry is organised, well-funded, and seductive in its own right. It whispers permanence. It sells dynasty. It promises that your name will outlive you, carved into a building that houses the very inequalities you might otherwise have fought. Against this, we must offer something older and more electric: the chance to belong to something larger than your name, to die as a class and be reborn as a person, to trade the gilded isolation of private wealth for the living, breathing, difficult solidarity of a world worth inheriting.

The revolution will not be led by class traitors. But it needs them, not as saviours, but as resources; not as architects, but as backers. The question is not whether they are able. It is whether they are willing. And whether we can make willingness feel less like a funeral and more like a rebirth.

References

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Forman, J. (1972). The making of Black revolutionaries. University of Washington Press.

Gwendolyn, I. (2024). Class traitor. In Threadings.

Michael Gast has spent twenty years refusing this binary.

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Let me say this plainly, because Gast insists on it: organising the rich is not the key project. You will find no Leninist fantasy here of a benevolent bourgeoisie leading the masses to salvation. The key project remains the organising of the multiracial working class, the people who clean the billionaires’ toilets, drive their children to school, and will, if history allows, inherit the earth they have scorched. The organising of the wealthy is subordinate, instrumental, and entirely accountable to that larger struggle. It is the extraction of resources from an enemy camp, nothing more. And yet, to refuse this work, to leave billions on the table out of aesthetic purity, is not radicalism but sociopolitical suicide.

What Gast has documented, across fifty years of obscured lineage, is the quiet emergence of something unprecedented: a network, now numbering perhaps a hundred thousand wealthy individuals, who are organised not to give back but to give away. This distinction is everything. Philanthropy, as Anand Giridharadas has surgically demonstrated, is largely a reputation-laundering scheme, the rich funding the salad bar while their lobbying firms burn down the kitchen. Gast points to a different creature: the inheritor who moves $25 million to climate justice with no expectation of a tax break, who states openly that her goal is “to end her own dependence on inherited wealth”. These folks are not to be seen as saints. They are defectors. And in a class war, you do not refuse defectors, you arm them and put them to work.

The anthology, Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People, is the most comprehensive map of this territory that I can find. It contains the voices of those who have tried, failed, learned, and tried again, from the radical rich kids of the 1970s who passed around the pamphlet Robin Hood Was Right, to the cross-class coalitions of the present moment. It is not a comfortable read. It insists that the wealthy who wish to be useful must stop performing poverty, must name their access, their capital, their power, and then place it on the table as a weapon. As Gast himself writes, in a passage that should be tattooed on the inside of every progressive donor’s eyelids: “To claim our class positions, and to claim the relationships and the power and the access that it enables for us, is actually really helpful”.

Sentimentality is the enemy. Guilt, a luxury. The planet is burning and Mars colonisation plans are in place for the 0.001%. Free the people to free the money to free the people is more than a credo, it is a sequence of political operations and should be read as such.

The Unprecedented (and Deeply Suspect) Formation

Are we seeing an unprecedented movement of the rich towards justice? After decades of watching the Mink Brigade, the Funding Exchange, and the rise of Resource Generation, Gast’s answer is a tentative, qualified, politically sharp: Yes.

I am not talking about the glories of philanthropy. I am not praising the “generosity” of the righteous rich. Anand Giridharadas has already surgically dissected the Winners Take All charade, the liberal elite who fund the circuses while hoarding the bread. Philanthropy is, more often than not, a reputation laundering scheme. But Gast points to something else: the emergence of an ecosystem of at least 100,000 wealthy people, representing tens to hundreds of billions in assets, who are organised not just to write cheques, but to end their own class power.

This is the distinction that matters. And it is worth repeating, as it is the difference between virtue-signalling-charitable-giving & justice-based redistribution, the difference between giving back and giving away, (and then ceasing to exist as a class agent of inequity).

The Map of the Insurgency

Gast has drawn the map of this territory. He delineates the landscape where donor organising meets political engagement. He points to the Trust Web, where inheritors like Elspeth Gilmore (of the Publishers Clearinghouse fortune) give millions in no-strings-attached gifts to organizers, not for a tax receipt, but for the revolution. He points to Katrina Schaffer, of the Hallmark corporation dynasty, who has moved over $25 million of her personal wealth to climate justice and electoral organising, with 60% of that money receiving no tax break. Her goal is not to be a wealthy patron; her stated goal is to “end her own dependence on inherited wealth”. He points to Monica Simpson who talks about pivotal moments that taught her to see the humanity in people across class divides, the spiritual dimensions of money and survival, and why showing up at uncomfortable tables is crucial for movement building. We must commit hedging our connections in further expanding this map of insurgency.

This is the surgical strike. To free the people, you must free the money. To free the money, you must free the people holding it from the delusion that they are entitled to it.

The Aesthetics of Class Collaboration

But let us not fetishize this. The left has a sick relationship with class. We waffle between the fetishization of the “noble martyr” worker and the dismissal of the working class as irredeemably conservative. We assume that the only way to fix the world is to find a tech bro with a PhD to engineer a solution (The Gates Foundation, take a bow).

Gast insists on a hard, materialist truth: you cannot win a class war if you refuse to admit the existence of defectors from the enemy camp. “To claim our class positions,” he writes, “and to claim the relationships and the power and the access that it enables for us is actually really helpful”. We must stop the middle-class performance of poverty. If you have access, say you have access. If you have capital, put it on the table. Strategy requires honesty, not aesthetic purity.

From the 70s Counterculture to Today

In 1977, a pamphlet was passed hand-to-hand in the shadows of the movement: Robin Hood Was Right. It was a roadmap for rich kids with guilty consciences who wanted to blow up the system from within. That lineage has now culminated in the 2025 anthology, Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People.

Gast admits the work is incomplete. “For too long,” he confesses in the book, “we have been satisfied being the rebellious rich without being connected to the labour movement or part of a real plan for winning power for working people”. This is the confession of a strategist, not a moralist. The “rebellious rich” are merely a vanguard of a single battalion. The war is won by the infantry of the poor.

We can safely say, a majority is drowning in a late-capitalist hellscape. The planet is burning and the billionaires are building apocalypse bunkers. Sentimentality is useless and guilt is paralysing.

Organizing the rich is all about extraction, a seemingly benevolent form (if there is such a thing). It is about convincing the class enemy to liquidate their own position. It is a dirty, compromised, necessary piece of the puzzle. If we refuse to take their money, they will use it to fund our opposition. If we refuse to organise them, they will remain organised against us.

As Gast says, we need to “strike a balance between being welcoming and accepting, while also pushing people to shift money and power“. The velvet glove on the iron fist. The soft pillow and the Marxist/Leninist critique.

Take the money. Take the access. Free the people. Or choose a different path, it will indeed take many of us hacking at the roots of injustice from all possible angles to bring about a deeper, lasting change. And quite importantly, find the cool class traitors, for as Sharon Chen, says “who’s going to reach my people but me?”

Note: This essay draws heavily on the work and writing of , strategist for Solidaire and editor of the “Organize the Rich” anthology.

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References

1. Michael Gast. Organize the Rich Radio. Apple Podcasts; 2025 [cited 2026 Jun 11].

2. Michael Gast Oakland, CA: Solidaire Network; 2026

3. Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People: An Organize the Rich Anthology 2025

4. Robin Hood was right, a guide to giving your money for social change.

5. Giridharadas A. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. 2018.

6. Solidaire Network. Michael Gast has been involved in organizing rich people for social justice for over 20 years

7. Michael Gast New York: The Nation; 2026

But for every foundation that dissolves with grace and strategic precision, there are many more whose exit leaves a smoking crater where vital community infrastructure once stood. The sunset, wielded carelessly, doesn’t feel like liberation but abandonment. As the spend-down movement gains momentum, a shadow canon of failures accumulates, largely unexamined by the very advocates who most need to study it, like a hospital teaching only from living patients and never doing an autopsy. The dark side of sunsetting is not an argument against the practice; it’s a warning sign and instruction manual for doing it responsibly. Without confronting these pathologies, the spend-down movement risks replicating the very extractive dynamics it purports to dismantle, ripping away resources from communities with the same arbitrary unilateralism that characterised their initial grantmaking.

The Clock Runs Faster Than the Checkbook

The most obvious failure is the simplest: a poorly executed spend-down can leave dependent organisations crumbling. Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation’s still unfolding situation offers a cautionary tale of staggering logistical difficulty. Tasked with disbursing $1.2 billion over 20 years, the foundation found itself, eighteen months in, catastrophically behind schedule earning $57million in a year while only managing to give away $56million, slipping $1million into the red on its own distribution targets. The foundation’s president acknowledged that reaching the required annual distribution of $75 to 100 million would demand “massive individual grants,” raising the spectre of capital absorption failures at the grantee level on an enormous scale. This is the paradox of accelerated spending: the very urgency that justifies the sunset can overwhelm an ecosystem’s capacity to absorb funds effectively, producing sloppy, oversized grants that distort local priorities and create dependency on a funding source that is, by design, about to vanish.

It is a case study in what anarchist anthropologist David Graeber might have called the bureaucratic violence of deadlines: the clock, not the community, begins to dictate who eats.

It’s not just the size of the cheques, but the chaos of a ticking clock that can override good judgment. Picture a foundation, years behind on its payout schedule, frantically searching for any nonprofit with the absorptive capacity to take a seven-figure bank transfer by Friday. Alignment with community needs becomes a secondary concern. The foundation’s legal obligation to spend becomes the grantee’s sudden, vertigo-inducing money drop, a structural recipe for misuse, no matter how well-intentioned both parties are.

When the Lifeline Snaps

The human cost registers most acutely at the organisational level. When Katya Fels Smyth faced the wind-down of her organisation, the Full Frame Initiative, she confronted four possible scenarios. The most terrifying was what she called “an implosion à la Benefits Data Trust.” That nonprofit, which helped people access public benefits, closed in the summer of 2024, leaving folks in a bind. The collapse provides a grim archetype: a well-funded organisation, it had received a huge gift from MacKenzie Scott, that nonetheless shuttered chaotically, abandoning the very people it existed to serve. The money was there, but the planning, the governance, and the care for a humane exit were not. For a sector that fetishizes “sustainability,” it is remarkable how rarely that logic is applied to the act of dissolution itself. We demand five-year strategic plans from grantees but applaud a foundation for shutting off the lights with six months’ warning and a press release.

Full Frame avoided this fate only through extraordinary measures. Fels Smyth raised over $1 million specifically for wind-down costs, negotiated generous severance packages, and spent months carefully transitioning its intellectual property to a network of volunteer “stewards.” But even this relatively conscientious closure required donors willing to fund the unsexy work of organisational death, a resource few foundations are prepared to provide. There is a perverse hierarchy at play: programmatic grants are attractive; paying for a final audit, severance, and the careful archiving of institutional knowledge is treated as an administrative afterthought. The fundamental asymmetry is stark: foundations control the timing and terms of their exit, while grantees and their clients bear the consequences.

A Foundation Exits, a Movement Trembles

Beyond individual failures lies a systemic danger: the disappearance of entire resource ecosystems without a succession plan. The Brainerd Foundation, a Seattle-based environmental funder that spent down its $18.2 million by 2020, exemplifies the thoughtful approach that many others fail to replicate. Co-director Ann Krumboltz spoke of a core ethical duty: “It’s important to respect the grantee community and think about what they require as we close, because many are dependent on—and understandably so—foundation dollars.” Brainerd invested its final phase in three “sunset initiatives” designed to build the next generation of donors, strengthen emerging leaders, and support a culture of innovation. They convened grantees for design labs, asking directly what investments would “be most valuable for strengthening the field.” They were trying to create improved future conditions as they were closing their doors, a gesture of institutional foresight too often missing from the philanthropic playbook.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: a single foundation, no matter how conscientious, cannot singlehandedly replace the ecosystem infrastructure it removes. The broader sector faces an “aggregation problem.” Multiple foundations exit a field simultaneously or in overlapping sequence, without any coordination. Imagine four major funders in a single issue area, say, housing rights or reproductive justice, all deciding on a spend-down within the same three-year window. No single exit is fatal, but collectively, they yank the financial floor out from under the field. For grantees, it’s an unpredictable landscape where a decades-long partner can announce its departure with lavish support and long notice, or with a severance package and a ‘good luck in your future endeavours’ pat on the back.

The Will to Power, Encoded in the End

There’s a deeper, structural reason why poorly executed spend-downs should be expected, not treated as anomalies. Let us speak plainly: mainstream philanthropy does not solve the contradictions of racial capitalism - in fact it is often an instrument for managing them. Critical scholarship on the sector’s political economy shows how foundations often function under a logic of “double dispossession,” where the accountability relationship between donor and grantee reproduces the very hierarchies social justice organisations claim to dismantle. A foundation that has never genuinely ceded power to its grantees during its lifespan will be structurally incapable of doing so gracefully in its final months. The patterns of paternalism, opacity, and unilateral decision-making are simply compressed and accelerated. The sunset becomes not a rupture with business-as-usual philanthropy, but its most concentrated and chemically pure expression: a final, irrevocable assertion of donor power. The foundation decides who gets what, when the taps are turned off forever, with very little accountability to those left behind. The donor gets the first word and the last, and the community’s role is simply to be grateful for whatever happened in between.

You can spot a power-blind spend-down a mile off. It’s the one where the foundation’s board crafts a multi-year “legacy plan” in a cherrywood-paneled room, hires a branding agency to name its final initiative something like “The Big Give,” announces it as an impact accelerator move, and then offers grantees a “resilience toolkit” and a ‘capacity building’ seminar. This type of move is meant to clean the conscience of an institution that cannot bear to admit its own powerplay right up to the moment it disappears.

What a Responsible Goodbye Looks Like

So, what distinguishes a destructive sunset from a responsible one? The case studies of both failure and near-miss point to a few critical markers.

1. Clear, early, and honest communication with grantees is foundational. The Brainerd Foundation gave every grantee a minimum of one year’s notice before their final grant and engaged in individual conversations about how to structure that support for maximum resilience. If we normalise long-term funding relationships, we could say a 3-5 year minimum could be the most responsible norm.

2. Dedicated resources for sunset costs, as Full Frame secured from the Claneil Foundation and the Gund family, enable the careful archival of intellectual property, the orderly transition of programs, and the provision of meaningful severance to staff.

3. Investment in field-building, not merely grantee-support, ensures that the foundation’s exit leaves the ecosystem stronger.

4. And the active participation of grantees and communities in designing the exit strategy transforms the spend-down from a unilateral act of donor prerogative into a genuinely collaborative process of transition.

Thus, the spend-down, done well, is less an ending and more of an investment in a successor landscape the foundation will not be around to see but will have seeded.

This is not an argument for perpetual endowment. The permanent foundation, hoarding resources extracted from the commons while meting out a meagre 5% annually, remains an institution structurally designed to manage scarcity rather than eliminate it. The point is not to abandon the sunset but to insist that it be conducted with the same rigour, accountability, and strategic intentionality that the spend-down movement demands of perpetual institutions. A bad sunset reinforces every critique of philanthropy; while a good one enacts their resolution. The contradiction between philanthropy’s progressive self-image and its extractive foundations does not vanish with a sunset clause, it must be actively dismantled through a process that surrenders power, not just money.

The choice is not between perpetuity and sunset, but between a philanthropy that exits responsibly and one that simply flees. Foundations contemplating their own dissolution must learn from the ghosts of their predecessors that faded out without a sound, leaving communities to quietly absorb the loss. The sunset remains one of the most potent tools in philanthropy’s arsenal, a mechanism for converting stored wealth into transformative capacity. But like any powerful tool, it maims the careless wielder. The only thing worse than a perpetual foundation pretending to solve problems it was built to manage is a foundation that, in its final act, abandons the communities it claimed to serve.

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A Responsible-Sunsetting Checklist

aka How to Conduct an Exit Interview with the Future

For a foundation, the final redistribution of money might as well be your last testament. Before you lock the doors, ask yourselves these questions, not in a board book, but out loud, with the pe

ople whose lives your decisions will reshape.

1. The Co-Creation Test

• Did we design our spend-down plan with our grantees and community partners, not just for them?

• Is there a formal feedback loop where their critique of our plan can actually change our plan?

• Have we moved beyond an “announce and defend” posture?

2. The Timeline Honesty Check

• Did we give every grantee a clear, personalised heads-up at least a year (or whatever a generous time period means) in advance, laying out the exact terms of our exit?

• Have we mapped out the field-level timing? Do we know who else in the funder ecosystem is sunsetting or considering it? Are we inadvertently exiting alongside other key funders, and can we coordinate our timelines to cushion the blow?

3. The Admin Fund(s)

• Have we set aside a dedicated, generous fund for our own dissolution, covering staff severance, IP transition, and the boring administrative work of closing well?

• Are we compensating the people (staff, consultants, community leaders) doing the emotional and logistical labour of our shutdown?

• Is our final financial audit structured for transparency, not just compliance, so grantees can hold us accountable?

4. The Final Redistribution Architecture

• Are our final grants structured as flexible, multi-year commitments to prevent sudden fiscal cliffs for grantees?

• Have we stress-tested grant sizes to ensure they don’t exceed a grantee’s absorptive capacity and distort their mission?

• Are we explicitly funding the survival of our grantees, or just the completion of our pet projects?

5. The Knowledge Harvest

• Do we have a plan to archive and share our lessons, failures, and intellectual property and open source them, or have them gather dust in a defunct Dropbox account?

• Have we funded the transfer of critical relationships and institutional knowledge to a designated successor or community steward?

6. The Power Check

• In our final phase, are we actively ceding power? Are grantees on our distribution committee? Are they making the final allocation decisions?

• Have we commissioned an independent evaluation of our impact and our exit, with results published for the field, not buried?

• Can we say with certainty that we are leaving the ecosystem healthier, more connected, and more powerful than we found it? If not, then we are not done.

References

1. McCambridge, R. (2017, June 19). Detroit-based spend-down foundation is having trouble spending down. Nonprofit Quarterly.

2. Hengevoss, A., & von Schnurbein, G. (2025, September). Sunset foundation – how foundations spend down affects the impact on staff and grantees. European Research Network on Philanthropy Research Note.

3. Gose, B. (2025, October 2). Why one charity chose to wind down while still flush with cash. The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

4. McCoy, E. (2017, May 25). Lessons from limited life: the Brainerd Foundation. The Center for Effective Philanthropy Blog.

5. The Law Firm for Non-Profits Blog. (2025, September 3). Sunsetting private foundations: legal considerations and strategic steps.

6. Fels Smyth, K. (2025). Closing Well: The Full Frame Initiative’s Approach to a Responsible Wind-Down. Full Frame Initiative. [McGoey, L., Thiel, D., & West, R. (2018). Philanthropy and the politics of knowledge. Economy and Society, 47(1), 1-24.

7. Guilhot, N. (2006). The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order. Columbia University Press.

The cathedral of modern philanthropy is an architectural marvel of contradiction. Its spires are built from extracted wealth, its stained-glass windows depict the very communities that extraction dispossessed, and its foundation rests upon the assumption of permanence. For a century, the ultimate aspiration of any serious foundation was to exist in perpetuity, to become an eternal, unaccountable institution gently correcting the excesses of the economic system that birthed it. Into this cathedral, Farhad Ebrahimi, founder of the Chorus Foundation, has hurled a theological grenade. His core thesis, that spending down is not a moral purity test but a strategic intervention, demands we stop fetishizing the act of closing and start strategizing it. In Ebrahimi’s hands, and in the practice of a vanguard of radical funders, the sunset clause becomes a tool to de-risk radical giving, catalyze institutional capital, and seed a permanent economic engine for movements that renders grand philanthropic institutions obsolete.

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To treat spending down as a mere moral decision is to trap oneself in a logic of personal absolution. The wealth holder, plagued by the cognitive dissonance of funding justice movements via returns from an extractive economy, decides to cleanse their guilt by zeroing out the balance sheet. This framing centers the donor’s emotional journey, not the movement’s strategic needs. Ebrahimi’s work at Chorus forcefully rejects this theatre. Spending down, as he conceptualizes it, is an act of systems architecture. It begins with the recognition that private philanthropy is a “transitional form”, a caterpillar that must facilitate the creation of butterflies rather than attempt to live forever as a caterpillar. When Chorus shifted from a vague intent to sunset “within my lifetime” to a hard 10-year plan, the decision was not driven by guilt; it was driven by the “urgency of the work” and a strategic analysis that hoarding resources for a distant future starves the present of the power needed to ensure a liveable future exists at all.

This urgency translates into a method for de-risking. Mainstream philanthropy is a fearful beast, terrified of funding the uncompromising, abolitionist edge of movements lest it offend board members or draw political heat. The spend-down foundation, liberated from the burden of preserving an endowment forever, can step into this breach and absorb that risk. Rather than a slow, dwindling retreat, the literature on sunset foundations reveals that these institutions can become what Hengevoss and von Schnurbein (2025) classify as “Impact Accelerators“ or “Urgency Responders“, strategic patterns where the final phase of a foundation’s life becomes its most potent, deploying concentrated capital to meet existential threats with existential speed.

Ebrahimi frames this as serving as “training wheels” for grantees, providing the high-risk, unrestricted capital that allows community organisations to build their own infrastructure and decision-making power. When a funder is exiting, it must ensure it does not leave a crater. The strategic spend-down thus obsesses over the final grantmaking phase, deliberately seeding community-controlled loan funds, land trusts, and permanent organising infrastructure so that local movements are no longer dependent on the whims of a distant foundation. The goal is to catalyze other institutional funders into following suit, demonstrating that bold, no-strings-attached funding does not trigger collapse but rather unlocks explosive, transformative capacity.

Chorus is far from alone in weaponising the sunset, though its transparency has made it a lodestar. Across the Atlantic, the Lankelly Chase Foundation’s decision to dissolve its £134 million endowment represented an escalation of this strategic logic, triggered by the board’s recognition that the foundation was “enmeshed in the very problem that we are trying to solve“, a function of colonial capitalism attempting to cure its symptoms. Julian Corner, its chief executive, articulated a clarity: rather than tinker with perpetuity, the foundation committed to wholly redistributing its assets over a five-year period, designing “controlled experiments” to hand decision-making power over resources to those imagining post-capitalist futures. This is a crucial semantic and strategic shift: the objective is not the annihilation of money but the abolition of the power structures that govern its flow. Lankelly Chase’s journey finds company in a growing cohort of UK trusts making similar choices. As Vivyan and Durham (2025) document in Voluntary Sector Review, foundations like the Gower Street Trust and the Sir Ernest Cassel Educational Trust are navigating their own spend-out processes, driven by the intertwined imperatives to spend more, give more flexibly, and shift power to the communities historically dispossessed by the very accumulation that endows them. These trusts build on the precedent of forerunners such as the Tubney Charitable Trust, the Polden Puckham Charitable Foundation, and the Old Dart Foundation, all of whom have chosen to reject institutional immortality in favour of timely, amplified impact. Smaller foundations, like the 30 Percy Foundation, have embarked on similar trajectories, aligning their final years with ceding full control, recognising that the foundation’s last and most potent act is its own decommissioning. This phenomenon is not a fringe anomaly but an emerging strategic pattern across international contexts, from the Atlantic Philanthropies‘ historic spend-down in Ireland to the MAVA Foundation‘s time-limited model in Switzerland, each instance offering distinct lessons in how a well-orchestrated sunset can generate a legacy that outlasts the institution itself.

The theoretical architecture supporting these experiments draws from a rich and growing body of scholarship that fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of perpetual philanthropy. Critical philanthropy studies have long illuminated how foundations function not as neutral arbiters of social goods but as instruments of “double dispossession” under racial capitalism, where accountability relations between donors and grantees reproduce the very racialized hierarchies that social justice organisations seek to dismantle. This literature reveals a bitter paradox: foundations bankrolled by processes of extraction and exploitation position themselves as the benefactors of the communities those processes most harm, all while retaining ultimate decision-making power over resource allocation. As a recent study in Human Relations demonstrates, the philanthropic accountability relationship enforces a partitioning, of leaders, of vision, of partners, that materially and symbolically deprives racial justice organisations, reproducing the political economy on which philanthropy’s own existence depends. This scholarly diagnosis makes the strategic sunset more than a tactical preference; it becomes a logical imperative for any foundation serious about advancing justice rather than managing its symptoms. The perpetual foundation finds itself caught in an inescapable contradiction, its existence predicated on the accumulation of wealth generated by the very systems of exploitation it purports to challenge. The critical literature makes clear that any intervention leaving the role of philanthropic grantmaking in the racial capitalist political economy intact, however well-intentioned, will not resolve this contradiction. The sunset, in this light, is the only honest exit from the feedback loop of injustice.

Yet spending down an endowment is only one expression of a deeper strategic orientation toward redistribution. Alongside these grand finales exists a parallel ecosystem of perpetual redistribution, embodied by non-endowed intermediaries like the Guerrilla Foundation, Dalan Fund, Collective Abundance, Weaving Liberation etc. Guerrilla, for instance, does not hoard a massive endowment, it grows in size precisely because of its redistribution model, continuously organising wealth-holders to degrow their hoarded assets in real-time. The foundation acts as a relay station, channeling capital from a Funders Circle of wealthy individuals into an Activist Council that makes the funding decisions. This model explicitly rejects the service culture of philanthropy, the idea that a donor writes a cheque and is thereby cleansed of responsibility. Instead, it demands donors engage in the political and personal work of redistribution as fundraisers, advocates & accomplices, while stripping them of unilateral decision-making power. Guerrilla’s growth proves that redistribution is not a recipe for organisational suicide but for building a robust, accountable infrastructure. We are not sunsetting our organisation; we are attempting to sunset the paternalistic donor-grantee hierarchy itself, demonstrating that real economic power can be built through a non-endowed, participatory model that actively organises against wealth accumulation.

These experiments collectively beg the existential question Ebrahimi poses: Are we here to manage scarcity, or to fund a world where we are no longer needed? The perpetual foundation is, by its very design, in the business of managing scarcity. It usually metes out a mere 5% of its assets annually, preserving the ‘phantom of the endowment’ for a future that will perpetually suffer the conditions the foundation was ostensibly created to solve. This is a circular economy of crisis in which the institution has a material stake in the continued existence of the social ills that justify its portfolio. The strategic spend-down breaks this loop. It treats the endowment not as a sacred trust but as fuel to be burned ferociously in a short window to achieve escape velocity from the gravitational pull of injustice. It converts financial capital into political power and infrastructure that, if done right, cannot be liquidated by a market downturn or a board vote.

We stand at a hinge in history where the scale of planetary precarity demands a commensurate scale of resource deployment that the safe 5% payout rule can never meet. Calls to reform philanthropy through impact investing or tokenistic participatory grantmaking, however elegant, ultimately amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic if they leave the core power imbalance, the permanent, tax-sheltered hoarding of resources extracted from the commons, intact. The work of Farhad Ebrahimi, and the foundations bold enough to follow his lead, illuminates the exit ramp. They reveal that spending down is not the terminal illness of a foundation but the final, glorious expression of its purpose. It is the moment the caterpillar stops trying to optimise its endless larval existence and instead dissolves itself to fuel the collective, uncontrollable, and magnificent emergence of the butterfly. The only truly effective philanthropy is one that engineers the conditions of its own obsolescence, leaving behind not a gleaming endowment building but a liberated ecosystem of self-determining communities who no longer need to ask permission to survive. The clock is ticking, and the choice is finally as stark as it is exhilarating: manage the decline, or fund the ignition.

References

Ahmad A, Saifer B. The political economy of accountability: philanthropy’s ‘double dispossession’ of racial justice organizations under racial capitalism. December 18, 2024.

Ebrahimi F. How we got here. Stanford Social Innovation Rev. November 20, 2023.

Ebrahimi F. Where we need to go. Stanford Social Innovation Rev. November 20, 2023.

Ebrahimi F. We need a strategy for spending down. Stanford Social Innovation Rev. November 20, 2023

Hengevoss A, von Schnurbein G. All good things come to an end: emerging strategic patterns of sunset foundations. J Philanthr. 2025;30(1):e70015.

Henderson AL, Ebrahimi F. Strategic criteria for foundation spend-downs. Stanford Soc Innov Rev. 2024;22(1):44-51.

Vivyan S, Durham T. Spending more, giving more flexibly and shifting power: reflections from spend-out grant makers. Volunt Sector Rev. 2025;16(2):322-339.

To understand why the rich so often continue to hoard with a desperation indistinguishable from poverty, we must abandon the notion that money is mathematical. We must follow the trauma into the body, trace inherited fear through the bloodstream, and interrogate a system that profits from our permanent dysregulation, while also seeking the keys that might unlock the cage. When Elon Musk blasted past $800billion and immediately declared “$10 trillion or bust” on X, he was delivering the textbook symptom of financial trauma. The void cannot be filled, because the void is not financial.

The Body Keeps the Financial Score

The first radical reframing offered by the ‘Money Trauma’ podcast is that our financial lives are not driven by logic, but by the autonomic nervous system. When Miho Soon posits that 90% of financial decisions are emotional, she is not speaking in metaphor. Peer-reviewed research on financial socialization confirms that our earliest money memories, a parent’s silent panic over a bill, the shame of a food bank queue, the electricity being cut off, encode themselves into the limbic system. The brain does not distinguish between a physical threat and the existential threat of financial ruin. For a child, a caregiver’s distress about money signals a potential collapse of the nest, triggering the same sympathetic nervous system activation as a predator at the cave mouth.

Psychologists have labeled this “financial trauma,” the physical and psychological response to chronic financial stress that embeds itself in the body. As adults, when we sit down to budget or check our portfolio, the prefrontal cortex, the seat of executive function, is not running the show. If the nervous system has been primed by scarcity, the very act of looking at a spreadsheet can trigger a dorsal vagal shutdown, commonly mislabeled as “laziness.” The person does not rationally choose to avoid their finances; they are neurologically flooded. This is the “affective dissonance” Rachel Sherman (2017) diagnoses in her study of wealthy New Yorkers who, despite their objective resources, are haunted by a nagging, socially mandated need to justify their privilege, a discomfort they manage through downplaying and moral credentialing rather than structural divestment.

Miho’s podcast demolishes the myth of the rational economic actor by showing that for millions, a depleted bank account does not produce a prudent calculation instead, it produces a flashback.

Hoarding as a Failure of Safety

If trauma explains the paralysis of the poor, what explains the pathology of the rich? This is where the podcast’s inquiry into wealth accumulation becomes intellectually scintillating. In the episode on the psychology of the wealthy, Soon dismantles the assumption that crossing a certain threshold dissolves fear. Instead, she suggests, wealth often calcifies the trauma, giving the survivor unlimited resources to build a fortress against a danger that has already passed.

Here, the clinical literature offers a devastating parallel: the behavioral cycle of hoarding disorder. True hoarding is not about the objects; it is about the intolerable distress of discarding them. The clutter is a physical buffer against an unpredictable world. Financial wealth hoarding functions identically. The titular trauma creates a void of felt safety. The survivor learns that money equates to survival and begins to accumulate. But because the void is internal, a disregulated nervous system, an epigenetic echo of ancestral starvation, the safety never arrives. The anxiety simply shifts its target. One need only look at Peter Thiel’s publicised pursuit of apocalypse-proof New Zealand bunkers and parabiosis blood-infusion therapies. This is not rational futurism; it is a man drowning in capital, yet still gasping for the physiological security his limbic system is structurally unable to generate.

This is the cruelest distortion of worldview. A person who has experienced financial trauma, even if they later become fabulously wealthy, often perceives the world as perpetually scarce. Their reality becomes a zero-sum game. Empathy, which requires a relaxed, socially engaged nervous system, becomes biologically unavailable. Instead, they see competitors and threats. The system rewards this pathology with more capital because the hypervigilant hoarder makes for an excellent capitalist, driven, relentless, and incapable of saying “enough.” The podcast boldly suggests this describes many titans of industry, unpacking how their childhoods of emotional or material deprivation birthed empires that consume instead of heal.

The Counter-Narrative: Iris Brilliant and the Courage to Dismantle the Fortress

If the trauma-driven hoarder represents the cage at its most fortified, the work of Iris Brilliant offers a blueprint for dismantling it from the inside. Brilliant, a coach and organizer who came into an unexpected inheritance at 22, experienced firsthand how wealth can hinder “our capacity for intimacy, honesty, and vulnerability”. As someone already active in anti-racist and feminist movements, she found herself unable to reconcile her values with owning stocks in guns, oil, and tobacco. This crisis of integrity became her life’s mission: supporting people with wealth to move money toward social justice.

Brilliant’s approach is not about guilt-driven giving. It is, fundamentally, a reclamation of the self from the isolating architecture of capital. Her work centres on disentangling “self-worth from net-worth” and working through the “shame, scarcity, and reactivity” that keep wealthy individuals locked in a fortress of hypervigilance. Where the hoarder, as described above, accumulates endlessly to fill a void of felt safety, Brilliant guides people to find genuine safety through reconnection: to their values, to community, and to a sense of “belonging to something bigger than ourselves”. Her paradigm-shifting work posits that the exit from the gilded cage demands not only personal neurobiological healing but a courageous, bodily re-entry into the collective, a deliberate plunge into the interdependent vulnerability that the money taboo (Trachtman, 1999) and the shame-cycle are designed to prevent. As Shapiro (2007) notes in the context of couples therapy, the mere act of transparently discussing money can be a therapeutic tool that unravels deep-seated power dynamics. Brilliant scales this to the political: if the system sickens us by keeping the traumatized wealthy isolated, then the conscious, deliberate act of moving wealth into community, of funding reparative justice, of shattering the familial omertà of money silence, is a profound act of guerrilla ontology.

This mirrors Miho Soon’s critique of who benefits from financial isolation while illuminating a path forward. If the system profits from keeping the traumatized wealthy person isolated and hoarding, then the act of moving wealth into community, of funding social justice, of breaking the taboo of money silence in families, is a form of sabotage against that system. Brilliant’s methodology, which asks people to “align wealth with our personal values” to “create a framework of collective liberation,” is the practical application of the trauma-informed diagnosis that podcasts like Money Trauma provide.

The Bloodstream of Generations

This worldview distortion is not just personal; it is inherited. Miho Soon’s personal testimony, woven through the series, describes the “survivalist” mindset passed down in a family that broke the chain of poverty in Malaysia. Despite material success, the emotional posture of scarcity persisted. The check was always about to bounce. The rug was always about to be pulled. Classic case of intergenerational transmission.

The science of epigenetics lends a haunting biological weight to her story. The Dutch Hunger Winter studies, research on the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and studies of communities that endured mass financial shock reveal that severe stress chemically alters gene expression. A grandparent’s hunger is not just a story; it can alter the cortisol regulation of a grandchild who has never known a day of food insecurity. In families of class migrants, this creates a unique psychological torment. The “new money” individual has the exterior markers of success but an interior still coded with the vigilance of the peasant. Migrating into a higher class, as Soon notes, holds up a mirror to the shame narratives internalised about one’s origin, creating a painful double-consciousness: too wealthy for the old neighbourhood, too “rough” for the new one. Here, Brilliant’s work on “inner resilience and adaptability” becomes crucial: not to erase that origin story, but to metabolise it.

The System That Profits from Your Pain

Finally, the Money Trauma podcast connects the personal to the political with a question as old as Marx but refracted through a trauma-informed lens: who benefits when you believe your poverty is a moral failing? Mainstream “financial literacy” fixes blame on the individual, prescribing tighter budgets as if the problem were arithmetic rather than a nervous system locked in a freeze response. This narrative is a feature of the system, not a bug. A population that self-blames does not unionize; a traumatized worker is easier to exploit. Soon’s critique, echoing the work of financial therapists like the Klontzes (2009) who reframe so-called “money disorders” as survival adaptations, maladaptive, attempts at self-regulation, is a profoundly political act of reclamation. The person prone to “overspending” may be seeking the dopamine of safety in a cold world; the workaholic may be fleeing the silence where old wounds live.

Yet the true exit from the gilded cage is not a bigger budget, nor is it simply giving all the money away in a panic. It is the slow, painful work of healing the nervous system itself, learning to feel safe in the body so that money can return to its rightful place as a tool, not a life raft. But healing, here, cannot be a private, interior affair. The nervous system does not regulate in isolation; it co-regulates, or it does not regulate at all. This is why the work must also be collective, political, and practiced. The money-traumatized cannot think their way out of the fortress; they must do their way out, through the embodied praxis of redistribution, not as charity, but as a deliberate, repeated, somatic relearning of safety through solidarity.

This is the terrain organisations like the Guerrilla Foundation, the Dalan Fund, Weaving Liberation, Black Feminist Fund and Collective Abundance are cultivating: spaces where wealthy individuals are invited not merely to write cheques, but to become politicised participants in movements, to sit in rooms where they are not the most powerful, to surrender control, to build relationships across difference, to let their money move at the speed of trust (and political upheaval), and to fundraise among their peers & activate the wealth class. The act of redistribution, done in accountable community, becomes a form of exposure therapy for the hoarding nervous system, a slow, deliberate practice of cracking the piggy bank open, again and again, until the terror subsides and something resembling genuine safety, the kind that cannot be purchased, begins to take root. It is also the courageous act, as Iris Brilliant models, of looking at one’s portfolio and one’s privilege not with the paralysis of shame, but with a fierce resolve to reconnect. The ultimate luxury for the money-traumatised is not passive income, but the hard-won capacity to sit in stillness without the impulse to hoard, spend, or flee, and to extend that regulated stillness outward into authentic, generative belonging, a belonging that is not bought, but built, in the risky, unglamorous, and profoundly liberatory practice of collective struggle.

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Podcast

Soon, M. (Host). (2023–Present). Money Trauma [Audio podcast].

Tessler, B. (2022, January 23). When You Come From Wealth: How to Take Courageous Action. Bari Tessler . [Features an in-depth interview with Iris Brilliant on disentangling self-worth from net-worth and the mission of moving wealth toward social justice.]

Khumalo, R. (Host). (2025). “Miho Soon – Money Trauma.” Healing Out Loud [Audio podcast episode].

References

Frost, R. O., & Hartl, T. L. (1996). A Cognitive-Behavioral Model of Compulsive Hoarding. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34(4), 341–350.

Gudmunson, C. G., & Danes, S. M. (2011). Family Financial Socialization: Theory and Critical Review. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 32(4), 644–667.

Klontz, B., & Klontz, T. (2009). Mind over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health. Broadway Business.

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

Shapiro, M. (2007). Money: A Therapeutic Tool for Couples Therapy. Family Process, 46(3), 279–291.

Sherman, R. (2017). Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence.

Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.

There is something almost childlike in the directness of the name “Block and Build”, the grammar of a Lego instruction manual applied to the defence of democracy. But the name is not the issue. The issue is that it took until 2024 for a coalition of American grantmakers to state the obvious: that philanthropy, if it wishes to remain relevant, must stop behaving like a polite bystander at its own funeral. While European foundations continue to fund another round of “democratic resilience” workshops as if authoritarianism were a deficit of moderation rather than a well-financed assault, the BBFC has done something genuinely uncomfortable: it has named the adversary and organised accordingly. Born not of electoral panic but of strategic anticipation, the coalition represents the most clear-eyed re-founding of progressive philanthropy in decades, a recognition that money, like water, seeks the path of least resistance, and that the path of least resistance right now cuts directly toward authoritarian capture. The name is blunt because the moment has no use for euphemisms.

The Architecture of Defiance

Born in the crucible of 2024 from the strategic foresight of Women Donors Network and Solidaire, the BBFC was not a panic response to an electoral defeat but an anticipatory strike against what its architects diagnosed as an emergent authoritarian playbook.^2.4 When congressional committees began targeting pro-Palestinian organisations with requests for Treasury Department information, Leena Barakat, WDN’s president, recognised what many dismissed as a one-off attack for what it was: a test. “My gut told me this was a test,” she later reflected, “and whatever happened here would eventually make its way to other organizations, other movements, and it would grow“.⁴

This is the art of philanthropic jiu-jitsu, and it rests on a simple, uncomfortable premise: the legal and financial infrastructure designed to safeguard civil society can be weaponised against it. The “nonprofit killer bill”, HR 9495, threatened to grant the executive branch the power to strip tax-exempt status from any organisation designated as “terrorist-supporting,” a designation requiring neither conviction nor due process. In that atmosphere, the BBFC’s insistence that funders not “distance themselves or stop funding grantees who may have been targeted” constituted a radical act of solidarity.⁴

By early 2026, the coalition had swelled to 475 participants representing over 200 organisations with a collective funding capacity exceeding $6 billion annually. That figure, vast as it is, is not the whole story. The key story is the structure: monthly strategy calls, resource libraries, media training, scenario-planning exercises, and a deliberate heterogeneity of membership spanning public and private foundations, corporate funders, and movement organisations that inform strategy without diluting their frontline credibility. This is a move away from the tired, old, donor circle with good intentions and instead the establishment of a distributed intelligence network with a strong grantmaking budget.⁴

The Uncomfortable Mirror Across the Atlantic

If this all sounds terribly American, that is because the threat currently most visibly and dramatically manifests on American soil. But to mistake American authoritarianism for an exclusively American phenomenon is to commit the cardinal analytical sin of parochialism and short-sightedness. The data from Europe is the stuff of night sweats. A cross-border investigation into political financing across 24 European countries revealed that between 2019 and 2022, a full quarter of all private donations, €150 million, flowed to populist, far-right, and far-left parties. Far-right groupings alone vacuumed up more than €97 million, or one in every seven euros donated.⁵ In countries such as Slovenia, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Portugal, and Greece, extremist and populist parties now absorb more than half of all non-public political funding.⁵

The mechanisms by which this money moves are intricate and often brazenly opaque.

Consider the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, the intellectual arm of Germany’s AfD, a party officially classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor.” Despite this designation, the AfD and its parliamentary apparatus stand to receive more than €120 million in annual state funding, a figure derived from the perverse cocktail of public party financing, MP salaries, expense allowances, and staff budgets.² Structural analysis suggests that the actual figure may be significantly higher, given the exclusion of parliamentary committee compensation, pension contributions, and rising membership dues that trigger additional state matching funds.²

Across the Channel, British institutions have become conduits for Hungarian soft power with a hydrocarbon aftertaste. An investigation revealed that the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation received over £512,500, more than 90% of its funding, from Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian academy endowed with state assets including a stake in the energy giant MOL Group, which refines oil predominantly sourced from Russia.⁶ Through this pipeline, far-right and anti-trans voices have secured wider platforms in the architecture of the British establishment have been quietly redecorated in the ideological furnishings of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy.

Meanwhile, the Atlas Network, funded by Koch-linked fortunes and corporate interests in fossil fuels, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals, maintains 589 partner organizations across 103 countries, deploying a sophisticated influence strategy that cloaks ideological warfare in the language of dispassionate expertise.⁸ Its European partners, including ECIPE and Epicenter, have successfully insinuated themselves into EU policymaking, shaping trade agreements and regulatory frameworks while cultivating relationships with liberal as well as conservative factions.⁸ The network’s modus operandi is instructive: it does not merely fund political campaigns; it funds the infrastructure of ideas, the think tanks and academic programs that shift the Overton window long before any ballot is cast.

The Missing European Analogue

Against this backdrop, the absence of a European analogue to the Block and Build Funder Coalition is not merely conspicuous; it is perilous. European philanthropy, particularly in its progressive expressions, remains fragmented, nationally bounded, and philosophically conflicted about its own power. The continent possesses immense wealth, the aggregate assets of European foundations run into the hundreds of billions, but that wealth is too often deployed with a fastidiousness that borders on paralysis, disbursed in cautious grants to uncontroversial projects while the machinery of authoritarian populism is being financed with the swagger of ideological certainty.

An effective European coalition would need to embody the same dual strategy, blocking and building, but adapted to a multijurisdictional reality where the threats are both transnational and nationally specific. Blocking, in this context, would involve coordinated legal strategies, intelligence sharing on dark money flows, and rapid-response funding mechanisms for organisations facing political or legal assault. Building would mean investing in cross-border media infrastructure, pro-democracy civil society organisations, and the unglamorous, long-term work of narrative cultivation.

Potential Vanguard Funders

If a European Block and Build coalition is to materialise, it will not be led by the cautious legacy foundations that have spent decades mistaking politeness for principle. It will be built by funders who have already accepted that philanthropy is inside politics, not above it. Several such institutions already exist, operating with the clarity of purpose that makes the rest of European philanthropy look like it is still rehearsing for a role it lacks the nerve to perform.

Mama Cash, the oldest international women’s fund, has long financed feminist movements that challenge state violence, border regimes, and extractive economies, making it one of the few established funders with both resources and political nerve. The Dalan Fund operates across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia, where its Shield Fund provides rapid-response crisis grants to movements confronting “foreign agent” laws and anti-LGBTQ+ statutes, placing decision-making power in the hands of movement actors rather than donor boards. Weaving Liberation, hosted within the Digital Freedom Fund, has publicly condemned funders who “depoliticise narratives, police language, and condition funding in ways that silence truth-telling and fracture solidarity,” and through #Funders4Palestine has advanced a sharp critique of philanthropic complicity while calling for material solidarity with Gaza. The Safe Passage Fund, governed by an all-women activist council with lived experience of migration and displacement, funds unregistered collectives and informal structures across Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, explicitly framing its work as “a political instrument against the structural, deadly violence of the European migration regime.” Alongside them sit the Black Feminist Fund and the operational solidarity networks, Watch the Med, Alarm Phone, Blindspots, civilfleet-support, that rotate through the governance, creating a distributed infrastructure of resistance. Guerrilla Foundation, based in Berlin, but with a funding focus in Southern & Eastern Europe, explicitly backs activist movements and systemic change initiatives, organising people with wealth, and redistributing resources directly into grassroots organising rather than the usual suspects of the Charity-Industrial Complex.

The challenge for these funders is not summoning political will; they have demonstrated that in abundance. It is whether they can scale their influence without compromising the movement accountability that makes them distinctive. That is a real tension, but it is the right tension, the tension of organisations trying to build power responsibly, rather than the tension of legacy foundations trying to avoid controversy entirely. The comfort, for those who prefer their philanthropy quiet, has always been that these funders are too small, too explicitly political, too unwilling to speak the anodyne language of “democratic resilience” to anchor a continental coalition. The harder truth is that they are the only ones who have been taking the threat seriously all along.

“Authoritarianism is not normal, and it’s not acceptable,” Barakat has said of the BBFC’s posture. “We are here to not just fight against it, but to build toward new, better systems for everyone“. The absence of that bluntness in mainstream European philanthropic discourse is a major liability.

A Model Worth the Imitation Game

The BBFC model is worth replicating not because it’s perfect but because it is clear, adaptable, and strategically coherent. It offers a template for collective action that neither subsumes individual grantmaking autonomy nor permits the fragmentation that authoritarian movements exploit. It insists, as Ebrahimi articulated, that “we don’t want to just defend the status quo“, that the goal is to “transform our sector“ and “improve all the contradictions and complications and problematic qualities that exist within the philanthropic sector“. That ambition, to wield wealth in service of both critique and construction, to be at once defensive and utopian, is precisely the ambition European philanthropy has lacked at the moments when it has been most needed.

The comfort, for those who prefer their philanthropy quiet and their politics deniable, is that the far right’s funding advantage can be attributed to external factors: opaque donation laws, populist charisma, Russian oil money. The harder truth is that there has been nothing progressive about ‘progressive wealth’ and it has not yet organised itself with the strategic rigor, honesty and philosophical seriousness that the moment demands. The BBFC, for all its American particularities, has offered a proof of concept: a) funders can coordinate without centralising, b) can take political stances without losing charitable status, and c) can prepare for legal assault without retreating from their missions. The question that hangs over Europe is not whether the model is applicable but whether the continent’s philanthropic leadership possesses the nerve to apply it. The money exists. The threats are documented. The framework is available. What remains, as ever, in the tragicomedy of political will, is the decision.

References

1. Matthews RA. Block & Build: A framework for housing justice and philanthropy. Funders Together for Housing Justice. Published October 30, 2025.

2. Non Profit Quarterly, Faster Than Authoritarianism: Rapid Response as a Frontline Strategy for Democracy Defense, Santana Moreno. April 21, 2026

3. Good Law Project. Rightwing think-tank backing ‘sovereign’ nations fuelled by offshore funds. Published August 17, 2025.

4. Inside Philanthropy. The Block and Build Funder Coalition is pushing back on authoritarianism. Published March 10, 2026.

5. Follow the Money. Quarter of political donations in Europe are going to extremist and populist parties, data reveals. Published May 29, 2024.

6. Good Law Project. Putin’s megaphone: Orbán’s far-right push into UK universities is fuelled by Russian oil. Published February 11, 2026.

7. InfluenceWatch. Block and Build Funder Coalition. Published July 13, 2025.

8. Observatoire des multinationales. The Atlas Network, France & the EU. May 29’ 2024.

Where else do you see half a mil people flood a city square, blending a rage for democracy with the low frequencies of a sound system, an anti-fascist rave under an open sky, where the leader of the Green Party grabs the mic to drop eco populist chat between house beats? The scene could only belong to this strange present: the No Kings marches across the U.S. and the Together Alliance demonstration in London are not traditional protests, they are sensorial, symbolic, and structurally ambiguous acts in the age of protest-fatigue & the grind of capitalist modernity.

In March 2026, while millions across the U.S. gathered under the No Kings banner to oppose authoritarianism, London’s streets thrummed with a parallel rhythm. Both, in their different idioms, expressed what Chantal Mouffe would call agonistic populism: a democratic confrontation staged not through parliaments but through presence, emotion, and affective infrastructure.

I. The Symbolic Dimension: Reclaiming the Political Imagination

These protests operate first on the symbolic plane. The name No Kings refuses not only a person but a form of relation, against authoritarian cults of personality, toward an ethics of dispersed power. London’s march carried powerful imagery: banners for Palestine beside Black Lives Matter drums, beside jewish leftie peace groups, to the backdrop of Homo-Centric Records. The street becomes a theatre where the state is reimagined, and political possibility is rehearsed. Drawing from Cornelius Castoriadis’ (1987) idea of the imaginary institution of society, one might say movements like No Kings invite participants to collectively invent a world without domination, staging the abolition of monarchy, hierarchy, and oligarchy not as a demand, but as a mood.

II. The Imaginary Dimension: Collective Desire as Political Energy

The imaginary dimension of these actions runs deeper, it is what Raymond Williams (1977) would call their “structure of feeling”, a yearning for post-authoritarian joy. When protest blurs into rave, and policy briefing slides into poetry and bass, the event attunes bodies to a possible future. The dance floor becomes Habermas’ public sphere with subwoofers: a place where speech, gesture, and rhythm outline a participatory democracy that official institutions have failed to provide. Social movement theorists from Alberto Melucci (1989) to Asef Bayat (2013) have emphasized how contemporary movements operate not merely through confrontation but through prefiguration; living out the social relations they wish to see.

In London, Homo-Centric Records joined forces with R3 Soundsystem, Choose Love, Amnesty International, the Black Artist Database, and Love Music Hate Racism to hold the rave-demo, ‘House against Hate’, it’s important to note what the R3 Soundsystem’s three Rs stand for:

REJECT: THE RISE OF THE FAR-RIGHT IN BRITAIN

REVOLT: AGAINST RACISM IN THE UK

RESIST: CORPORATE INFLUENCE WITHIN DANCE MUSIC

A case of modelling intersectionality by weaving migrant justice, anti-authoritarianism, anti-commodification, wrapped in a bow of unabashed queer energy, black feminist power and the lineage of dancefloor politics.

“This is fucking Britain and this is what we look like!”

III. The Material Dimension: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Costs of Spectacle

Yet critique has trailed these mobilisations. One line of argument insists they represent not genuine insurgency but managed spectacle, “training the population, particularly younger people, to regard popular mobilization as something that happens only when elite institutions plan and schedule it, setting the purpose and parameters, determining which “messaging” dominates”. In this view, it is political de-mobilization disguised as mobilization: a valve releasing pressure without altering the machinery. Without rooted networks tied to housing struggles, unions, migrant defence, and neighbourhood assemblies, energy dissipates. The material base remains precarious: digital coordination and volunteer infrastructure always on the verge of burnout.

IV. The Practical Dimension: From Affect to Organisation

This critique carries a familiar tone, world-weary-sophistication, the implication that those who show up are naive while those who stay home see the bigger picture. But as Tim Hjersted counters, “this attitude is strategically illiterate. It mistakes cynicism for analysis. An organizer looks at a mass protest and sees thousands of people ready to get involved—a chance to connect them with local groups, deepen engagement, and build the relationships that deeper resistance depends on. I would add that many who marched are already engaged elsewhere. Feeling good is not the problem. You feel good when you feel the power of millions, when you see the wit and fury of your fellow inhabitants of this mess, when you stop feeling alone. Feeling bad is not a magic recipe for anything beyond itself.”

Rebecca Solnit puts it more directly. “There seems to be a fringe excited to tear down the No Kings marches. The most popular attack pretends—genuinely, foolishly—that participants believe this alone is the political work that achieves our goals.” But in the crowd she encountered environmental lawyers, union organizers, trans activists. The courts are full of lawsuits against authoritarian overreach. Academics defend academic freedom. Voting rights experts are on it. People from Memphis to Minneapolis deliver food and stand guard for those under attack by ICE. The ACLU and other rights groups are in high gear. As Solnit notes, if you are engaged, you see the people who are engaged, and millions are.

Timothy Snyder, after attending a No Kings rally, wrote: “Rather than writing another essay about why this matters [unlike me] I will just say that it is pure joy to meet the people who want to stand out and the people who are doing the work. Thank you.”

The practical problem is not how to gather a crowd but how to keep it together after. No Kings organisers frame their structurelessness as principle, “the collective is the leader”, but distributed networks still require coordination, accountability, and strategy. What scholars call strategic layering links moments of mass mobilization to slower, quieter institution-building (Ganz  2010). Protest as ignition, organization as combustion engine. In London, that could mean channeling the Together Alliance’s visibility into neighborhood anti-fascist defense committees. In the U.S., No Kings could scaffold local campaigns around climate justice, judicial accountability, and voter disenfranchisement. The dance floor becomes not the end but the gasoline.

V. Politically Sharp and Pelvically Loose

To treat these uprisings as merely fleeting catharses is to miss their cumulative power. And to treat fleeting catharses as somehow futile is to miss the power of collective catharsis. The brilliance of these scenes, sexy basslines under banners, eco-populist speeches between beats, must sediment into organizational form, but the dissident joy makes one want to do that sedimenting work. Otherwise, the spectacle remains only what Debord called a “momentary negation” of alienation, not its abolition - and what better source of fuel for this abolition than radical togetherness, dance, play, music, taking over the streets with mad energy?

The critiques from the self-styled radical flank often function as a form of purity that accomplishes nothing except the depletion of energy that might otherwise build. Movements do not arise from those who stay home congratulating themselves on their superior analysis. They arise from those who show up, and then show up again, and keep showing up. Showing, sowing, towing, mowing, growing, grooving and moving.

Still, standing on the pavement as sun breaks across the choreography of cheers and music, it is clear something vital stirs: a politics of pleasure and presence, an insurgent cosmopolitanism refusing both monarchy and demagogy. Maybe in the world after No Kings, we will still march. But the rhythm will be politically sharp, pelvically loose, and when Cajmere’s Brighter Days comes on, we might actually believe it.

References

Bayat, A. (2013). Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East.

Castoriadis, C. (1987). The Imaginary Institution of Society.

Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle.

Freeman, J. (1972). “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17.

Ganz, M. (2010). Why David Sometimes Wins.

Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present.

Mouffe, C. (2018). For a Left Populism.

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You’ve read the manifestos. You know the canon. Yet the world’s machinery of control grows more insidious, fluent in the language of your dissent, adept at metabolizing your outrage into content. Your well-worn manuals feel like maps to a country that no longer exists. This list is for those who sense the game has changed. It’s for the strategists of the soul, the cartographers of collapse, and the terminally skeptical who need new tools to crack open the present. They are survival guides for the psyche, blueprints for new solidarities, and philosophical grenades for a reality that has outrun its own metaphors. Read them not to be right, but to be dangerous in the ways that now matter.

1) Dysphoria Mundi (2025) by Paul B. Preciado

A fever-dream manifesto for a world in convulsion. Preciado diagnoses the planet not with collapse, but with dysphoria, a profound bodily and political transition where old genders, states, and certainties are dying, and something radically new, collective, and mutant is struggling to be born.

2) Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (2024) by Dean Spade

Spade moves beyond critique to a practical, gentle, and radical workbook. It’s about transforming how we relate: to partners, friends, comrades, as the essential groundwork for collective liberation. In a burnt-out, transactional hellscape, this is a guide to building the resilient, mutual-aid-based relationships that make long-term struggle possible and worthwhile.

3) Don’t Talk About Politics (2025) by Sarah Stein Lubrano

In an era of performative call-outs and brittle ideological silos, this is a masterclass in the craft of strategic conversation. Drawing on rhetoric and psychology, it’s a toolkit for actually changing minds, building bridges where dogma builds walls, and making your words a lever for material change, not just social signalling.

4) How NOT to Save the World (2026) by Anthea Lawson

A devastating, meticulously reported exposé of the white-saviour industrial complex. Lawson dismantles the myths of benevolent aid and “ethical” consumerism, revealing how they often reinforce global inequality. It’s a call for humility, solidarity over charity, & a politics of genuine global justice that starts with seriously deep listening.

5) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2024) by Omar El Akkad

A haunting, speculative essay on memory, complicity, and the rewriting of history. From the climate crisis to forever wars, El Akkad probes the coming amnesia, asking how future generations will judge our present-day passivity. It’s a gut-punch designed to provoke action before the moral ledger is conveniently erased.

6) Radical Justice: Building the World We Need (2026) Nani Jansen Reventlow

Accountability ain’t enough, this is a blueprint for transformation. Reventlow smashes the courtroom glass ceiling to argue that true justice isn’t punitive but reparative, weaving together law, activism, and imagination to show how we can build systems that actually heal, rather than simply cage and harm.

7) The Cancer Journals (1980) by Audre Lorde

In our age of sanitized, “awareness”-branded illness and performative wellness, Lorde’s raw, furious, and transcendent account of living with breast cancer is more revolutionary than ever. It’s a masterwork on weaving personal trauma into political power, refusing prosthesis, and speaking the unpretty truth of the body as an act of war.

8) Exocapitalism (2024) by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo

The most dystopian and compelling economic theory you’ll encounter this year. Exocapitalism is the logical endgame: a system that has fully externalized its costs onto a destroyed planet and now looks to space for new frontiers of extraction. A stark, philosophical lens for understanding the suicidal logic of infinite growth.

9) On Lying and Politics (2024) by Hannah Arendt

A newly curated selection of Arendt’s most prescient writings on truth, power, and the political lie. In our post-truth vortex of deepfakes and stochastic terrorism, her analysis of how totalitarianism begins with the annihilation of factual reality is not just relevant, it’s the operating manual for defending a shared world.

10) Love and Money, Sex and Death (2023) by McKenzie Wark

A trans elder’s kaleidoscopic memoir that is also a work of critical theory. Wark weaves personal transition with sharp critiques of capital, academia, and art, offering a new vocabulary for a life lived across binaries. It’s about constructing a self, and a politics, from the fragments left behind by collapsing institutions.

11) Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016) by Alexis Shotwell

A blistering takedown of the quest for moral perfection. Shotwell argues that waiting for a “pure” choice is a luxury we can’t afford; instead, she shoots for embracing complexity, imperfection, and action within a messy world, showing that ethics aren’t about being blameless, but about taking responsibility for the mad entanglements we’re already in.

12) Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (2019) by James Lovelock

Forget cozy solarpunk. The Gaia hypothesis originator offers a mind-bending, unsentimental prophecy: the Anthropocene is already ending, giving way to an era where our AI creations, cooler and smarter, become Earth’s true stewards. A crucial, humbling read for anyone crafting politics for a post-human future.

13) In Defence of Looting (2020) by Vicky Osterweil

A fiercely polemical and rigorously historical rebuke to the politics of respectability. Osterweil reframes looting not as mindless chaos, but as a strategic, redistributive, and deeply effective tactic of riot that strikes at the heart of property, the foundational institution of racial capitalism. Essential for debates on tactics, violence, and what “disorder” really protects.

And there you have it folks. For those with still attention spans intact, just start somewhere, don’t overthink it, trust your gut, one of these books must have piqued your interest if you made it this far. Just go for it, dive in, reading begets more reading, and if that proves to be a valuable ride, come back to this list and pick another. Finished already? Then check out last year’s reading list :) If you think I missed out on something major, comment below so i add it to the next list or drop me a line at: ivan@guerrillafoundation.org happy bookworming! ;)

The modern wealthy elite have not failed morally because they are evil. They have failed because they are mediocre.

This is the thesis at the heart of Rutger Bregman’s bracing intervention. The Dutch historian offers something far more cutting than familiar condemnation: a diagnosis of poverty of ambition among those who could, but will not, rise to the occasion of their own humanity.

The hedge fund manager who donates to the opera while structuring shell companies in Luxembourg. The tech billionaire who signs the Giving Pledge while fighting taxes. The politician who champions diversity while accepting donations from polluters. These are not monsters. They are, in Bregman’s unforgiving formulation, morally mediocre, satisfied with the appearance of virtue because the substance would cost too much.

The Conscience of the Comfortable

What makes Bregman’s analysis potent is its historical depth. For much of Western history, the wealthy organised their lives around a question that has become almost unintelligible: How shall I be saved? We have replaced salvation with self-realisation, producing an elite sophisticated in personal fulfillment but bankrupt in moral seriousness. The modern professional class does not ask whether its life is good; it asks whether its life is satisfying.

The result is what Bregman calls “ethics-washing”, low-cost gestures that allow the comfortable to feel virtuous while inequality remains fortified. ESG investing that does not divest. Diversity statements that do not redistribute power. The problem is not that the wealthy lie about their virtue. The problem is that they believe their own press releases. As Bregman writes, “It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good”.

It Is Not Immoral to Make Money. It Is Immoral to Keep It.

Here we arrive at Bregman’s central proposition: It is not immoral to make a crazy amount of money. It is immoral to keep it. The moral question begins not with acquisition but with retention, with what one does when one has more than any human being could reasonably need.

The contemporary wealthy have answered with an architecture of avoidance. They outsource moral obligations to charitable foundations that function as tax shelters, to impact investments that generate returns while generating press releases (and ‘environmental externalities’). “Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has,” Bregman observes. “As long as it feels good” .

The modern elite will do anything for the poor except get off their backs. They will donate, volunteer, advocate, but they will not pay the taxes that would actually fund the public goods that might transform society. They will do everything except give up anything that matters.

The Emotional Architecture of Inaction

The concept of “moral licensing” proves essential here. The wealthy purchase indulgences that allow them to feel righteous while maintaining the systems that produce inequality. A donation here, a board seat there, these function not as the beginning of moral transformation but as its substitute. The small gesture licenses the large omission.

And beneath this lies something more intractable: the isolation of wealth. The super-rich have built lives so segregated from ordinary experience that empathy has become structurally impossible. Private schools, private transport, private healthcare, private islands. They float above a world they do not encounter.

Can moral ambition survive such isolation? Bregman’s implicit answer is no., which is why his call is not merely for redistribution but for desegregation. The wealthy cannot imagine justice until forced to inhabit the world their privileges have allowed them to escape.

The Illusion of Awareness

Bregman skewers what he calls the “illusion of awareness”, the belief that simply exposing injustice will inspire action. “Awareness doesn’t put food on the table,” he writes. “With awareness, you don’t cool down the planet, you’re not finding shelter for those 100 million refugees, and you won’t make a bit of difference for the 100 billion animals at factory farms worldwide. Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal“.

He opens his book with a chapter titled “No, you’re not fine just the way you are”. There are, he notes, “two forms of ‘knowing.’ You can know something and then do something about it. Or you can know something and look away, afraid to face the consequences of what you know to be true”.

The Collective Action Problem

Yet here we encounter the most serious challenge: What is the rational choice for the individually morally ambitious wealthy person? If I pay my fair share of taxes while my peers do not, I have not improved the world, I have merely reduced my own resources. Systemic inequality means individual virtue, absent collective action, is nearly powerless.

This is not an argument against moral ambition but a specification. The morally ambitious wealthy cannot simply write cheques; they must become political actors dedicated to building the proper institutions: tax authorities, regulatory bodies, international treaties that compel the collective action individual conscience cannot achieve.

Power Before Wealth

Wealth follows power, not the reverse. The super-rich fund the think tanks that produce ideologies justifying their privileges. They own the media outlets that normalize their existence. They lobby legislators who write tax codes that enrich them. The truly ambitious must work to dismantle these structures, to campaign against Citizens United, to advocate for public financing, to support antitrust enforcement that breaks up concentrations of economic power.

Bregman points to historical precedent. After the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, “a revolt among elites who were just utterly fed up with the total decadence, immorality, and also frankly the unseriousness of the people who were in power”. Figures like Alva Vanderbilt transformed from decadent socialite to main financier of the women’s rights movement. The question is whether today’s elites can similarly awaken.

The Fear of Being Different

What holds the talented back? Bregman diagnoses a deep human instinct: “The fear of being different runs deep in human nature. We may tell earnest tales of our personal convictions, but what we actually do is mostly a matter of mimicry. The longing to belong is like a magnet, interfering with our inner compass”.

Yet he insists that “you can’t be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture or another, from the Pythagorean theorem to the conviction that slavery is depraved“.

The Utopian Horizon

What would success look like? Bregman’s previous work, ‘Utopia for Realists’, offers hints: universal basic income, shorter working hours, public investment in common goods. Not the abolition of wealth but its diffusion. Not the end of ambition but its redirection toward ends that matter.

He diagnoses our era’s true crisis: “The real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better“. We have lost the capacity to imagine a different world. Yet “without all those wide-eyed dreamers down through the ages, we would all still be poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. Without utopia, we are lost“.

The morally ambitious life is not a life of deprivation but of greater meaning, freed from the exhausting pursuit of more, opened to satisfactions that wealth cannot buy. The wealthy are not being asked to sacrifice their humanity but to reclaim it.

The Question That Remains

Bregman has diagnosed moral mediocrity, traced its origins, anatomised its mechanisms, and proposed an ambitious alternative. But the question lingers for every reader:

What am I willing to give up?

Not what am I willing to advocate, or donate, or sign. Not what am I willing to post. But what am I willing to lose? What comfort, what status, what security am I prepared to surrender for the sake of justice?

This is the question that separates moral ambition from ethics-washing. This is the question the wealthy have evaded for generations. As Bregman writes, “It’s not what you think is right that counts, but what you’re prepared to do about it”.

So to refresh, under this perspective and in a 2026 capitalist stronghold, it is not immoral to make money. Yet it is immoral to keep it. So the question is whether we will keep it, or whether we will finally, at long last, let it go.

References

Bregman, R. (2017). *Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek*. The Correspondent.

Bregman, R. (2024). Moral ambition: How to stop wasting your talent and start making a difference. Little, Brown and Company.

Congrats! You’re in the global 1%, a club built on centuries of exploitation, luck, and systemic rigging. Whether you inherited it, hoarded it, or “earned” it, you’ve got power. And power should come with accountability. So let’s dig in, no fluff, no guilt trips, just hard questions and a roadmap for doing better.

Section 1: The Birth Lottery Audit

“Did You Earn This, or Was It Served on a Silver Platter?”

a) List the % of your net worth that came from:

• Inheritance/gifts/family connections

• Returns on capital (investments, property, etc.) vs. actual labour

• Pure luck (right place, right time, right tax loophole)

• Reflect: How would your life look without these advantages?

Make a list or free-flowing prose of your personally experienced ‘Plutocracy BFFs’ below:

(*Note: If you’re feeling defensive, ask yourself why. Discomfort is part of the process 🙂

b) Name 3 ways your wealth class sustains systems that keep inequality locked in (e.g., lobbying against wealth taxes, hoarding resources, offshore accounts).

(*Bonus round: Cite one law/policy you’ve benefited from that screws over everyone else.)

Section 2: “Philanthropy” Exposé: “Tokenism or Transformation?”

a) Calculate your annual giving as a % of your total wealth (not income!).
Now compare it to:

• The 10% “justice minimum” (Resource Generation)

• The 50%+ (as advocated by Marlene Engelhorn & Tax Me Now)

(HOT TAKE: Is your giving about real redistribution or just PR?)

b) “The ‘Nice Rich Person’ Checklist”

• Do you leverage your power (e.g., advocating for wealth taxes) or just write cheques?

• Do you donate without strings (trusting marginalized communities to lead)?

• Do you fund systemic change (e.g., tax justice, labor movements) or just Band-Aids?

Section 3: Power & Responsibility: No CopOuts “The Leverage Audit”

a) List 3 ways you could use your privilege to disrupt wealth hoarding beyond charity (e.g., endorsing a wealth tax, divesting from exploitative industries, funding grassroots movements).

b) “The ‘I’m Not the Problem’ Myth” Anand Giridharadas’s challenge:
“Do you believe in ‘win-win’ solutions to inequality, or are you willing to lose some privilege for justice?”
(Sit with that, then sit with it some more, then write a reply that you can come back to)

Section 4: Your Redistribution Action Plan “The ‘F*ck This, I’m Doing Better’ Pledge”

a) Money: Pick one concrete step (e.g., commit to 10%+ annual redistribution, join Millionaires for Humanity, gel with Resource Justice/Transformation peer-to-peer work, hop on TaxMeNow bandwagon).

b) Power: Name one system you’ll challenge (e.g., lobbying for progressive taxes).

c) Legacy: How will you ensure your wealth doesn’t perpetuate dynastic inequality?

“Wealth hoarding isn’t neutral – it’s violence. Redistribution isn’t ‘generosity’, it’s reparations.” – Adapted from Edgar Villanueva

Citations & Further Reading

1. Hickel, J. The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

2. Giridharadas, A. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

3. Villanueva, E. Decolonizing Wealth

4. Resource Generation (resourcegeneration.org)

5. Tax Me Now (taxmenow.org)

6. Engelhorn, M. Guter Rat (tax inheritance advocacy)

Final Note: If this felt uncomfortable, great. Now go do something.

The world’s waiting.

Pass this on to your 1% peers <3

Good luck, and do fuck up the philanthropy-industrial-complex 😉

It’s easy to identify where the impulse for “impact” measurement comes from – we all want to know the difference we’re making in the world. Understanding the difference we make helps with motivation at work, and enables us to reflect on how we do what we do.

And we know this impulse is particularly acute for those who are involved in social change work, but who are abstracted from the day to day work – people like senior managers and funders. When you’re in the day to day, you witness the difference you’re making. You see it in the conversations you have with the people you work with, and you feel it in the changes in the contexts you’re part of. You understand the change because you’re living that change.

But that’s not possible if you’re not in those contexts day to day. That’s when those who are abstracted from the work ask for impact measures – “objective” proof that they can use to satisfy themselves that their coordinating or funding contributions are also making a difference. And that’s how the natural impulse to understand our impact in the world becomes a trap which damages and undermines the processes and relationships which actually create impact.

How does abstracted, “objective” impact measurement undermine the creation of impact? Let’s explore the evidence.

The impossibility of measuring “your” impact

Firstly, in complex systems it is impossible to rigorously identify “your” impact. To understand this, let us look at the research on the outcome of obesity.

Here’s a systems map of the outcome of obesity, produced by the UK Government Office for Science. This research identified that there are 108 different factors which contribute to the outcome of obesity, and the map shows the relationships between those factors. On this diagram, you can see factors summarised into areas such as “Food production and supply”, “Early life experiences” “Education” and “Media”.

Let’s say that you’re one of the people operating in the bottom right corner of this system – you’re providing “healthcare and treatment options” to address obesity. Let’s say you’re delivering weight loss programmes in neighbourhoods. How would you distinguish the impact of your weight loss programme from the influence of all the other factors in this system?

Short answer – you can’t. Someone on your programme sees a film that changes their perspective on the meals they cook. Someone on your programme changes jobs, to a place with a canteen where they only serve healthy options. Someone is made redundant, so they can’t afford to buy healthy food. What was the impact of your programme in these situations?

In complex systems like this it is impossible (not difficult, impossible) to produce a reliable counterfactual (to say what would have happened in the absence of your intervention) because complex systems like this produce outcomes through relationships which are unpredictable, dynamic and emergent. This means that you run the ‘same’ complex system twice and it will produce two entirely different results. (The point is, it’s never the same system, because minute changes that may well be invisible to you will lead to disproportionate changes in the results the system creates).

Without a reliable counterfactual, it is impossible (with any degree of robustness) to say “this was my contribution” to the results the system creates. When you measure impact in a complex system, you’re not measuring “your” impact, you’re measuring the result of the interactions of hundreds of variables, some of which will be completely invisible to you. (And because significant variables are invisible to you, they can’t be controlled – so methods such as Randomised Control Trials aren’t reliable methods in complex systems).

Performance management corrupts data

The second problem specifically concerns the use of impact data for performance management – when funders or senior leaders say to those undertaking the work of social change – “you can only have a job/have these resources if you successfully ‘demonstrate your impact’ to me.”

Using impact data for performance management in this way corrupts the data that is produced. We have known this since Donald Campbell published his famous piece “Assessing the impact of planned social change” in the journal Evaluation and Program Planning in 1979. In it, he formulated what has come to be known as Campbell’s Law:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

It is only through an astonishing feat of intentional blindness that we have ignored the evidence surrounding Campbell’s Law for this long. Every use of Social Impact Bonds, every instance of Payment by Results, every time someone uses Results Based Management – all are subject to the corruption of data described by Campbell’s Law. So many studies since 1979 have reinforced the truth of Campbell’s Law that it is helpful to have a range of them summarised by a meta study in 2018. Franco-Santos and Otley published a piece called “Reviewing and Theorizing the Unintended Consequences of Performance Management Systems” in the International Journal of Management Reviews. This was a systematic review of the effects of target-based performance management systems. It found that when people use targets to manage the performance of workers, over 80% of studies find evidence of gaming [the deliberate manipulation of data to make it look good] and 74% find evidence of people deliberately lying.

This is the distortion and corruption that Campbell’s Law is talking about. If you ask people to “demonstrate their impact” in return for their jobs, or the resources to do their work, then, my word, are you going to get good looking data about impact. This was exactly the case for the Big Lottery Fund in England who undertook in 2014/5 a (sadly unpublished) review of 10 Years of their large scale grantmaking programme Reaching Communities. The Reaching Communities Fund was purposefully framed around delivering outcomes – applicants were asked to identify the outcomes (the impact) that they would create as a key part of the application process, and successful applicants were required to monitor their progress against the delivery of this impact.

The review found that they had given over £1 billion of grants in the first 10 years of the programme. And not a single one of these grants was unsuccessful in delivering its expected outcomes. What a truly astonishing level of prescience from all of those applicants! Every single one of those applicants was able to predict and mitigate all of the unexpected twists and turns of life. A global financial crash occurred, pushing millions in England into poverty – and still everyone delivered expected impact. Public sector austerity devastated voluntary organisations funding arrangements, and still they all delivered expected impact.

This is the kind of data corruption we get when we ask organisations to demonstrate their impact. And – to be clear – it’s not the fault of those reporting this impact data. They’re only playing the ridiculous game that has been created by others. This kind of gaming is entirely the responsibility of those who choose to ask others to “demonstrate their impact” in return for funding or job security.

You have a choice

Because it is a choice to fund or manage in this way. If you do play one of the roles that is abstracted from the work of social change, and you want to manage or fund in a way which genuinely supports the processes and relationships which create impact, you can choose to do it differently.

An alternative approach is called Human Learning Systems. It begins by asking the question: “how is impact in the world created?” and builds an approach to managing social change activity from the answer to that question.

Human Learning Systems embraces the real-world complexity of impact. It recognises that genuine impact in people’s lives is created by all the factors that exist in and around a person’s life – that impact is something which is co-created with a person, not delivered to them by a project or a programme. This means that creating impact must start with an exploration: what in your life can create the impact that is meaningful to you? What purpose matters to you? What are the unique set of actors and factors that make up the complex system in your life which would enable you to achieve that purpose?

Let’s say that a person is in chronic pain, and wants to change that. The job of someone who wants to help deal with that pain is to build a shared understanding of the unique set of actors and factors that is creating the experience of pain in their life, and then co–design and enact experiments/explorations which address those unique factors. This is an approach in which every act of change is an act of action research which asks the question: “What works, for you, in your context?”

This process is described as a Learning Cycle, and it offers a process map of work for anyone involved in change activity.

In this respect, we see how the impulse to understand impact can be usefully harnessed. The question “what impact is my work having?” is useful to anyone when framed within a Learning Cycle. In fact, asking this question everyday is a fundamental aspect of the Human Learning Systems approach, because every single act is an act of action research.

But the crucial point is that those doing the work are asking this question for themselves – they’re not seeking to gather impact data to demonstrate their effectiveness to others, they’re seeking to understand the impact of their actions because it is a necessary part of their practice.

This approach means that the nature of impact measurement changes. Impact measures become bespoke to the specific context in which the Learning Cycle takes place. We measure what matters to this person. And if that’s different to what matters to the next person, then it’s our duty to them to measure what matters to them. That’s how we escape the impact trap, and how we make good on the original promise of impact measurement – to focus on making things better from the perspective of citizens, not from the perspective of those seeking to help. Every time we use a standardised impact measure, we are not measuring what matters to citizens, we’re measuring what we think is important.

The crucial point here is to break the link between data and performance management. The evidence is 100% clear – if you use your data for performance management purposes, it is likely to be corrupted, and will be useless for genuinely improving performance. By taking a Human Learning Systems approach we can enable data to do its job – to help people to get better at creating genuine impact.

How does this help funders and leaders?

Understanding how genuine impact is created in the world enables senior leaders and funders to organise “impact” work in a way which supports and enables the processes and relationships which create it. This is the choice that funders/senior leaders get to make – do you want to fund/manage in a way which supports impact?

If you do, then an approach that works (here’s the most current evidence) is Learning as a Management Strategy: organising for continuous, collaborative learning, rather than for control or “delivery” of impact.

If you’re a funder, this means funding for continuous, collaborative learning. If, as a funder, you’re allocating scarce resources, it means allocating resources to those who are able to learn collaboratively in complex systems, and who share a purpose with you. This means, for example, funding those who can undertake Learning Cycles rigorously and effectively. And it means supporting capacity building so that organisations understand and can practise this kind of continuous learning approach.

An example of this approach can be seen by the Systems Innovation and Experimentation Fund, created by Climate KIC and the Swedish International Development Agency. They funded explicitly using a Learning Cycle framework.

They did this by asking applicants to identify the systems they wanted to experiment with – what was the purpose of those systems, who the actors were that would enable the achievement of that purpose, what the factors were that achieved/frustrated the purpose. And crucially, they asked what shared knowledge was created when they brought together those actors to reflect on those factors. In short, their application process was testing whether the applicants could be effective system stewards.

They selected a longlist from those applicants, and gave them development grants and support to help them develop their action research proposals. This was resource and support to enable further system convening – what do experiments/explorations do those actors want to create in order to create impact in those systems? They then funded those actors to “deliver” those as pieces of action research, not as programmes to be implemented.

Concluding thoughts

If you’re a funder or leader who wants to support the processes and relationships which genuinely create impact, you can do two simple things:

1. Stop asking teams/organisations/programmes to “demonstrate their impact”

2. Fund to enable continuous, collaborative experimentation and learning

If you’re curious about what making this kind of switch might look like for your organisation, there’s lots more information, including over 80 case studies, on the Human Learning Systems website. You can also join the Human Learning Systems LinkedIn group, or drop me a message there.

Weaving a New Tapestry of Wealth
To inherit significant wealth is to inherit a profound solitude, a paradox where immense privilege coexists with a sense of paralysis. The desire to enact good is often stifled by a system engineered to preserve capital, not pursue justice. The default programming for the upper echelons of the 1% is clear: become a steward of growth, a dragon guarding its hoard, passing it down the lineage with a sprinkling of conventional philanthropy to soften the edges. This entire structure is buoyed by tax privileges and lifelong perks that perpetuate dynastic concentration.

What, then, brings a Radical Philanthropy Volunteer to our door? Each story is unique, yet all share a common thread: a deep-seated conviction that the system is profoundly broken, and a resolve to use their disproportionate agency to help dismantle the very architecture that stacked the deck in their favour. The Guerrilla Foundation’s ‘Rad Phil’ programme is a deliberate intervention into this reality, an apprenticeship in wealth abolitionism. It is not a traditional internship but a voluntary, six-to-twelve-month immersion: a deep dive into the visceral, human work of dismantling the fortress of legacy wealth to build something new upon its ruins.

For a young person of wealth, this apprenticeship is a portal into a living experiment in philanthroabolitionism. They are not observers on the periphery but are woven into the very fabric of the team. They learn our operational rhythm not from a manual but from the inside, experiencing how decisions are forged not by executive fiat, but through the collaborative, consent-based practice of sociocracy. They witness the challenging work of redistributing power not as an abstract theory, but in the daily practice of meetings and retreats where hierarchy is actively dismantled.

Here, the apprentice sees the engine of redistribution in motion. They sit alongside our Activist Council, a body of grassroots organisers, not distant trustees, as they debate and direct grant-making, ensuring resources flow to the frontlines of social change. They gain a front-row seat to communications work that seeks to rearticulate a distorted narrative, reframing philanthropy not as virtuous charity but as a mandatory act of reparative justice: a direct challenge to the hollow veneer of philanthrocapitalism.

This journey is as much about personal and collective transformation as it is about strategic acumen. It is a supreme exercise in trust-building. The apprentice sees the organization in its full spectrum: its visionary potential and its very human frailties, its breakthroughs and its struggles. This radical transparency is our bedrock. In a field often dominated by cold, alienating bureaucracy and sterile impact reports, we offer an alternative: the messy, essential work of building authentic relationships with the communities we serve. Through this, the volunteer learns to see themselves not as the apex of a chain, but as one part of a wider, interdependent ecosystem of change.

Upon completion, the apprenticeship culminates in a uniquely powerful act of peer-to-peer succession. Having lived the experience, the apprentice is tasked with “finding the others.” They are uniquely positioned within their own class to identify a successor, leveraging an intuitive feel for the team’s chemistry to foster a self-perpetuating chain of trust and transformation. This builds a vital community among wealth holders united by a shared goal of radical, disruptive giving.

Finally, they graduate not to a passive alumni network, but to new possibilities of engagement. They have the option to join the Funders Circle, accelerating the redistribution of their own wealth. They become fundraisers, leveraging their networks, and ambassadors for the movement, evangelists not for the foundation, but for the necessary creed of resource redistribution. In essence, they are tasked with growing the “cult”: a community bound not by dogma, but by a shared commitment to alchemizing inherited privilege into collective liberation.

We’re not looking for benefactors; we’re recruiting accomplices in the great redistribution. If you know the game is rigged, it’s time to break the table.

You know where to find us.

To further contextualize the work of the apprenticeship, one could draw upon these lines of thought:

Benjamin, R. (2022). Viral justice: How we grow the world we want. Princeton University Press.

Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. Haymarket Books.

Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners take all: The elite charade of changing the world. Knopf.

Villanueva, E. (2021). Decolonizing wealth: Indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore balance (2nd ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

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The Inevitable Stain of Class

Despite the best efforts of social movements in the UK to create an echo chamber in which we rejoice in our own wisdom, we are fundamentally shaped on an individual and collective level by the material, cultural and social systems we were raised in and continue to exist in. The class system is just one of these. It impacts the ways we talk, walk, think and act; it shapes the conversations we have, and the ones we are allowed to have. Our chances and opportunities, the power we can wield in a crowded room and the likelihood of an early death are all impacted by the class contexts in which we were born, raised, and now live our lives. If we accept this, we must conclude that class will also shape the form and content of our resistance. The tactics and strategies we favour, the people we meet or already know, and who we find enough commonality with to enter into struggle together.

Since the 1960s, social movements have been shaped by those who have the most time, energy, financial resources and confidence. These people were born into what can be broadly labelled the middle-classes. The individuals in these movements are driven by their ethical dispositions and the knowledge that they don’t possess the same power as the owning class but have been goaded into a relationship of hostile dependency with them.

The Management of Dissent

With these middle-classes having such influence on social movements, what space is there for those of us raised and living in the working-class? Or from its lower echelons, subject to the myriad violences of poverty? Can the middle-classes work with working-class individuals and communities without management or administration? Without judgement, measurement, or punishment?

We ask these questions because that is the job the owning class has given the middle-classes in all other social fields. We ask because we have spent large portions of our lives in social movements and this is what we see happen to the small number of working-class people who manage to enter these spaces. All the while, our supposed betters lead another futile charge and pat themselves on the back.

Why look at class in our social movements? Because whatever introspection has gone on thus far clearly hasn’t changed anything, and our society is racing into the abyss.
Why look at class in our social movements? Because we think the working-class should be behind the wheel. After all, if the middle-classes are conditioned for management, what are the working-class conditioned for if not survival, struggle, resistance?

A Methodology of Unpacking and Redistributing

So we begin. We begin with getting people together, because we still believe in people and we still believe that minds can be changed. We begin with structured conversations in workshops and trainings. We begin with educational processes that allow all of us to unpack the lies about class that capitalism has told us. Workshops in person over a weekend, educational sessions held online, reading groups, and our most basic weapon – one-to-one conversations. We recognise the different ways of learning, thinking, and working between the classes and we respond to them. We play to our strengths. We accept that sometimes separation is useful and necessary in resourcing us to continue the cross-class work long term.

We get together with our working-class siblings to interrogate the ways in which we have internalised the class hierarchy, and we push our middle-class would-be comrades through the same process. We come together across class in our local wealth redistribution groups and struggle with the basic task of communising the wealth at the table. We lean on our new education, continuing those conversations, holding people to account. We challenge all of us to dig a little deeper, to go a little further, and then we do it again.

The Numbers and the Nerve

In 2023, the initial weekend workshops which pushed our network into action took place across the UK. Late in 2024, those who had begun local redistribution projects off the back of these workshops converged for three days to test how far we’d come. What next? We pilot a series of online sessions for 50 participants from the working-, petit-bourgeois, and middle-classes. 5 of us set up A Revolting Class (ARC) in order to pick up the pace. We make plans to train 10 more working-class facilitators who can conduct the weekend workshop by the end of the year. People stick with this work for a host of reasons, but we imagine most of all they stick with it because it resonates with their experience. It rings true against the barren falsehoods that capitalism has offered, and the lukewarm bullshit served up by social movements.

Whoever you are reading this – you have been shaped by capitalism. Whatever class you were born into, wherever you find yourself now. You want dates and numbers, you want something to measure. It’s the itch in the ass crack you just can’t reach. Allow me:

• Local redistribution groups: 4 (Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, Brighton)

• Total members: 50

• Total redistributed: £529,000

• ARC-facilitated weekend workshops completed so far: 8

• ARC weekend workshops upcoming 2025-26: 12

• Online sessions completed so far: 33

• Online sessions upcoming 2025-2026: 132

Make of that whatever the fuck you like. The conclusion we’ve drawn is that we’re just getting started. We want to add a few more bodies to our organisation – those with the blood, spit and drive for the cause. People who want to unpack the damage that capitalism has done to their minds, and resource the communities of resistance they are connected to. We want to ask ourselves deeper questions about what it means to work in solidarity cross-class against the ruling class. And we want to find ways to resource the working-class resistance already happening because we know with the full beat of our hearts that the philanthropy sector is utterly unsuited for this task, and it cannot be reformed. Just like one of our Grandfathers used to say – “Why ask for the devil to hand you a sack of potatoes when you can rob all his little helpers at gunpoint?”

The contemporary landscape of social change is a battleground defined by a fundamental schism. On one side stands the hegemonic bloc of impact investing and social entrepreneurship, a sophisticated engine of capital preservation masquerading as moral innovation. On the other side, a slowly growing, insurgent movement for Radical Resource Redistribution (RRR), articulates a praxis of justice that is not merely about ‘doing good while not parting with your wealth’, but about dismantling the very foundations of wealth and power. This is not a friendly debate between strategies; it is a clash between a system designed to safely remain within the status quo and a movement committed to enacting liberation.

Impact Investing: The Neoliberal Capture of Conscience

Impact investing and social entrepreneurship are not alternative models; they are the logical, cynical evolution of capitalism under duress. They represent what feminist scholar Sara Ahmed would call a “non-performative” – a speech act that, in her analysis, “does not bring into being what it names,” but instead serves to consolidate the existing order. This framework is a form of sanctioned ignorance, a karma-washing that allows wealth to remain intact while performing a spectacle of concern.

The ideology is a product of what anthropologist David Graeber termed the “utopia of rules,” where business school indoctrination reframes systemic injustice as a series of “market failures” or “investment opportunities.” Poverty becomes an “untapped market” (some might remember the trope of the Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid). Colonial legacies become “emerging economies.” This logic, as political theorist Jodi Dean argues, substitutes the political goal of justice for the managerial goal of “sustainability”, a term that, in this lexicon, means the sustainable flow of returns to capital, not the sustenance of life or community. The primary metric is not justice, but the perpetuity of the venture. It is a wealth-defense mechanism par excellence, creating a philanthropic-industrial complex that functions as a subsidiary of the extractive economy it claims to challenge. It asks, “How can we make money while doing good?”, a question that inherently subordinates the “good” to the “money.”

Radical Resource Redistribution: A Movement and a Praxis of Repair

In stark opposition, Radical Resource Redistribution is both a movement and a praxis of repair. As a movement, it is a political force demanding the dismantling of the wealth defense industry and the repatriation of stolen resources to frontline, grassroots communities with political demands. As a praxis, it is the daily, intentional work of moving capital out of oppressive systems and into the hands of those building liberatory futures. It is embodied in the principles of Emergent Strategy, as articulated by adrienne maree brown, who teaches that “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

RRR is fractal and relational. It understands that the act of a foundation moving 50,000 Euros to a grassroots collective without onerous reporting is a micro-practice of the macro-political goal of abolition, the abolition of ‘power over’. Or a foundation spending down as the abolition of hoarding. It aligns with Indigenous principles of interconnectedness and reciprocity and the feminist economic vision of scholars like Nancy Fraser, who calls for a shift from a system of “progressive neoliberalism” to one centered on participatory parity and justice. This praxis is not about “investment” but about divestment and redistribution: divesting from systems of harm (police, prisons, fossil fuels, Zionist or other oppressive and racist entities) and redistributing those resources to community-led survival and resistance programs. It trusts that communities and social movements, not business school graduates, are the experts in their own liberation.

Breaking the Wealth Defense Industry: Tactics for a Just Transition

Moving more money into justice-based work requires a deliberate and confrontational break from the charity industrial complex. This involves:

Funder Abolitionism: Agitating for the dissolution of large, legacy foundations, whose endowments are tied to extractive industries and whose boards more often than not have a stake in maintaining the status quo. The goal is not to reform their grantmaking practices, but to liquidate their assets and transfer the capital directly to movements.

Funding Political Infrastructure, Not Projects: Shifting funds from discrete, apolitical “projects” to the core political infrastructure of movements: legal defense funds, bail funds, community land trusts, and independent media. This builds lasting power, not just temporary relief.

Weaponizing Redistribution as Reparations: Following the lead of groups like Resource Generation, which organize wealthy individuals to redistribute their inherited or accumulated wealth as an act of political reparations, not charity. This is about breaking class solidarity among the elite and building it across class lines, a necessary step in what Tricia Rose calls the work of “deep solidarity” required for meaningful change.

Embracing “Unsustainability” as a Virtue: Rejecting the tyranny of the “sustainable” (read: perpetual) nonprofit. As the late, great community organiser Mandy Carter often demonstrated, movement power lies in strategic, time-bound campaigns, not in maintaining an eternal organizational structure AND of course there’s lots to be said about long-term funding into resourcing community organising and the politicisation of people to awaken & bolster agency. Funding should be flexible, rapid-response, and allow for projects to successfully end. Funding that perpetuates and engorges large NGOs sustains the charity-industrial complex that maintains the status quo, that being said, these funding transitions need to be handled with care, otherwise the neoliberal stance of slashing third sector capacities/services/funding, can result in royally busted safety nets for folks who need them most.

PhilanthroAbolitionism for a Politics of Radical Repair

The stubborn dominance of traditional philanthropy and impact investing is not an accident of efficacy, but a function of hegemony. Legacy wealth models, operating under the trickle-down fantasy of the charitable-industrial complex, remain the default because they are structurally and ideologically sanctioned by the very systems that created the inequality they purport to address. As scholar-activist Dylan Rodríguez argues, the non-profit industrial complex often functions as a “counter-insurgent” formation, channeling revolutionary potential into manageable, fundable projects that do not threaten the underlying capital order. This is why exponentially more attention, social capital, and resources flow towards building a slightly more “ethical” stock portfolio or endowing another museum wing than towards the direct, unmediated transfer of resources to grassroots, Black, Indigenous, and global South movements. It is a grand, seductive distraction, what Robbie Shilliam might describe as a coloniality of time and knowledge, where the “fashionable” solutions of the privileged, steeped in business school metrics and a savior complex, continually defer the urgent, messy work of justice. The philanthrocapitalist obsession with scale, innovation, and return-on-investment is a political project to avoid the only true solution: the dismantling of their own power and the radical redistribution of their hoarded wealth. PhilanthroAbolitionism, therefore, is not a niche demand but a necessary rupture: a refusal of these sanctioned pathways and an insistence on repair that is measured not by donor satisfaction, but by collective liberation.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The theoretical critique of the philanthropic-industrial complex is borne out by the stark arithmetic of global capital. The sums moving through “socially responsible” channels designed to preserve wealth dwarf the paltry resources directed toward genuine, political redistribution, underscoring that this is not a matter of incremental reform but of fundamental structural change.

The Scale of “Hoarder Wealth” vs. Redistributive Flows

The global volume of impact investing, capital that explicitly seeks a financial return alongside a social or environmental benefit, has ballooned into a multi-trillion-dollar field. According to the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)’s 2022 market sizing report, the estimated market size reached $1.164 trillion in assets under management. This capital, while often doing marginal good, is structurally prohibited from the kind of non-repayable, no-strings-attached transfer that characterizes true redistribution. Its primary mandate remains the preservation and growth of the capital itself.

The Trickle of Traditional Philanthropy

Traditional philanthropy, while massive, is a mere fraction of the wealth it sits upon. In the United States, charitable giving by individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations totaled $499.33 billion in 2022 (Giving USA 2023). While this seems large, it is critical to note that this giving comes from a base of total U.S. household wealth that exceeded $140 trillion in the same period (Federal Reserve). Philanthropy, in this context, represents a leaky faucet from an ocean of wealth, much of which is itself the product of historical and ongoing extraction.

The Radical Redistribution Deficit

In stark contrast, the scale of resources moving through explicitly political, radical redistribution channels is microscopic. For example, the international funder collaborative for social movements, Funders for a Just Economy, reported granting just $6.5 million to grassroots organizations in 2022. A study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) found that in 2021, a shockingly low percentage of U.S. foundation funding was allocated to “social justice” strategies: only 8% of the $90.7 billion in total foundation giving. An even smaller fraction, less than 1%, specifically supported grassroots community organizing that builds power to challenge systemic inequity. This data reveals a system designed not to fund resistance, but to manage and contain it.

This quantitative chasm underscores that Radical Resource Redistribution is, in practice, a form of targeted degrowth. It is a deliberate political project to “degrow” the hoarded, oppressive capital concentrated in the hands of the few, capital that is often invested in the very systems (fossil fuels, private prisons, militarism) that create the crises, and to channel it into the social, political, and ecological power of neglected communities. The goal is not to make the hoarded wealth “sustainable,” but to dismantle it, transferring its material power to the grassroots communities who are the true experts in their own liberation. The data proves that the current system is not a failed mechanism for justice; it is a highly successful mechanism for the defense of wealth. While the aforementioned numbers are all US-centric, for Europe we don’t even have such data but from inferential experience, the numbers are even lower for politicized, grassroots funding.

From Alchemy to Autonomy

The choice is not between a “sustainable” venture and a “dependent” movement. The choice is between a model that alchemizes guilt into continued dominance and a praxis that builds collective autonomy. Impact investing is a spell cast by capital to convince us it has a soul. Radical Resource Redistribution is the deliberate, collective, and fierce work of breaking that spell and seizing the means of life and struggle.

To break the wealth defense industry is to recognize, as the Combahee River Collective did, that the only true social impact is liberation. It requires moving beyond the karmic ledger of the privileged and into the messy, just, and necessary work of repair. It is to understand that the ultimate measure of success is not a return on investment, but the irrevocable transfer of power and resources away from the hoarders and into the hands of those weaving a world where everyone has enough. The future is not built through a balanced portfolio, but through the uncompromising redistribution of everything, land, capital, and power, back to the people.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press (2004)

brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, (2017)

The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement,” (1977)

Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. Verso, (2012)

Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. Verso, (2013)

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, (2015)

Indigenous Action Media. Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex.

Rodríguez, Dylan. Abolition Now! Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. AK Press, 2020.

Rose, Tricia. Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives & How We Break Free. Random House, (2024)

Shilliam, Robbie. Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction. Polity Press, 2021.

The awkwardness when a programme officer visits a grassroots collective is palpable. It stems from an unbridgeable power gap. The funder, however well-intentioned, arrives with what political theorist Niamh McCrea identifies as a latent threat inherent in all philanthropic relationships: the power of exit. As McCrea argues, even when movements strategically accept funding, they must constantly “resist funder conditionalities, and preserve egalitarian modes of organising in the face of practices which undermine participatory ideals and threaten relations of care and solidarity“ . The funder’s presence, often framed as “learning” or even “solidarity,” can feel like a safari precisely because they can leave the meeting, and the geography of struggle, at will. For the community, this visit is not a social call but a high-stakes audition for survival. Trust, the essential currency of movement building, cannot be built in such fleeting, asymmetrical encounters. It is earned through shared risk, consistent presence, and a demonstrated accountability to the community’s own agenda; things that a traditional grant cycle, with its due diligence forms and impact reports, cannot buy.

Conversely, the effective grassroots organiser is increasingly required to be a hybrid creature: part mobiliser, part grant writer, part networker fluent in the dialect of foundation strategy. This is not a choice but a necessity; to be outside this circuit is to be perpetually on the brink of precarity, one funding cycle away from dissolution. Yet, in mastering this world, they risk becoming estranged from the very base they represent, never quite belonging in the polished boardroom or the gritty community centre. Kelly Waltz, in her critique of the nonprofit industrial complex, frames this as a process of co-optation, where movements are “institutionalised“ and their “counter-revolutionary goals and values“ are subtly enforced by the “inconsistent financing from the state and wealthy donors“ . The organiser must acquire a “toolkit” and a “networking-arsenal“ simply to access resources that should, in a just system, flow to them as a matter of course, all while the very act of acquiring them threatens to sever their organic links to their community.

This is the chasm that Collective Abundance was created to bridge. As their mission states, they use “philanthropic funding as a tool to help strengthen the climate justice movement-ecosystem,” acting not as a traditional intermediary but as a redistributor rooted in the movement itself. They are a group of “organisers spread across geographies,” not grant makers in a distant office. Their model directly confronts the trust deficit. In Spain, however, their first attempt at a participatory process revealed just how deep the toxicity of scarcity runs. When they asked ten grassroots groups to distribute €100,000 amongst themselves, the process landed poorly. As the organisation reflects, “The responsibility of dividing up a pot of money was received as an unwelcome invitation for each collective to have to prove their worth, rather than an opportunity to resource one another“. This was a powerful, real-time lesson in the damage wrought by years of forced competition. In response, they did something radical: they “put money decisions to the side” and spent the rest of the gathering “dancing, laughing and getting to know one another – exactly as it should be”.

This pivot is the “punk edge” in practice, a refusal to let the logic of the market dictate the terms of the relationship. It reveals the need to disrupt “Northern NGO-centrism.” They argue that true localisation requires not just shifting funds but also recognising that Southern and grassroots organisations possess a distinct form of “cultural capital, rooted in community affiliation, local knowledge and astuteness”. Ironically enough, this north/south divide, while existing on a global scale, is also a divide we see within the European continent. Collective Abundance’s model operationalises this by creating local nodes of funding through country-based teams that work with coalitions of grassroots groups, embedding resourcing within a context of relationship and local knowledge. Their participatory ecosystem funding directly addresses the pernicious effect of scarcity, which “pits grassroots and frontline groups... against each other to compete for scarce funding“. In Poland, informed by the Spanish experience, they offered €10,000 to each collective with an invitation to spend the first year simply getting to know one another, keeping collective funding decisions for year two, thereby genuinely moving “at the speed of trust” .

Their dual role, resourcing movements while educating funders, is crucial. They hold the complexity, translating the needs and nuances of grassroots organising to institutional donors, while insulating movements from the distorting effects of direct funder pressure. The Robert Bosch Stiftung, a major partner, openly admits that they “would not have been able to reach the activists and movement partners that the Abundance Fund was able to reach“ and that “trusting the Abundance Fund, letting go of control and being flexible created the right conditions” . This is not just rhetoric; it is a structural admission that the traditional model has failed. McCrea’s strategic case for accepting philanthropic funding hinges on this very point: it is only justifiable insofar as it “pushes existing configurations of power in more egalitarian directions“ . By working with “wealth holders and people in philanthropy to help develop new participatory funding practices,” Collective Abundance aims to “provoke realistic but tangible shifts within philanthropic culture to transform how funders engage with grassroots organisers“ .

Real power is not transferred through a grant agreement; it is cultivated through shared struggle, mutual accountability, and the patient work of building trust-filled relationships. As one organiser from the Abundance Fund put it, the goal is not to turn “grantees into grantmakers,” but rather to insist that “funders need to become better organisers”. By placing values-led community organisers at the centre of resource distribution, and by fostering collective decision-making amongst them, Collective Abundance is modeling a form of resourcing that is less a transaction and more an act of solidarity. It moves philanthropy from a performance of activism to a genuine investment in collective power, proving that when trust is the foundation, abundance is not a dream but a practical outcome.

References

McCrea, N. (2019). Critical issues in philanthropy: power, paradox, possibility and the private foundation. In N. McCrea & F. Finnegan (Eds.), Funding, power and community development (pp. 21–38). Policy Press.

McCrea, N. (2024). All things considered, should egalitarian movements accept philanthropic funding? Res Publica, *30*(2), 285–303. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09622-8

van Selm, G., Bukenya, B., Kamya, I., Kumi, E., Yeboah, T., Banks, N., Elbers, W., Schulpen, L., & van Wessel, M. (2025). Northern NGO-centrism in localisation processes: reproducing power inequities in the aid field. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2025.2543349

Waltz, K. T. (2024). Altruistic imperialism: The co-optation of mutual aid by the nonprofit industrial complex https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5678/