Go to homepage

President's Letters

President's Letter: Solidarity Is the Antidote to Fear

Dear friends,

Anna looked around nervously when the facilitator asked us to pair up and talk to someone we didn’t know about why we had come to the meeting. About 100 people were packed into a small room at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington, D.C. at noon on a beautiful spring day, with the cherry blossoms in full bloom outside.

I walked up to Anna, and she told me her story. She’d never been involved in activism of any kind. But she was a government worker who had been dismissed with no notice and no due process, despite stellar performance reviews. 

Anna was heartbroken about the work she would no longer get to do helping others. She was angry too. She had come to this orientation meeting organized by Free DC, an organizing group that has trained thousands of people in nonviolent strategic action since January, using the principles developed by leaders in the civil rights movement in the U.S. and activists facing authoritarian leaders around the world. The group has organized committees in every ward of D.C., attracting 400 new people per week — many of whom had never been involved in a similar group before. 

At the orientation session Anna and I attended, participants learned about and drew on their own experiences to teach each other about the authoritarian playbook — and how movements for change have successfully pushed back in the U.S. and around the world. I was inspired to see everyday people explore concrete strategies themselves, rather than be told what to do by an expert who “knows better.” Everyone left with clear commitments to join ward committees and to recruit their friends and neighbors.

People like Anna, and groups like Free DC, will redeem our country. 

Millions of Americans care deeply about the rule of law and democratic institutions — and they are rightly outraged by the callous and sometimes lawless behavior of the administration. But millions more are not passionate about “democracy” as such — they’re not eager to defend a system that hasn’t been working for them for decades. They are instead moved by issues that affect their daily lives, like workers’ rights, health care, education, and racial justice. They are ready to be invited into broad movements that give them a direct, lived experience of democracy, rather than advocacy for an abstract, distant ideal.

The big question for nonprofit organizations and philanthropy is whether we are as ready and hungry for change as Anna is. 

Many nonprofits and foundations have relied on traditional strategies: expert research, insider advocacy, and mobilizing a small number of true believers to take action on issues determined in some far away boardroom. All the evidence — from U.S. history and experience around the world — is that those strategies won’t deliver the goods now. Only people power, built and exercised at a significant scale through organizing, offers the hope of advancing freedom and justice. 

The importance of organizing by everyday people has been put in stark relief by the capitulation and silence of too many elite institutions, including law firms, universities, and corporations. Many people with enormous privilege are choosing to take no risk. Rather than practicing solidarity, they have tried to cut deals that they naively think will protect them. Meanwhile, everyday people like Anna, with little privilege, set an example for all of us to follow. Alone, they have little power. Together, they are formidable. 

The enormous harms of policies adopted by this administration in a so-called “flood the zone” strategy have had an unintended consequence. They have created potential opponents to those policies who are hungry to organize for change everywhere: people who depend on Medicaid for lifesaving care, older Americans and veterans threatened by the prospect of cuts to social security and veterans’ health care, U.S. citizen children and family members worried about whether their loved ones will return home from work or school at night, parents, teachers, and students worried about education cuts, scientists and university workers, LGBTQ+ people, people of color and women affected by reversals of racial and gender justice policies, and government workers like Anna. 

To meet this moment, some organizations will have to reorient their work toward becoming vehicles to dramatically expand the circle to these large groups of people, rather than simply engaging small bases of existing members or supporters. Methods, like strategic nonviolence, that have not been widely practiced or taught for decades can be revived for a new generation. Large scale public education — connecting the dots between attacks on seemingly different issues, helping weave together groups across differences to build solidarity — will be essential. 

I’ve been heartened to see seeds of this kind of imaginative, large-scale, fast-build organizing begin to emerge in pockets around the country — among government workers, Medicaid beneficiaries, scientists, students, and the friends, families, and co-workers of immigrants. Sometimes these efforts are led by established groups, sometimes by new groups of concerned citizens formed in the crucible of crisis. Inspiring examples include: SEIU members mobilizing on days’ notice all over the country to demand the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, who was unjustly picked up by ICE; teachers and parents mobilizing to win the release of a mom and three kids in Sackets Harbor, N.Y., and millions participating in Hands Off! rallies. We need all of it — and much more. 

Foundations need to change too. At Freedom Together, we believe in and support many strategies. But, for decades, philanthropy has underinvested in organizing — the essential strategy to build solidarity power. The field bears the scars of that haphazard investment. There is too much insularity, marginality, and preaching to very small choirs. The crisis we’re in offers an opportunity and an imperative for the field, supported by philanthropy, to build wide onramps for millions of people to engage in the everyday work that will save and improve democracy as a form of self-government.

At Freedom Together, we’ve committed to spend 10% or more of our endowment this year, because we believe that investments in solidarity at scale now can change the course of history — and that civil society and the rule of law as we know it may not exist in a few years if all of us don’t act. In the current context, spending more to do more of the same isn’t good enough. We are challenging ourselves to go out and find creative organizers and groups that are committed to this indispensable work of mass organizing, in the finest tradition of the movements that have changed America in the past. 

Organizations and foundations face big obstacles to change. We all have plans, programs, structures, habits, comfort zones, and multiple stakeholders with varied interests and risk temperaments that make big strategic pivots of the kind called for now daunting. But we must now make big adjustments, and fast.

More people are open to engagement than at any time in my lifetime. How this story turns out will depend not only on what politicians do, but on the choices we make.

Collective action by institutions can also make an enormous difference. We’ve seen too little solidarity among universities and big law firms, though the courage of some is praiseworthy. As a Harvard alumnus, I was proud to see President Alan M. Garber standing up for academic independence and intellectual freedom. As a foundation that proudly supports science and medical research, we were inspired to see the American Academy of Arts & Sciences stand up for the importance of free inquiry. 

Foundations could well be the next institutions to face attacks. I am very proud to stand in solidarity with 307 foundations (and counting!), representing more than 30 states and the District of Columbia, in defending philanthropy’s freedom to give. As Tonya Allen, president of the McKnight Foundation, John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, and I wrote in Nonprofit Quarterly:

“Foundations do not exist to perpetuate ourselves. Our purpose is to support civil society by expanding the capacities and strengths of charitable organizations that help meet the needs of the communities in which they work. It may be tempting to lie low and guard our resources — but that will not serve the nonprofits we fund, the people they serve, and the institutions we rely on to thrive.”

I am deeply encouraged by all those who have already signed on. For those who haven’t, there’s still time: please sign on to the statement here — we’re stronger together.

This is a time for courage. And courage doesn’t just mean the courage to stand up for what’s right (though we need a lot more of that!). It also means being willing to change ourselves to meet this big moment in history and to practice solidarity to be most effective in standing up for our democracy. 

We are not spectators to the potential collapse of democracy. If we act with courage and solidarity, we can be protagonists in a story that is still far from finished. 

In solidarity, 

Deepak Bhargava

#CourageIsContagious 

The everyday Americans and elite institutions who are not bending the knee deserve our gratitude. Here are just a few examples: 

Freedom Together Media Highlights

Recommended Readings