Resist
A Different Kind of Foundation
There are countless organizations and individuals who are quietly going about changing the world. We like to spotlight organizations and changemakers doing great work and help you to learn about how you can support them.
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The Issue
Many grassroots, activist, and frontline community groups lack access to sufficient funding.
A major source of income for nonprofits and social change organizations is grants. Grants are a type of monetary donation typically made by foundations, corporations, and government agencies (aka grantmakers). Most grants have an application process that requires the grant recipient to meet specific criteria, use the grant money for specific purposes, and report back to the grantmaker on progress or setbacks in the grant-funded work.
The benefit is that grants are usually larger than donations from individuals. The drawbacks are that grants often come with strings-attached requirements, create competition instead of cooperation in the nonprofit and social change sector, and reinforce unequal power dynamics through extractive and transactional practices. Grants also tend to be for short-term, project-based activities making it difficult for organizations to fund their overall operations, build and sustain movements, or implement long-term systems change work.
Often, the most progressive, grassroots, activist, and frontline groups — the ones focused on radical transformation and systems change in order to achieve a more just and equitable world — face barriers to accessing grant funding. These groups may not want to apply for funds from the governments and corporations that they feel are causing harm by creating and perpetuating the systems they are trying to change. Or, they may be ineligible for funding due to strict requirements. This is true for both radical and progressive groups as well as nascent, small, and informal groups. That leaves foundation grants.
However, many foundations also have rigid requirements and perpetuate the same systems. As a result, grants are made to more mainstream and established groups that are less likely to challenge the status quo, causing resource accumulation to be concentrated in particular parts of the nonprofit ecosystem. Critics refer to this as the nonprofit industrial complex.
That’s where Resist comes in.
Who is Resist?
Resist is a different kind of foundation. They make grants to groups that are either too new, too small, or too radical for other grantmakers.
Resist supports people’s movements for justice and liberation. They redistribute resources back to frontline communities at the forefront of change while amplifying their stories of building a better world.
Resist was founded in 1967 to organize grassroots activists and resisters in opposition to the Vietnam War. Its founders include the “Boston Five”, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and other prominent resisters. It quickly expanded to include civil rights and has come to focus on the dismantling of systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, and Christian hegemony over time.
Resist has provided critical early funding to some of the most influential progressive organizations in the U.S. – many of which have gone on to make history themselves.
What Resist does
Redistributes resources
Each year, Resist raises money from over 9,000 individual donors from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Then, they redistribute the money to frontline community groups who are resisting, reimagining, and building resilience in communities across the country. Many individual donors who may be interested in supporting this type of work do not have the time or expertise to find and research the most effective progressive, grassroots, and activist groups. Resist is able to sustain and support groups that you might not otherwise know exist by pooling donations from individual donors and redistributing the money in the form of flexible, multi-year grants.
Cultivates movements
Resist supports frontline groups to meet and share with each other in order to build stronger social change movements. They have co-hosted regional convenings, and create and fund physical spaces for frontline leaders to work collaboratively share resources, best practices, and collectively envision transformative change. As part of this, Resist offers back-office services (think: finance and operations) to groups that would not otherwise be able to afford specialists in these areas, allowing them to focus on their program work.
Practices radical philanthropy
Radical philanthropy calls for a constant exploration of how funders recreate systemic oppression through their grantmaking and donor practices. Resist seeks to move grantmakers and donors to be in direct opposition to systemic oppression and shift power to transformative, frontline-led work. They do this by harnessing the wisdom of frontline communities, challenging top-down philanthropic models, and being more accountable to their grantees and frontline communities.
Why we love Resist
We love Resist because they provide resources to groups that have been historically excluded from grant funding and have a deep commitment to movement building. But that’s not all.
Change from within
As part of its commitment to radical philanthropy, Resist challenged itself to better align its rhetoric with its practice. Many organizations talk about shifting power, centering racial justice within organizational practices, and actively rooting out patterns of oppression within their own systems. It’s a lot harder to actually do it. Especially when it means admitting where you haven’t lived up to your own ideals. At Resist, it meant listening to and acting on critiques and blindspots. It meant identifying internal white supremacy and patriarchy and moving from white, middle-class leadership to women of color and queer leadership. It meant becoming more accountable to the movement, who they fund, how they fund, and how they engage with other foundations. Resist openly shares about this transformation and actively invites traditional philanthropists, foundations, and institutions with power to join them on this journey.
Worker self-directed
As Resist’s Co-Director, Kendra Hicks puts it, “Structure matters. How you do your work is equally as important as the work itself.” Traditional nonprofits recreate the corporate model. The Board of Directors typically delegates the management of the organization to an Executive Director who then delegates some of that work to their department heads. This keeps work siloed by way of ‘expertise’ or departments, making it difficult to adapt to changing conditions. This is not to say that experts don’t matter or that focused department work is always harmful. But, when the voices of those who are directly impacted are left out of decision-making processes, the organization suffers.
By contrast, in a worker self-directed organization like Resist’s, the Board delegates the direction and management of the organization to a collective of self-governing workers. The Board then provides oversight and support to the staff collective to ensure that the self-management system is functioning to advance the organization’s mission. As a result, all workers have the power to influence their day-to-day work, workplace conditions, career paths, and overall organizational direction.
How you can help Resist
Learn more
Visit resist.org to read about Resist’s history, theory of change, principles, and transformation to radical philanthropy.
Donate
Support the frontlines of social change. Your contribution to Resist supports hundreds of activist groups resisting, organizing, and building a better world.
Take Action
Discover frontline organizations working on the issues you care about by exploring Resist’s grantee database. Many offer ways to volunteer and take collective action towards a more just and equitable world.
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Originally published August 24, 2021.
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