#15 Clarity, Confidence.
A coalition of determined organizations and individuals, including Rawa, proudly presents the “Raise The Bar” toolkit: a practical guide to identify and address harmful philanthropic practices, and to better support justice and liberation movements from a place of deep solidarity and authentic partnership.
While we invite you to attend the June 30 launch event and encourage you to read and use the toolkit, we want to highlight the broader significance of this work.
For decades, organizations around the world have led relentless struggles for just causes. Yet we have lagged behind in confronting the less visible, internal, and structural constraints embedded in funding systems.
We have made too little progress in recognizing the ways in which financial power—held by states, corporations, and wealthy families—can shape, constrain, and at times undermine our work. We have not sufficiently examined its direct relationship to the causes we fight for, nor have we consistently confronted it.
Since the early 1990s, philanthropy has increasingly functioned as a key instrument shaping global civil society. While early generations of foreign-funded NGOs used these resources to navigate political and social organizing within a rapidly shifting, increasingly Americanized, unipolar world, the structural harm remained less visible and was rarely confronted.
Since then, a new generation has grown up within this system. Analysis on how wealth reshapes and co-opts liberation struggles emerged, as did new supposedly more democratic frameworks and cosmetic reforms from funders. Yet these were mostly shifts in language without corresponding material changes. The scandalous complicity of some funding structures in contexts of genocide have pushed many to critically reassess and rethink the internal dynamics of funding itself, including how bureaucracy and administrative structures function as tools of political repression and dominance.
Over the years, we have sought to better understand how our own methods of organizing, functioning, and thinking are shaped—often invisibly—by the structural power embedded in funding systems.
What is needed now is greater clarity and collective confidence: a deeper understanding of these power dynamics, including the vulnerabilities and limits of the philanthropic sector itself. We must develop tools of engagement that include confrontation, negotiation, and pressure. In doing so, we should approach philanthropy not as a “comrade,” but as a relationship of exchange and power—one that must be actively navigated in service of our communities’ interests - the way our communities see and decide. █