#16 We Were Never Meant for Each Other
The recent wave of defunding movement organisations in Palestine, the US, and across the globe is being read as punishment for Palestine solidarity. But what we're witnessing is bigger than punitive regression.
We're watching the end of another philanthropic phase.
For a time, funding movements had become fashionable. "Decolonial," "movement-led," and "power shifting" and other buzzwords filled strategy documents, conference panels, workshops, and cocktail receptions. Philanthropy convinced itself that liberation could be translated into metrics, measured through indicators, managed through due diligence, broken down into inputs and outputs, packaged into portfolios, and delivered through grants.
This brief period of funding movements did not arise from a deep commitment to liberation. It was philanthropy grasping at relevance—at staying close enough to movements to borrow their legitimacy, while remaining distant enough to maintain power and control. Until it all became real. Until Palestine.
Until philanthropy saw movements slipping through its fingers and refusing to stay inside the lanes it had built for them. Until fascism stopped being an abstract trend and became the political terrain on which funders themselves would traverse. A fashionable posture suddenly carried a heavy burden.
Philanthropy’s infamous strategizing and restructuring loops are back in full go-nowhere speed, while the frontlines wait for the next grant to drop. Boards debate "reputational risk." Lawyers are hired to tighten due diligence.
And suddenly movements hear what was always lurking just beneath the surface: You were never really a fit.
The intermediaries, grassroots funds, and movement resourcing infrastructures that absorbed risk while institutional philanthropy protected itself have become expendable. The organisations that made it possible for wealth to fund movements at arm's length are now themselves considered too risky.
Funders are cleaning their portfolios. Sweeping out anything that creates political friction, direct action, community-led infrastructure, grassroots power, and any form of organising that builds autonomy and self-determination. Anything that leaves communities with more agency than philanthropy can comfortably manage. Resources are being redirected toward what is legible, governable, and institutionally safe.
As communities resist genocide, imperial violence, and fascism, they are once again told to queue at courtroom doors, lobby congressional offices, and seek permission from the very institutions producing the violence. Our political agency is outsourced. Our power is exported back into the institutions built to contain it. Once again, we're expected to reform the unreformable.
The fantasy that wealth can purchase social change—as long as it remains measurable, manageable, and accountable to capital—is being exposed. The problem was never that movements failed to deliver. The problem is that movements stopped delivering what philanthropy ultimately seeks: influence without relinquishing power.
Movements will always exceed what philanthropy was ever willing to fund.
So let's stop whispering. This is not regression. It is not an exceptional retreat. This is philanthropy doing exactly what it was built to do.
Philanthropy has never existed to redistribute power. It exists to maximise the political value of concentrated wealth, preserve control over it, and make that control tax deductible.
Our job is not to wait for philanthropy's next political fashion.
Our task is what movement people have always done: organise differently, manoeuvre through contradiction, find the cracks, build infrastructures that answer to our communities rather than to wealth, and reclaim the resources extracted from us. Our task is not simply to survive philanthropy's cycles, but to outgrow them—and to build sovereignty over wealth that was ours long before it was accumulated in someone else's portfolio.
Our task is not to make philanthropy more courageous, but to make it less necessary. █