Elina Alayeva

New in Lex: Rewind! 🎉 Viewing your document’s history is now as easy as scrubbing through a video

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Because Tim Walz taught high school. Trust me.

In wake of George Floyd's murder, there was an outpouring of contributions to racial equity orgs. Today, most funders have returned to their previous giving patterns, creating a mess for nonprofits that assumed this funding would sustain. Philanthropy's response to the moment misunderstood how change happens. Most leaders working on racial equity tell the same story: in the second half of 2020, they couldn't answer the phone fast enough. Every funder was looking to donate to racial justice aligned orgs. Some orgs saw their fundraising expand by multiples. It was never easier to raise money. With bank accounts flush and a sense this was a unique opportunity in history, nonprofits aggressively expanded. Many orgs were small and had not lived through a wave of funding like this. It was not known that much of the interest was ephemeral. Most new donors wrote one check in 2020. Sometimes they wrote another the next year. More institutional foundations generally wrote 2 or 3 year grant terms. Either way, most of the surge of donations (though certainly some funders have endured) ended within 3 years. By now, orgs have spent most of that. My understanding is most racial equity orgs are cutting budgets and shrinking today. The one-time surge of money, while beneficial at the time, created a mess for nonprofits to navigate. Problems that were generations in the making don't get solved in one or two years. They take decades. Slow, incremental progress creates large change. To paraphrase, people overestimate what can be achieved in one year and underestimate what can be achieved in ten. The philanthropy consulting group Bridgespan studied 10 major, national policy advances over the past century. On average, those big policy victories came from at least 40 smaller wins over 25–30 years. If funders want to make progress in any movement, it takes committed funding. It's not fund this for 2 years, then move to a different topic and fund that for 2 years. That doesn't work and isn't helpful to grantees, particularly when everyone else is doing the same thing at the same time. Success on any policy issue requires patience.