What the Chronicle of Philanthropy Missed—and What the Sector Still Won’t Say
The Chronicle of Philanthropy is a trusted publication in our field. They have a unique platform; and, when they shine a spotlight on something, people take notice. So, when they ran a story about 18 Million Rising losing funding from Wellspring Philanthropic Fund over a post related to Palestine, I paid attention.
But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it—not because it was courageous, but because it felt incomplete. It raised three questions for me, and I can’t seem to shake them.
First: Is this just more fuel for our sector’s demagogues—the ones who speak with conviction, fan the flames, and suffer none of the consequences their audiences might? I’ve read the op-eds. I’ve heard the takes. And, in this moment—when political pressure is rising from every direction—I’m not convinced that more performative certainty is what we need.
Second: Is this a perfect example of the soft authoritarianism I’ve been naming in philanthropy for some time now—the kind that operates through process and silence rather than overt control and where funders talk about values until those values introduce discomfort—and then quietly retreat?
And third—and maybe most important: Is this an effort to raise consciousness, or to exploit the lack of it? Paulo Freire warned us about naïve consciousness—the stage where people notice what’s happening but fail to see the systems behind it. This piece didn’t name structure. It named a rupture. It stirred the pot, but didn’t explain the stove.
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They point to something deeper—something structural—and I think we need to talk about that.
What the Article Reported—and What It Didn’t
To be clear, the facts of the story matter. 18 Million Rising, a national Asian American advocacy organization, shared a post expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Several months later, a $250,000 grant—roughly a quarter of their annual budget—was revoked by Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a progressive foundation known for supporting racial justice work. The relationship ended with a short Zoom call and a brief follow-up note.
The Chronicle reported the timeline. They named the actors. They presented it as a moment of rupture within progressive philanthropy—just when unity, they suggested, was most needed.
But what they didn’t do was give us the tools to understand how this kind of rupture happens—not just in this instance, but structurally.
They didn’t name the asymmetry. They didn’t interrogate how discretionary capital works. They didn’t explore how power operates in philanthropic relationships where one side holds the money and the other holds the consequences.
And, without that context, the piece became what so much of our sector’s discourse becomes in moments like this: a flare of outrage with no clear analysis, no clear path forward, and no structural clarity.
This wasn’t a moment of progressive collapse. It was a moment that revealed the limits of the current design.
What the Wellspring–18MR Rupture Reveals
The real story isn’t just that a funder walked away. It’s that this kind of fallout is inevitable when you take two actors—both values-driven, both committed to justice—and place them in a structurally asymmetrical relationship that can’t hold disagreement.
Wellspring is a progressive foundation. They’ve backed racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and human rights work for years. They’re spending down. They take risks. And let’s be clear—they aren’t the Koch brothers.
18 Million Rising is an unapologetically political, values-driven organization. They’re organizing Asian Americans around solidarity, racial justice, and international liberation struggles. Their message wasn’t out of alignment with their mission—it was the mission.
Yet the relationship fell apart.
It did not fall apart because either side is corrupt, but because the system they were inside was never designed to support mutuality. It was built for discretion—not dialogue. It was built for values alignment—until values diverge.
That’s the core contradiction: we say we want principled giving; but we’ve built a structure where one side bears all the risk, and the other can exit at will. That’s not partnership. That’s conditional patronage dressed up in the language of solidarity.
And, if we don’t name that structure, we’ll keep confusing collapse for conflict when, in reality, it’s just design doing what it was built to do.
This Isn’t Just a One-Off. It’s the Default.
What happened between Wellspring and 18 Million Rising wasn’t extraordinary. It was textbook. This is how philanthropy functions when relationships are built on discretion rather than shared risk.
It’s not just about one grant being pulled. It’s about what this structure teaches everyone inside it.
Nonprofits learn quickly that speaking boldly comes with risk, that saying the “right” thing at the wrong moment can jeopardize a budget, and that funders want authenticity—until that authenticity becomes uncomfortable. So grantees hedge, they manage, and they internalize caution as strategy.
And funders, for all their talk about boldness and trust, learn to stay silent. They don’t name red lines or engage discomfort. And, when something crosses the invisible boundary, they don’t explain—they just leave.
This is how the system preserves itself: not with overt power plays, but with ambient fragility; not through suppression, but through silence. And the result is a sector where everyone is managing reputational risk, but no one is practicing actual trust.
It’s not malice. It’s architecture. And, until we start designing relationships that can hold tension instead of avoiding it, we’ll keep watching these collapses play out in slow, quiet, predictable ways.
When Journalism Echoes the System
The Chronicle had an opportunity. This story could have invited the sector into a deeper conversation about power, discretion, and the limits of the current design. It could have examined how a values-based relationship fell apart—not because of bad actors, but because of a structure that can’t hold discomfort.
Instead, the piece flattened complexity into spectacle. It amplified the drama, but skipped the diagnosis. It gave us rupture without context, power without scrutiny, performance without consequence.
No one named this more clearly than
, a longtime Jewish leader in our space, whose response to the article should be required reading. She didn’t deny the rupture mattered—she challenged the way it was framed. She called out how the article leaned on Holocaust imagery, erased nuanced Jewish perspectives, and elevated voices known to hold extreme anti-Israel views—all while glossing over the pain and fear many Jewish leaders are holding in this moment.She wrote, “It outsources the burden of context and curiosity to ‘the other’—in this case, to ‘the Jew,’ or ‘the Jewish funder.’” And, later, “It reads as if philanthropy is about entitlement: I deserve it. I am righteous. I am morally superior. Instead of what it could be: We’re in this together.”
And she’s right. The article didn’t invite reflection—it performed solidarity for an audience already primed for outrage. And, when a publication positions itself as a platform for justice one week and a celebration of billionaire giving the next, it’s not building clarity—it’s managing optics.
This wasn’t journalism that held power to account. It was coverage that reinforced the very dynamics it claimed to critique.
If We Want More Than a Contract
Let’s not pretend this is just a funder problem.
Because if nonprofits want more than transactional support—if we want trust, shared risk, and long-term partnership—then we have to engage funders like that’s what we’re building. And most of us don’t.
If a prospective funder won’t engage on a level where we can discern whether the shit might hit the fan over a post on IG, don’t ask for their money. There’s a lot of it out there.
And stop chancing a quarter of your organization’s budget on a relationship with a friendly program officer. Insist on meeting the people who actually hold decision-making power—or walk away. If the relationship can’t survive a hard conversation, it’s not a relationship. It’s a transaction waiting to implode.
We want the freedom to act boldly, but we wait until after a rupture to ask if the relationship can hold tension. We want funders to stand by us in hard moments, but we rarely initiate the conversations that surface risk before things get hard. We want more than a contract, but we treat the relationship like a vending machine: push the right buttons, hope the money comes out.
Here’s the truth: a gift relationship—one built on trust and mutuality—requires a different posture. It requires naming the uncomfortable stuff early: Where do our values align? Where might they diverge? What would make this relationship untenable?
And, yes, it means asking the hard questions before the fallout: Why might this post be a problem? Who might it trigger? What would it look like to talk through that before it blows up?
That’s not self-censorship. That’s stewardship. That’s how grown-up relationships work when power is real and values aren’t always tidy.
What 18 Million Rising seemed to want wasn’t just renewed funding. It was a principled relationship. But gift relationships aren’t earned through performance or post-rupture press strategies. They’re earned through honesty, vulnerability, and shared clarity from the start.
And, if we’re serious about building something better, that’s where we have to begin.
The Closing Argument
This wasn’t just a funding decision. It was a structural failure—one we keep mistaking for interpersonal drama. And The Chronicle didn’t clarify that failure. They made it foggier. They reported the rupture, but left the architecture untouched.
And that’s how these moments pass through the sector: a flash of outrage, a few op-eds, quiet exits. Then it’s back to business as usual—until the next collapse.
But what if we stopped treating these ruptures like surprises?
What if we finally admitted that this system we’ve built—of trust-based rhetoric and discretionary control, of bold messaging and invisible boundaries—cannot sustain the values we claim to hold?
Here’s what it would look like:
Funders: If your support has limits, say so. If there are values you won’t fund, name them. If you reserve the right to walk away, be honest about that. That’s not betrayal—it’s clarity. And clarity builds trust more than any brochure or keynote speech ever will.
Nonprofits: Stop performing alignment you haven’t tested. If you want to be treated like a partner, don’t wait until the money disappears to start acting like one. Ask the hard questions. Name the tensions. Build something that can hold.
And to those who shape the stories—like The Chronicle: We don’t need more attention. We need analysis. Don’t give us another controversy. Give us a vocabulary for structural failure. Give us the tools to see what’s actually going on underneath all this.
See it as your role not to exploit naïveté, but to develop critical consciousness. That’s the work. That’s what journalism can do when it’s rooted in justice—not just sympathy for those who’ve been hurt, but clarity about the systems that keep hurting them.
Because the real risk isn’t that funders walk away. It’s that we keep mistaking a system failure for bad luck—treating collapse like a glitch instead of the outcome it was built to produce.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting Projects
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