Why Does Our Sector Fund Social Change Like Bureaucrats?
Turns out, a 2% response rate comes with a cost. Don’t miss this one—first in The Giving Review, then picked up by The Chronicle of Philanthropy: How Direct Mail Undid the Civic Imagination of Everyday Donors.
Lately, I’ve been trying to work something out for myself and for the students in my social entrepreneurship course who are trying to understand not just how to build something that solves a big social problem, but also how to fund it. We all talk a lot about structure and sustainability; but the deeper I get into these conversations, the more I find myself circling a strange and slightly uncomfortable idea: that the way we’ve been taught to fund social change doesn’t actually line up with what social change is.
It’s taken me a while to come to that realization. Like most of us in this space, I jumped in with both feet, played along, and learned all the rules. But, when I step back and try to connect the dots between the nature of social change, the way people actually give, and what I’ve been reading in anarchist theory—yes, anarchist theory is where I’m at lately—it starts to feel like we’ve built a funding system that’s completely out of sync with the thing it’s supposed to support. For now, this is me thinking that through “out loud.” This is less a grand argument, and more a working essay.
When I first started working in this space, I thought social change was mostly about building better plans and then creating programs and systems to match those plans. I didn’t have the right language for it at the time; but I understood that when government failed, nonprofits were expected to step in. When the market ignored people, we’d be the ones to build a more ethical model. Social change, I assumed, was strategic and rational—something you could map out, fund properly, and scale.
But, over time, I started noticing that the most powerful, world-changing moments—the ones that actually move the needle in extraordinary ways—rarely play by those rules. They rarely even have a playbook to refer to. They weren’t especially measurable. And they didn’t start with funding. They started with frustration or care or someone deciding that waiting wasn’t an option anymore. Which makes me wonder: if social change is what happens when systems fail, then maybe it doesn’t want to be systematized. Maybe it’s less about control and more about refusal. That doesn’t mean it’s chaotic. But it might mean it’s harder to keep under wraps than we’d like to admit. This also means it’s messier—and a much more complex subject to teach in a classroom.
I’ve always paid close attention to how people give—not just philanthropists or big funders, but regular people in everyday life: a neighbor helping clean up after a storm, a friend dropping off groceries, a stranger covering someone’s bus fare without making a big deal of it. None of these moments fit easily into the kind of fundraising logic we teach. They don’t come with thank-you notes or tax receipts. But they feel real. And they seem to work—all the time and in all kinds of contexts.
It’s these kinds of observations that keep pulling me back to the gift—not as a transaction or a tool, but as something more relational; more intuitive; and, frankly, more resistant to being packaged in a neat and tidy box. When people give freely, there’s something deeply human about it. Yet so much of our sector is built around trying to structure, track, and optimize those impulses. I find myself asking over and over again: have we built systems to support generosity, or are these systems really designed to domesticate it? And maybe the harder question is are we afraid of the kind of social change the gift is actually capable of creating?
This is where anarchist thought started sneaking into my reading—not because I went looking for it, but because the people who seemed to be naming what I was seeing just happened to be writing from that tradition. Thinkers like David Graeber, Peter Kropotkin, and James C. Scott weren’t talking about Big Philanthropy or contemporary fundraising practices; but they were describing something very familiar: the way humans organize themselves without being told, the way mutual aid and voluntary cooperation emerge from the ground up, and the way centralized systems almost always misunderstand—or distort—that reality.
These thinkers helped me see that the gift doesn’t belong to capitalism; it predates it. Mutual aid isn’t just a moral choice; it’s a survival instinct. Top-down systems, even when they mean well, tend to erase the very complexity that makes grassroots communities work. And, once I started connecting those dots, I couldn’t unsee it: the gift, social change, and the moments that matter most in this work—none of them want to be predicted or controlled. They want to be trusted. Yet we keep behaving like we’re scared of what would happen if that’s how it all worked—if all we had to do was learn how to let go.
Once I started connecting the dots between how people actually give, how extraordinary change actually happens, and how humans organically organize themselves, the funding systems we rely on started to feel like a bad translation. The whole thing began to look less like a thoughtful response to injustice and more like an elaborate performance of order and control. Grantmaking cycles, donor scoring, even trust-based philanthropy all reflect an underlying need to predict and contain social change. Sorry folks, but that’s not how this works.
Honestly, I don’t think we built it this way out of malice. I think we inherited a set of assumptions: that money needs management, that generosity needs a dashboard, that trust can be earned with documentation. But, every time we add another hoop, another metric, another layer of vetting, we stand in the way of the gift and social change doing what they do best. We end up funding risk-avoidance instead of risk-taking. We reward planning instead of proximity. We say we want change, but our systems are built for preservation. And I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with those contradictions yet.
I’m not pretending I have all this figured out. If anything, that’s part of the problem—we’ve gotten addicted to certainty, to the belief that someone, somewhere, has it all mapped out. But I think it’s worth asking what would happen if we started with a different set of assumptions. What if we believed that people, when trusted, will act with care? What if we stopped treating unpredictability as a threat? What if we funded social change the same way it actually happens: relationally, locally, messily, and without asking for permission?
A freedom-centered ethic wouldn’t be frictionless. It might look more like mutual aid funds than program budgets. It would mean fewer applications and more conversations. It would almost definitely mean moving money faster and with fewer strings. I think about the times I’ve seen this happen—when someone moved resources because they knew the people involved, not because they had a report to justify it. It wasn’t scalable. But it worked. And maybe that’s the point: if the gift is about trust, and social change is about disruption, then the systems we build around them should at least try to make space for both.
This is the question I keep circling back to—not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a real, uncomfortable prompt I can’t shake. Do we actually believe in the kind of change we say we want? Do we believe in freedom, in trust, in community power? Because if we did, I think the way we fund social change would look different. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would at least reflect the values we keep putting in our mission statements.
Instead, I see a sector full of good people stuck in bad structures—people who believe in justice but inherit tools built for order and control. I don’t think we need to burn it all down. But I do think we need to name what doesn’t fit. And we need to make more room for the messier, more human forms of giving and organizing that are already happening quietly, constantly, and without waiting for permission. If the gift is free, and change is unruly, then maybe the most radical thing we can do is stop trying to contain them—and start learning how to follow their lead.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting Projects
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