Of Gentrification and Fundraising

We were sitting with a grassroots board last week that’s doing a yeoman’s job of addressing the ever-creeping specter of gentrification in their neighborhood. Hardly a neighborhood in New York where that’s not the case…

This group had actually done an excellent job of defining its values and welcoming those newcomers who shared its ideals into the fold. In fact, several had taken seats on the board and were eager to start a fundraising committee to raise unrestricted funds from their contacts. What’s not to like about that?

And yet…

There was a neon red flag, to mix metaphors, going on here.

First off, to relegate fundraising to the “new folks on the block” was to mimic the larger society’s denigration of the neighborhood as lacking in value. By setting up two classes – the old and the new – and assuming one had the capacity to raise funds and the other was too poor and too lacking to do so…well you can see why we saw that as a set-up for trouble.

Secondly, that fed into a growing segregation on the board, also of the old and the new, where the new delivered and the old talked. Yipes!

Third, by assigning the fundraising duties to the “gentrifiers,” the board was implicitly linking fundraising with “dirty money” – again, shedding the idea that everyone is responsible for the organization’s financial survival.

And finally, and most importantly, this entire organization was founded under the predicate that diversity – economic diversity, ethnic diversity, professional and class diversity – is what makes the neighborhood a wonderful New York pot of stew. Why couldn’t it fashion a board that acted that way as well?

And the fact is, it could.

The board asked two long-time members, fearless organizers from the old days, to serve on the fundraising committee, and appointed one as a co-chair. They brought in Cause Effective to do some board training and work with the fundraising committee to draft a multi-faceted board fundraising plan – this ensured that the whole board spoke the same language around fundraising and that no one was more privileged by their prior experience with fundraising.

Finally, the board devised a set of metrics for success that included factors such as number of new donors brought into the fold, range of donor backgrounds, and variety of solicitation strategies – so the prize didn’t simply go to the one whose asks raised the most immediate cash.

We learned an important lesson with this group, about gentrification and values and fundraising. And that is, that while fundraising can be associated with gentrification and all things bad – hey it’s about the power of money to make things happen, isn’t it? – that fundraising can actually be a tool, a magnifying glass, to integrate the best of the old and new.

And that fundraising can, indeed, be about values, when practiced in a mindful way.