•	Grantmaking Philosophy
•	Excerpts: Funding Social Movements and A New Look at Intermediaries

Our vision has clear ideals: democracy and justice, peace and freedom, liberty and equality, solidarity and community, … respect for each other, respect for nature and the earth.

We believe in an essential truth of progressive social change: that the people who suffer injustice are crucial to overcoming it.

There are few ways to act on a scale commensurate with government and corporate power – to act locally and globally at the same time, to move regions, states, or nations – except through inclusive social movements that grow independently of the prevailing order.

Some movement methods are rooted in direct action and civil disobedience, some are electorally focused, some rely on ethical teachings; some movement goals seek a pivotal governance or constitutional shift, some move a social policy platform, some re-invent cultural norms – and many movements mix most of these approaches over their life cycle.

While the movement building process has never been very neat or simple, we have identified four distinct stages that help us evaluate movement development and the tasks at hand: building infrastructure, building identity and intention, achieving social combustion the movement moment, and consolidation or dissipation.

There are certainly easier ways than movement organizing to get a seat at the tables of power, but not if the goal is turning the tables – changing the purposes of power and empowering the people to hold it.

Successful social movements need global dimensions, not only to confront the problems, but also to envision the solutions.

The logic of deploying intermediaries is compelling. There is a large gap to bridge between established national funders and emerging social action … But how do we choose? Whose institutional capacity does intermediary grantmaking build? How do groups on the frontlines hold autonomous intermediaries accountable?

If we evaluate the past twenty years of social policy and civic participation in this country, we would have to say that we need intermediaries that more fully meet the tests of political empowerment.

The distinctive common characteristic of the new intermediaries is that they consciously integrate the intermediary roles of policy development and regional networking, with the infrastructure tasks of grassroots organizing, leadership development, and community empowerment.

As the old divisions between intermediary and base-building roles is transcended, the old tension between national and local organizations seems less inevitable … Through collaborative peer-based intermediaries, community-based work can grow to the state and regional scale.

Social structures that promote democracy and justice cannot be engineered, or delivered, they must be practiced.