Learning Club: Addressing Frustration Honestly to Build Trust

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Our monthly Learning Club sessions are invitations for staff and affiliates to gather, deepen our shared understanding of a topic, spark new ideas, and build alignment. Given the complexity of our work, we use this regular internal learning as an opportunity to experiment and shake up our thinking. 

We based our January Learning Club session around the final section of Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People—an anthology that documents the 50-year history of donor organizing and reminded us of the possibility to move from fear to shared purpose. As one staffer shared, “My head exploded six different times with lightbulb moments.” Entitled “Finding a New Way,” the final section centers on insights from field leaders on these challenging times and how to build forward.

The Button

The chapter that resonated most with our team came from an interview between Michael Gast and our affiliate Mijo Lee, “We Have This Big Red Shiny Button in Front of Us,” in which Mijo describes the tension between making an urgent fundraising ask in the immediate and delaying the ask in favor of developing a longer-term relationship. 

“The decision about whether or not to push that button is not actually a simple one. Obviously, if we’re thinking long term, big picture — don’t push the button. Right? We’re in it for the long haul. I want to invest in this person’s personal growth — but sometimes you do have real urgency… Maybe this is your one shot.” (p. 263). 

Some of us tied this idea to the detrimental boom-bust cycle of political giving, especially as we kick off our next Democracy Learning Community session. As midterm elections approach and global crises loom larger than ever before, donors are facing the urgency to give more now and the implications for future giving. But even at this potent moment, we need to work beyond reactive giving and build for the long term. 

To do this, we must go beyond encouraging donors on the best practices that promote progressive, liberatory philanthropy. Rather, we must partner to instill the organizing skills needed to effect real systems change, helping a donor to activate their capacity as a donor organizer. Once activated, a donor joins in the journey to shape the broader future of resource mobilization. Accumulating momentum in this way contributes to the longevity of our movement and builds for real, sustainable wins.

We asked ourselves, where are we not being quite as active from this organizing lens? How are we pushing this work forward as a personal, transformative journey from donor to organizer? One staffer shared, “If the best we can do is to make people really great donors, we haven’t pushed far enough.”

Organizing comes from a set of shared values and typically a shared set of demands, which we don’t yet have. Not only do we need a unifying vision that goes beyond reactive action to rally around, but we also need to continue to hold the complex feelings that arise through this work.

Listening to Build Trusting Relationships

We walk a path liable to infighting and debate because our movements are composed of and vitally embrace diverse experience and ways of knowing. On the other side of frustration and conflict, time and again, real change and progress are earned. The closing essay, “What’s Next?” by Rajasvini Bhansali called out our own listening skills as we seek to build relationships that hold people with trust.

Rajasvini writes, “To move beyond the margins, we must be willing to listen. We need to see ALL people, including wealthy people, not as empty vessels but as agents of change already enacting their own version of transformation. We have something to learn from them.

“We often veer toward people we find easy to talk to — it’s comfortable to jam on ideas with like-minded folks. But if we’re going to adopt an organizer mindset, we must engage people who challenge or irritate us and support their transformation while learning from them.” (p. 305)

Rajasvini then explained how she once pushed against her instinct to jump in and tweak a donor’s line of thinking. Instead, by remaining grounded in her curiosity, she asked open-ended questions and listened as the donor talked herself out of her own argument. 

Although often uncomfortable, looking at our own prejudices is completely correct. As one staffer shared, “My desire to be right all the time is something I need to work on when working with folks who are diametrically opposed to me. 

When we give ourselves space to understand, extend grace, and hold the humanity of the people who are unwillingly or unknowingly doing harm to others, we can focus our efforts on dismantling the systems that are actively and knowingly doing harm. Through many conversations that plant seeds and mindsets rooted in curiosity, we develop relationships that meet people where they are and instill the skills and capacity to reflect and answer their own questions. 

Striking a Balance

In his essay “Jo Saunders,” Michael Gast writes about mentor Jo Saunders who held the humanity of all as central to her work as an owning-class organizer. Jo saw the hurt child within every adult, even those propelling the most egregious harms the world is experiencing.

“[Jo] always modeled for me what it means to not blame anyone, find the good in everyone, while being steadfast in a commitment to accountability, apology and repair.

“She knew how to love the person, and oppose any shitty actions that they might take. As she said many times, ‘Show me a monster, and I’ll show you a child with a broken heart.’ I think that captures such a fundamental lesson in this work and in the way we orient towards ourselves and other humans as believers in collective liberation.” (p. 296). 

This essay led us to speak frankly about how we funnel anger without projecting personal frustrations around wealth inequality onto an individual. When one of our staffers came into this work five years ago, she was advised, “You can’t come into this work hating rich people. If you want to shift perceptions, you can’t immediately hate a person for how they show up at this moment.” That conversation reminded her that, as humans, we all want solidarity, community, and connection. 

One staffer offered Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger,” in which she writes, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.”

In this vein of thinking, we imagined what could become possible when we’re able to be with anger in a way that truly honors the rage. We also wondered how staying with that uncomfortable feeling could allow us to move through and create a new field of choices in partnership with clients. 

We considered the ways in which currently we empower and challenge folks to venture out of their comfort zones while centering compassion. We spoke of our capacity to recognize wealthy folks as humans who are working through oppressive forces and toward mutual liberation while still holding them accountable for the repair of the harms from which they benefit. How have we been able to strike the right balance between accepting our human imperfections without insulating people from tender but necessary and exciting growth?

One key finding we’ve unearthed is that when a donor is able to recognize their role and what they can tangibly do, the moment takes on a more powerful, hopeful, and joyful tone. One solution is tackling financial illiteracy head on through budgeting. Ironically, wealth can insulate people from their own financial literacy. If you’ve always been able to afford everything, you don’t know, on a visceral level, if you have enough, which leads to a fear of lack untethered to reality. Budgeting takes a person from conceptual knowing to emotional knowing, which leads to informed, grounded action.

And some of the biggest transformational moments we’ve witnessed have been taking an imaginative journey that leads us back to reality. For instance, “What would you do if your parents gave you half of your inheritance in a charitable trust that had to be given away in 5-10 years?” Or “What if you had to increase your giving tenfold?”

As we relentlessly build a more equitable future and restore a more liveable planet, we are grateful for resources like Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People that offer honesty, solace, affirmation, and glimmering pieces of tangible hope that encourage us forward. As a team, this anthology calls for us to be bold and pour energy into our conversations around donor organizing. If we can be of service in stepping up your own giving or connecting you with resources, feel free to reach out, and we would be happy to make an introduction and assist on your journey.