Happy Monday, everyone, or as happy as it can be given that it’s 2020 and we’re all likely in a computer simulation run by a sadistic toddler. An announcement before we begin today’s serious post: The Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) Slack community is growing and now has over 800 members. People are connecting to one another and starting to form local CCF groups across the world. So join, and I hope to see you there!
Speaking of CCF, since the launch of this movement last month, I’ve been getting requests to be on panels or write articles to defend the community-centric approach against folks who hold traditional donor-centered fundraising philosophies and practices. The framing is that there are two sides to this “debate,” with community-centrism being an uppity challenger to traditional practices so it is time to duke it out Mad Max Thunderdome-style (I may have exaggerated a little).
Sorry, I am not interested in these debates. There are no two sides. Traditional donor-centered approaches have revolved around the comfort of white donors and thus have been allowing them to avoid grappling with systemic injustice rooted in slavery, colonization, and capitalistic exploitation of the poor and marginalized that perpetuates wealth and power hoarding among rich mostly white people, which fuels many of the problems we’re trying to fix. Let’s not waste time with back-and-forth over whether that’s true. There is also no argument that this works to bring in funding. In fact, the issue is that it “works” TOO well. But just because something “works,” doesn’t mean it is the ethical thing to do. We need to collectively explore ways to evolve our fundraising practices to be more ethical.
What I am interested in is dissecting this bad habit that our sector has of “both-siding” injustice and the harm that this causes, the above issue being one example of it. What is both-siding? It’s the belief that there are equally valid perspectives to every issue and that they all deserve the same amount of time and attention. Unfortunately, this has had terrible consequences in our society. For example, the climate-change “debate.” Scientists are overwhelmingly in agreement on the issue, so to give any air time to those in denial is to give validity to fringe beliefs, and over the past several years this has caused untold destruction to our planet. Besides climate change, both-siding has led to the rise in anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, Covid-impact-minimizers, and violent white supremacists.
Both-siding happens because we think we’re being fair and intellectually curious and encouraging “diversity of perspectives,” etc. But many perspectives are awful and should never get any exposure. This is not to say we should no longer hear different sides or have rigorous debates. But those should be designed to engage with essential truths, not to argue about whether an overwhelmingly proven fact is valid or not. For instance, we can debate about how to respond to human-created climate change, NOT debate whether humans create climate change. We can argue about Kamala Harris’s records, NOT do what Newsweek did, which is give racists a platform to advance their birther conspiracy theory, in the name of “diverse perspectives.”
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