The Master’s Tools: How Traditional Grantmaking Blocks Liberation

Liberatory philanthropy begins with a radical premise: the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde wrote these words in 1984, and they remain true today, with philanthropy serving as a clear illustration of how oppressive systems offer their own tools, presented as solutions.

When millions took to the streets in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder, they instinctively understood what Lorde meant: you cannot use the oppressor’s methods to achieve liberation. Many didn’t bother with strategic plans or funding applications. They organized bail funds, created mutual aid networks, and demanded abolition all outside the institutional frameworks designed to manage and neutralize their uprising.

Despite facing constant attacks from the Trump administration, immigrant communities don’t wait for funding to act. For example, Rapid response networks across California, including the North Bay Rapid Response Network (707-800-4544) and Sacramento’s network (916-245-6773), provide immediate legal observation and accompaniment services.

Farmworker organizations reported a tenfold increase in seeking know-your-rights workshops as communities organize guardianship plans and rapid response protocols outside traditional nonprofit structures.

Reproductive health rights continue to be threatened. Yet, networks like Plan C, which uses a grassroots approach to provide direct information about accessing abortion pills by mail, and the Auntie Network, a volunteer network offering travel assistance and support, both operate independently of mainstream strategies.

When climate activists face a crisis, the most urgent action often comes from organizers like those who shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and recent pipeline blockades by water protectors, such as Mylene Vialard, rather than from environmental nonprofits with million-dollar budgets and foundation-approved campaigns.

The sector exists to convince communities that liberation can be achieved only through the “proper channels” and by crafting the right messaging or impressing the right program officer. This is the deepest harm of grantmaking: asking communities to use the same tools that uphold their oppression to achieve their freedom. But as Lorde knew, and as communities prove every day, real liberation has always come from communities using their own tools, building their own strategies, and refusing to ask permission from the very systems they seek to transform.

When Strategy Becomes Subjugation

When organizers find themselves in meetings with funders, they must navigate the complex terrain of balancing a radical vision with the need to translate it into language that won’t jeopardize the funding. These are embodied challenges that accumulate over time.

As Resmaa Menakem notes in My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts, “the body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us.” When organizers repeatedly find themselves in rooms where their lived experiences are questioned, where their strategies are critiqued by people who’ve never faced police violence, or threats to deportation, or being stripped of their bodily autonomy, where they must perform gratitude for resources that come with strings attached, their nervous systems respond accordingly.

The folks on the ground and on the frontlines are tired, finding themselves caught between the urgent need for resources and the unfortunate requirement to compromise their liberatory futures, which are often co-opted by institutions designed to preserve the status quo.

Building Outside the System

This embodied understanding of philanthropy’s harm is driving organizers to reject traditional structures entirely. This rejection is happening across the movement space. INCITE! organizers documented this shift after losing Ford Foundation funding due to their solidarity for Palestine, saying, “...we learned on one hand that foundations can indeed control your organizing, and on the other hand, there are other ways to resource movements when we think outside the foundation universe.”

Sista II Sista decided to return to all-volunteer status after choosing to stop pursuing foundation grants in favor of continuing their work against war and police brutality, which some foundations found distasteful or “unfundable.” Its organizers gradually acknowledged the drain of their human resources from grant writing and reports, noting “the rejections, the waiting, and the constant explanations of our work to people who just didn’t get it, yet greatly influenced its direction.”

Meanwhile, newer organizing models are emerging that bypass the need for nonprofit status altogether. Tenant organizing collectives, such as the LA Tenants Union, operate as an unincorporated association and have successfully fought evictions through direct action.

Community defense networks, like Copwatch groups, deliberately remain informal to avoid state oversight while monitoring police activity, with organizations across North America, Europe, and Australia.

Food justice groups, such as Mutual Aid NYC, operate as community-based food distribution networks that distribute food through horizontal resource sharing and function outside of traditional nonprofit funding models.

These models reflect what organizers call cooperative economy approaches, which emphasize economic models based on shared ownership, democratic decision-making, and mutual benefit, prioritizing community wealth-building and meeting human needs over profit.

This shift toward community-controlled resources directly challenges the inherent power imbalances of philanthropy. As Armando Zumaya said in a LinkedIn comment: “...philanthropy ignores us. When our members at Somos told us that funders were retreating from funding them, it says it all. WE are our own funders. Rapidly improving fundraising is the solution. Getting foundations to give more is urgent, yes, but the strategic solution is fundraising from our own communities.”

Three Shifts Toward Liberation-Centered Grantmaking

The biggest contradiction of grantmaking is asking communities to seek liberation through structures that reinforce their continued marginalization. What if the process of grantmaking did a better job at building community power? Three fundamental shifts point toward a more liberatory approach:

Shift 1: From Capitalist Philanthropy to Liberatory Philanthropy

Imagine if grantmaking strategy sessions started with community members at the head of the table, not as tokenized advisors, but as decision-makers. Imagine if funders approached their role not as experts but as learners, ready to understand how their resources could best support community-led solutions.

Liberatory philanthropy begins with a radical premise: the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. This means funders must fundamentally restructure their strategic planning processes to center the voices of communities and what their vision of a better future looks like.

This shift requires funders to confront an uncomfortable truth: most of their strategic expertise is actually strategic ignorance. They’ve become experts at managing money, not at solving real-world injustices. Liberatory strategy demands that they step back and let communities lead.

As Mariame Kaba explains in her work with prison abolition organizing, “PIC abolition is a collective project. My personal desires and views are interesting to me, but abolition isn’t Mariame Kaba’s vision of the world. I want to engage with other people, to learn from their ideas to refine my own and to change my mind.” This principle should apply directly to grantmaking strategies. Real change emerges from collective wisdom, not individual expertise.

Shift 2: From Philanthropy as Control to Philanthropy as Catalyst

Instead of requiring organizations to conform to predetermined strategic frameworks, funders should provide resources and step back, trusting communities to navigate their own paths toward liberation.

Some foundations, including the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and the Marguerite Casey Foundation, are beginning to model this approach. Rather than funding specific programs or outcomes, they provide general support to grassroots organizations, understanding that the most transformative strategies often emerge from day-to-day organizing work rather than ivory-tower strategizing that’s completely detached from the lived realities of the communities they aim to serve.

This shift requires funders to release their addiction to control and embrace what adrienne maree brown calls “emergent strategy,” which is the understanding that complex systems change through many small actions and relationships, not through top-down strategic interventions.

The alternative is what we are currently witnessing more of: mutual aid networks operating without 501(c)(3) status, grassroots collectives rejecting funding entirely, and movements opting for decentralized structures over traditional nonprofit models.

Shift 3: From Grant Cycles to Relationship Building

The most radical shift may be the simplest: funding relationships, not just programs.

Traditional grant cycles create artificial urgency and scarcity, forcing organizations to compete against each other for limited resources while constantly proving their worthiness to funders. This transactional approach pits movements against each other, rather than fostering collective power.

Relationship-based funding looks entirely different. It means funders investing time to understand community context, building trust over years rather than months, and providing support that strengthens entire ecosystems rather than individual organizations.

While many organizations reject traditional nonprofit constraints in favor of more fluid, community-accountable structures, the funding landscape is beginning to shift. Some funders, such as the Oak Foundation and Ashoka’s fellowship for social entrepreneurs, are demonstrating a new way forward by providing long-term, flexible support for organizing work. This approach recognizes that real change happens through people and relationships rather than projects and deliverables.

Healing in Real Time

These shifts create space for entirely different ways of working together. They call for strategy sessions where community members outnumber funder staff three to one. It means agendas built around questions that communities want to explore, not outcomes a funder seeks to achieve. Instead of PowerPoint presentations, there are storytelling circles. Instead of logic models, there are dreams and visions.

This approach takes longer than traditional grantmaking cycles. It’s arbitrary and harder to quantify. However, it yields something deeper: strategies that genuinely belong to the communities they’re intended to serve.

Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network have practiced this, organizing through traditional governance structures and indigenous knowledge systems rather than conforming to (Western) strategic planning models imposed by funders.

The Nervous System of Liberation

The shift toward liberatory philanthropy is about healing the collective nervous system of social justice movements. When grantmaking shifts from perpetuating harm through top-down approaches to supporting community-led healing and power-building, it reduces the reinforcement of existing trauma to cultivating the greatest strengths of communities.

Instead of organizations burning out their staff by trying to meet nearly impossible funder expectations and competing for resources, communities can have the space to truly build liberatory futures grounded in abundance, interdependence, and new forms of power-sharing. Strategy should emerge from the wisdom of communities, creating social change that happens at the speed of trust rather than the speed of grant cycles.

“Trauma is not what happens to you,” explains Dr. Gabor Maté, an expert on trauma, addiction, stress, and childhood development. “Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” For too long, philanthropy has perpetuated trauma within the same communities it claims to serve. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The body truly does keep the score. However, the body also knows how to heal, provided the right conditions are met. Grantmaking strategies could be one of those conditions if we dare to transform it from a tool of subjugation into a practice of liberation.

Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

The solution isn’t to reform this system; it’s to build entirely new alternatives. As Dean Spade, lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law, explains, “mutual aid cultivates the practices and structures that move us toward our goal: a society organized by collective self-determination, where people get a say in all parts of their lives rather than just facing the coercive non-choice between sinking or swimming.”

This is why the most transformative organizing often happens outside of traditional nonprofit structures. It’s why groups deliberately choose to remain unincorporated, why movements reject traditional funding streams that come with political strings attached, and why communities are developing new models of resource sharing that don’t require proving worthiness to the wealthy.

As Sidra Morgan-Montoya, a Portland-based artist and writer, expressed: “The nonprofit industrial complex blocks us from doing our work. It incentivizes top-down approaches to inequity, imposing the agenda of the wealthy onto the way nonprofits work, which nonprofits in turn impose through our engagement with communities.”

Audre Lorde was right. We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. What we need now is the courage to build on that power, to stop trying to perfect systems designed to exclude those that are marginalized and instead create entirely new models rooted in shared power, deep connection, and revolutionary imagination.

Communities are capable of developing more effective solutions for themselves. The question is whether funders can relinquish control long enough to discover what becomes possible when strategy serves liberation rather than control. And many funders are already demonstrating these possibilities to us.

Our history of resistance has never waited for legitimacy from institutions that profit from our oppression. It’s time for philanthropy to catch up to what movement builders have always known: liberation cannot be granted. It must be built, with communities leading the way.

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