Love Letter to Philanthropy
This piece was originally published on Medium by Lorraine Ramirez, Executive Director of Funders for Justice and CHJL Cohort 3 alum. It is being shared here with permission from the author.
My Dearest Philanthropy,
I write to you on this Valentines Day, the anniversary of our twenty years together. We began as complete strangers to one another: Me, young queer Chicana just out of college, brand new in a big city, in search of a job that would pay the bills and be meaningful; and You, looking for someone to join the ranks of a growing powerhouse team, led by some of the wisest and most brilliant leaders in queer BIPOC organizing and fundraising in the country — the world, really. I was immediately all in.
At this milestone in our time together, these words run through my head, over and over: To organize your community, you must love your community.
Together, you and I have been to 22 states — nearly half this country. You have introduced me to some of the great loves of my life: mentors, chosen family, comrades, friends, heroes, and movements for queer and trans liberation and an end to state violence. You were there when I lost family members, when I got married last summer, and at my first movement heartbreak. Together, we dove in to support Black folks rising up in Ferguson, MO, and around the country, and have stayed in the fight for nearly a decade. And throughout all of this, we have mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars to grassroots BIPOC organizing for liberation.
While I might have started with a simple attachment, I have grown to love you with a fierceness that consumes my days: strategy, planning, org charts, and dreams for all of us to get free.
And when I say love, I mean love in the most radical way we can imagine. Love that challenges us to live to our biggest, fullest possibilities. Love that is big enough for us to push each other to new heights every year. And love that is strong enough to hold the inevitable tensions that arise. To move with steadfastness, clarity, and courage that will risk it all in service of liberation. But we gotta want it. Are you ready to risk it all — status, relationships, prestige, and the comfort of old ways — in the service of transformation?
I confess, I have at times, for brief moments, given up on us. I see you lose our way, repeating the same cycles over and over. Your deep discomfort, your annoyed displeasure, leads to great consequences for those you have professed your commitment to. Even this year, even today — still denying millions of dollars to communities who are rising up for justice. At times such as these, I am tempted to walk away. But I know this is the moment to double down on our dedication to each other.
We must emerge from this moment of deep tension, of yet another year of heartbreak after heartbreak, transformed. What will that transformation be?
My greatest vision for us is that we will learn together what it means to fully fund movements to end the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems (also known as the prison industrial complex). To fund in such a way that no one is in a cage because we were too afraid to get them free.
This vision is inclusive of so many interwoven movements: Black liberation, land back on this continent, education, workers’ rights, housing and community development, environmental justice, reparations, migrant rights, queer and trans rights, land justice around the world, and so many more. And while we have funded many of these movements, we do so while often shying away from the whole truth: The path that got us here and the pathway we are currently on is paved with criminalization, enslavement, genocide, colonization, and land theft. Therefore, if we want injustice to end, we must fund all of these movements. Movements to end crimmigration, end restrictions on housing access and policing of public housing residents, end surveillance of workers, end prisons as economic stimulation in rural places, end criminalization of trans people and queer people, end criminalization of protest — which hits Black and brown folks the hardest by far. We must stop funding systems of harm, and instead fund systems of care, and fund communities and movements to thrive. And we must directly and explicitly fund to end, in its entirety, the prison industrial complex.
All these things may seem overwhelming, and maybe uncomfortable to say aloud. But for change to be possible — true, deep, transformative change — we must start by being honest about the history and current state of this country and this sector. When things get uncomfortable, difficult, and scary, we must find a way through.
With that honesty, with that courage and clarity, tremendous new possibilities emerge. Let’s get there together.
With love,
Lorraine Ramirez
Title inspired by Love Letter to the Movement, by Sarah Jawaid & Damon Azali-Rojas. Open heart inspired by Coaching for Healing, Justice, and Liberation’s Liberatory Coaching Certificate Program, by comrades in movement and in philanthropy, and by a deep love for our sector.
About the Author: Lorraine is a queer Chicana who has worked for the last twenty years in social justice philanthropy in the areas of queer and trans liberation, racial justice, immigrant rights, gender justice, criminalization and state violence, and housing and the foreclosure crisis.
Lorraine previously worked at Neighborhood Funders Group, managing their housing and place-based funder organizing work in its earlier formation, and then as co-founder and director of Funders for Justice while it was a program of NFG. Prior to NFG, Lorraine was part of the US Programs team at the Open Society Foundations, as a member of the Equality and Opportunity Fund. She began her work in philanthropy with five years on the grantmaking team at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, across their international and US-based grant programs. She has trained, consulted, and partnered with a number of grassroots social justice community-based organizations across the US, in the areas of fundraising strategies, organizational development, safety and security practices, and coalition-building, always in service to queer and trans BIPOC organizing to build the world we need and to end the prison industrial complex.
Lorraine now serves as the executive director of Funders for Justice (FFJ), after co-founding FFJ with member leaders in September 2014. She recently served on the board of JustFund.us and of Kolibri Foundation. She has previously served on the board of the Audre Lorde Project, Queers for Economic Justice, and the Justice Committee, a people of color organization dedicated to building a movement against police violence and systemic racism in NYC. Lorraine has also served as a board member of the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), Trans Queer Pueblo, and Resource Generation; and as a member of the grants panel for the Mobilize Power Fund of Third Wave Fund. Lorraine holds a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Pomona College.