“What would it look like to reclaim the power of the individual and turn our supporters into true co-conspirators in our work?”
This was one of the many questions our Development team asked ourselves as we witnessed other nonprofits halt their operations due to federal funding cuts or sudden grant revocations. This emergence in the philanthropic landscape felt all too familiar.
2020 was a contemporary revelation that traditional philanthropy was never designed to transfer power or disrupt the conditions of inequity. It is a system of wealth accumulation that creates a dependency pattern for organizations in need of resources. 2025, therefore, wasn’t just another year of crisis. It was a clarifying moment that highlighted the necessity of deepening our engagement with those who depend on our work and implementing alternative models of resourcing our movement.
Grounded in the belief that “we sustain us”, we had long taken our cues from the movement of community-centric fundraising to push our thinking beyond the transactional and towards the relational. We laid this groundwork when transitioning the one-time crisis donors we gained during the uprisings of 2020 into long-term supporters via our Freedom Dream Sustainers program, but we knew there was more to build. The question was: how?
Donor Organizing Means Adaptability
The answer began to take shape at the 2024 Stories + Money = Change conference in Detroit. Our team led a workshop on our approach to sustained giving programs following the decline in racial justice funding after the murder of George Floyd. It was at this conference that our Director of Development Regina attended a session led by Haley Bash, founder of the Donor Organizer Hub.
Bash walked participants through the fundamentals and process of building a donor organizing pilot and ignited a solution to our curiosities. In Haley’s words, donor organizing is the practice of “sharing resources and our commitment to each other to achieve collective liberation.” Further, she affirmed that it is a well-demonstrated model to train everyday people to raise money for social movements, dispelling the myth that only wealthy philanthropists can do this work. The Donor Organizing Hub presentation revealed that the vision for collective action from the ground up is possible and the framework already existed. Yet, in order to execute such a practice, we’d have to locate more internal capacity on our team.
At the end of 2024, DJC was selected for the second consecutive year to participate in the Morgridge Family Foundation’s Morgridge Acceleration Program (MAP). This opportunity was the missing piece that completed our individual giving puzzle: through the program, we were able to onboard a Detroit-based Development professional as our MAP fellow and re-engage with Haley Bash of the Donor Organizing Hub to design a roadmap for launching an inaugural donor organizing program.
MAP gave us the capacity to experiment with engaging community members as key actors in our mission’s sustainability, while also supporting a local partner equally committed to improving the lives of Detroiters. Our team hit the ground running with our MAP fellow by conducting research on prospective donors to recruit for our pilot, creating a timeline between the pilot’s launch and the day-long fundraising drive that would conclude the program, and developing political education sessions to anchor the curriculum. Black August was identified as the most fitting time to launch the pilot as it embodies the spirit of mobilization we sought to bring to our resource community. We were well on our way, and then suddenly, new challenges emerged.
Just as we were hitting our stride, our MAP fellow was no longer able to participate in the program for reasons beyond their control. Returning us back to square one, we had a choice: either shelve the project entirely or pivot with the unknown. We chose the latter.
If there’s anything this work has taught us, it’s that capacity constraints and shifting circumstances are part of the reality of nonprofit work, yet they can’t extinguish new ideas before they take root.
In our next post, we’ll pull back the curtain on how we moved forward with implementing the project and the lessons we learned along the way.