The Social Sector Needs a Meta Movement

(Photo by iStock/ihsanyildizli)

Imagine a world where the social sector exercises the full measure of its power and influence, fueled by its more than 12 million employees and 64 million volunteers. Imagine people who are fighting for living wages, women’s rights, early childhood education, racial justice, and climate action locking arms and pushing for broad social and environmental progress. Imagine a movement of movements with a bold, integrated policy agenda that drives real progress toward a more healthy, sustainable, resilient, and equitable world—not in some utopian future, but in the next decade.

If we click the heels of our ruby slippers together, we can go to that place.

OK, it’s not quite that easy. But we already have what we need to make it happen: the people, organizational models, and money. All of us—nonprofits, activists, funders, capacity builders, and knowledge providers—need to summon the vision and willingness to reach beyond our current bounds. And then we need to just do it.

Right now, we’re living in a social sector version of the tragedy of the commons, with organizations and coalitions pursuing their goals in silos and advocating only for their own narrow band of policy prescriptions. This problem is deep and wide—it’s happening both within and across movements—and it draws down the power of the sector as a whole. It’s time—actually well past time—to apply tried-and-true templates for grassroots movement building to the entire social sector and create demand for public policy changes that will move the needle toward long-term shared prosperity.

This involves a shift in mindset—from seeing our organizations as doing one thing (“We advocate for people experiencing homelessness”) to seeing them as part of a bigger thing (“We’re engaged in a movement that advocates for social and environmental justice”). Much as layers of identities make up our whole selves, this shift stands to weave all the strands of activism and service into our sector’s self-conception. From there, we can build an advocacy network that connects currently disparate movements and aligns agendas in pursuit of common goals. This requires action in the following areas: ramping up support for grassroots initiatives; coalescing behind a common goals framework; and designing a network support system that has regional, statewide, national, and potentially global scale.

Fueling Grassroots Strength

Grassroots movements are the engine that drives societal and policy change. People who live, work, and play in individual communities are best poised to identify what needs to change in those communities. And building power for the social sector writ large is contingent on the public wielding its leverage over what government officials do and what policies they support. The “boots on the ground” nonprofit sector has known this for some time and has organized alongside community leaders to help residents advocate for themselves. Alongside is an important principle: Political forces or philanthropy can’t organize true grassroots movements; movements spring up spontaneously from communities’ pressing concerns.

The social issues communities identify, however, rarely yield to simple fixes; addressing them often requires significant policy innovation. This happens only when grassroots organizers have funding to support educating the broader public and policy makers about conditions that need to change. Yet philanthropy has drastically underfunded grassroots efforts. We don’t have comprehensive reporting on funding across issue areas, but the data we do have is illustrative: Just 3 percent of foundation funding for human rights ($102 million) went to grassroots organizing in 2017, according to a report published in 2020 by Candid and the Human Rights Funders Network. Only about 5 percent of environmental funding ($97 million) went to grassroots organizing in 2018, according to the Environmental Grantmakers Association. And despite a recent surge in support, philanthropy continues to underfund Black-led organizations. In a 2020 study, the nonprofit development organization Echoing Green looked at its highest-qualified fellowship applicants and found that Black-led organizations on average had 24 percent lower revenues than their white-led counterparts.

That said, some funders are beginning to see that just, equitable, and effective solutions grow from the grassroots, and have taken steps to address the silos within movements. For example, a large group of funders created The Fund for an Inclusive California in late 2017 to make grants, in consultation with community advisers, to grassroots organizations addressing long-term housing challenges. The CLIMA Fund, a partnership of four grant makers, aims to fill the gap for communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently launched the Voices for Health Justice Project to support grassroots organizations seeking health justice.

We need more efforts like these, and at higher funding levels. Just as important, we need new funding and initiatives that spur funder collaboration across issue areas.

Connecting Disparate Movements

When grassroots movements are strong, they can begin to make change. But imagine the impact if they had a better framework for seeing and speaking about how issues interconnect, and could easily use that framework as a platform for policy advocacy. What if environmental activists could clearly advocate for living wages as a way to combat climate change? What if health care advocates lobbied for early childhood education as a path to better long-term health? What if we all acted on the growing understanding that housing access and affordability is a racial justice issue?

Fortunately, we have a widely supported framework at hand: the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are ultimately about human rights, and to move a huge slate of human rights issues forward, we must recognize the ways they are intertwined. As the advocacy support program New Tactics in Human Rights puts it: “When combined with the human rights framework, intersectionality is a tool that helps us overcome the blind spots that occur in silos and forces us to understand how issues connect through the communities and peoples we serve.”

This process is about adding rather than subtracting. “Bringing movements into alignment with each other is not about making others fall into line, or replacing one vision with another,” writes the ecosystem builder Movement Strategy Center in its 2016 report “The Practices of Transformative Movements.” “It is about cultivating a bigger sense of ‘movement,’ recognizing and acting on connections that already exist. It is about cocreating a story of the future and inviting others to engage in advancing it.”

Everyone in the sector—from the grassroots organizer to the Washington lobbyist—has a role to play in getting out of their silos. If elected leaders at state or national levels hear enough of their constituents using the same connective language to talk about issues and demanding similar system-level changes, they will be forced to react. Not only is there strength in numbers, but also, by using our own knowledge of movement building, we can create a more powerful sector.

Building a Movement of Movements

The intersection of movements needs its own organization, designed—again—around strategies we know are effective in building grassroots movements. The SDG framework provides a conceptual foundation, but the connective tissue between movements won’t reveal themselves. We need a convening and networking hub to tie them together, bring everyone into conversation, provide a venue for mapping out the points where issues and analyses intersect, support mutually reinforcing policy agendas, and drive action.

To maximize its strength, effectiveness, and moral force, we should build this hub from the ground up based on three linked principles:

1. Anti-oppression: Rooting the network in an anti-racist and broadly anti-oppression practice is important to working intersectionally and potentially internationally. The hub should actively recognize and mitigate the oppressive effects of dominant cultures and power dynamics, striving to equalize that power imbalance internally and within the communities where network members work. The Center for Story-Based Strategy does a great job of articulating an anti-oppression foundation that could ground this work.

2. Grassroots leadership: Following directly from anti-oppression principles, grassroots leadership should infuse all aspects of the network’s operation. For example, a fellowship program could recruit leaders from local movements to drive the meta movement, bringing regional leaders together to develop a policy platform that can move a broad human rights agenda forward.

The network will need a coordinating team to provide a durable, functioning structure, but the team should focus on facilitation, not dictation. Similarly, long-term funding is essential, but funders should not direct the agenda; they should instead cede power as much as possible, committing support but relying on community-based advisers to choose fellows and initiatives. If we nurture the people communities already see as leaders, we’ll open a pipeline of leaders coming up behind them.

3. Network consciousness: Activists need to believe that engaging with the meta movement will make their own organizations and movements more powerful. Network members must see their work for justice as fundamentally linked to the larger movement and actively build relationships with other members. To encourage this, network leaders and resources should map clear connections that show how disparate organizations advocating for one significant policy change can move everyone’s agenda forward.

The network organization should do all the things no individual organization has the resources to do—such as create databases of grassroots organizations and policy platforms that address multiple SDGs, integrate communications resources, and aggregate research. Rather than merge movements into an undifferentiated mass, the goal should be to create a focused space where organizers and organizations can come together to define and push forward a slate of ambitious policy solutions that address intersecting needs.

Seize the Movement Moment

The social sector originated as a way to encourage wealthy white people to give alms to the desperate and ignored. It was not built to transfer power—just the opposite—and much of the sector remains rooted in that original mentality, with individual organizations trying to lift their communities while remaining stuck in starvation cycles that leave them unable to cover their costs.

We should shed that history and build an engine for making the social sector a primary power center in its own right. It is the only sector that can accept and combine government, corporate, and philanthropic funding, and use that money for public good. That gives it inherent power, but we’re not using it well. The silos we’ve created generate competition for grant dollars and produce disconnected strategies, reinforcing a structure that puts the entire sector in a supplicant position.

A meta movement could change that by building a sector-wide movement that supercharges the strategies of individual movements by leveraging our massive funding base and the strength of networks. Historically, social movements have surged through four stages, ending in either repression, co-optation, failure, or success. By connecting movements, we can drastically reduce the chances of the first three outcomes, and improve the odds of success for both individual movements and a shared agenda.

The next decade is crucial, with so many of our systems on the precipice of either positive reconstruction or catastrophic collapse. Governments are overwhelmed with bureaucracy and regime change, and the private sector has other priorities. We need to start investing time, creativity, energy, and money now in harnessing the currently dispersed power of the social sector to drive demand for the kinds of policy actions that can turn us away from the precipice.

Read more stories by Laura Deaton.