Upstream - [TEASER] Will the Revolution Be Funded? w/ Nairuti Shastry and Zac Chapman

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

This is a free preview of the episode "Will the Revolution Be Funded? w/ Nairuti Shastry and Zac Chapman." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. How do we resource the necessary work to dismantle capitalism and transition to a more democratic, just and regenerative economy—especially when capital will fight and/or co-opt any attempt to disrupt the status quo that they benefit from and when capital owns and controls most foundations and granting institutions?  This is the important and highly relevant question we will tackle today with our two guests Nairuti Shastry and Zac Chapman. Nairuti is a racial and economic justice researcher-practitioner and the Founder and Principal of Nuance, a social impact consulting firm, as well as a senior researcher at Beloved Economies.  Zac is the Resource Mobilization Director at the New Economy Coalition, a steering committee member of Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network, and board member of LittleSis. Together they recently wrote an article titled, “Will the Revolution be Funded?” published by The Forge.  In this conversation we explain why it is so hard to find funding to do anti-capitalist movement work and how we can find aligned funding both within and outside of mainstream philanthropy. We learn about ways that activists and organizations are working to fight against and transform the nonprofit industrial complex and the existing philanthropic culture and institutions. And finally, we ask what it truly means to resource the revolution and support ourselves beyond financial capital.  Further resources: Will the Revolution be Funded? Will the Revolution be Funded? Youtube event recording New Economy Coaltion Funding Library Post Capitalist Philanthropy New Report: Gilded Giving 2022, Institute for Policy Studies Funding Freedom: Philanthropy and the Palestinian Freedom Movement, Solidaire Sylvia Rivera Law Project Poder Emma Drivers Cooperative A Strategic Framework for a Just Transition, Movement Generation How we Contest for Power, Mijente Resource Generation What Organizers Need From Lawyers, Part 2: Help Build Deep Democracy, Convergence Mag The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex The Financial Activist Playbook, by Jasmine Rashid  Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World By Anand Giridharadas Related organizations: Sustainable Economies Law Center, Invest for Better, Slow Money Institute, NC3, Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, Transform Finance, The Next Egg Values aligned Wealth advisors and managers: Mission Driven Finance, FSL Public Finance, Chordata Capital, Mission Driven Finance, Adasina Social Capital   Related episodes: Post Capitalism w/ Alnoor Ladha A World Without Profit with Jennifer Hinton Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely could not do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public and build our movement. Thank you comrades. Hope you enjoy this conversation. ["The Way Philanthropic Institutions Work"]

The way philanthropic institutions operate is that they are only mandated by the federal government to pay out 5% of their endowment every single year. So what does that mean, right? If you're only paying out 5%, you have to be doing something else with that other 95% of the endowment, which I'm not the greatest at math, but that is bigger than 5%. So all of that other money is being invested in the stock market on Wall Street, in the very same industries that are causing all of these kind of symptoms of capitalism, including climate catastrophe, including racial injustice, increasing gun violence, increased militarism, right? They are investing in those same industries with the right hand, let's say,

and then using the left hand to provide grant making to address that very same crisis. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. How do we resource the necessary work to dismantle capitalism and transition to a more democratic, just and regenerative economy? Especially when capital will fight and or co-opt any attempt to disrupt the status quo that they benefit from, and when capital owns and controls most foundations and granting institutions?

This is the important and highly relevant question that we'll tackle today with our two guests, Nairudi Shastri and Zach Chapman. Nairudi is a racial and economic justice researcher practitioner and the founder and principal of Nuance, a social impact consulting firm. And Zach is the resource mobilization director at the New Economy Coalition, a steering

committee member of Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network and board member of Little Sis. Together they recently authored an article titled, Will the Revolution be Funded? published by The Forge. In this conversation, we explain why it's so hard to find funding to do anti-capitalist movement work, and how we can find aligned funding both within and outside of mainstream philanthropy. We learn about ways that activists and organizations are working to fight against and transform the nonprofit industrial complex and the existing philanthropic culture and institutions. And finally, we ask what it truly means to resource the revolution and support ourselves beyond financial capital.

And now, here's Della in conversation with Nirudhi Shastudi and Zach. So happy to have you on and what an important topic for all of us to be considering. So let's start with some introductions. I'd love for you both to introduce yourselves and particularly what is your relationship to our topic for the day. So nonprofits, movement organizing, and particularly funding. So, Niruti, would you like to go first? Yeah, thanks so much, Della, for inviting us and for having us. And yeah, I can share a little bit of context. So my name is Snairudi. I'm using she her pronouns today and calling in from Northern Virginia, where I actually grew up. And I would say that kind of course of my career really has been at

sort of the nexus of both racial and economic justice. I started my career working in the higher ed sphere. I was at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore really looking at how kind of de facto anchor institutions like universities, hospital systems, and philanthropic institutions really can shape the movement landscape in a particular place and can either enable or hinder it. And that was probably my first exposure to the world of kind of more progressive economics, but it wasn't until I started working with Beloved Economies, which was a national campaign really focusing on work and labor and its relationship to our broader economic system

that I got introduced to the principles and work of both solidarity economy and new or next economy. And one of the kind of key learnings from my own experience there was just the role that capital played in supporting groups and communities and organizations around the country really being able to transition out of our current economic system and build something new. And so that brings me to my current context and work where you know I'm working with Solidarity Economy movement organizations and groups and really trying to figure out, you know, what does a fully resourced landscape really look like for movement orgs? And,

you know, what are the different textures and flavors and infrastructure of capital that can really enable movement groups to supplant our existing economic systems instead of just sort of coexisting and crossing our fingers for a better future. So that's kind of the context from which I'm joining today. Thank you. And Zach, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah. Hey everyone, I'm Zach. I use he and they pronouns. I'm based out in Western Massachusetts, but I'm currently in the Chicago Teachers Union for the 2024 Worker Co-op Conference.

Hopefully we'll weave some more learnings in through that today. I am the Resource Mobilization Director over at New Economy Coalition. NEC is a membership-based network representing the solidarity economy movements in the US. So we have about 150 members, of which upstream is one. Shout out to you all that we organize into a more powerful voice through trainings, gatherings, narrative building, and practicing the collective governance of our resources. And that last one is the kind of the niche that I play at NEC.

So a lot of our campaigns, projects and programs programs come out of these autonomous member-led working groups. And so we have a working group that really focuses all on how our movement organizes our resources together. So we have a handful of different democratically controlled funds that have moved over a million dollars directly into the solidarity economy movement over the past handful of years. And we also are building out a handful of other types of campaigns, including a Solidarity Economy funding library as well. Thank you. Thank you both for that. And yes, so happy that Upstream is part of the movement, the New Economy Coalition movement,

as this umbrella org and getting to connect and resource and learn with and from one another. And I'll just share my own relationship to our topic for today as well. So yeah, Upstream, we're a fiscally sponsored project of a nonprofit. So we have applied for grants and received grants in the past, but we also have an LLC and the Patreon because of how difficult it has been to find grant funding to do the work that we're doing. And then I also co-founded a nonprofit, the California Donut Economics Coalition. We got our first year of funding and then we recently found out we're not renewed for

next year's funding. So this question, this topic is so alive for me. How do we resource ourselves and how do we do the work to supplant the current economic system as you mentioned? So thank you so much both for your work and for bringing this to us. So the two of you together co-wrote this epic article, Will the Revolution Be Funded? And I know it's part of other work, a larger work, including conferences and the Solidarity Funding Library. So there's many elements of this, but maybe we just start with funding for what, right? So it's will the revolution be funded?

So just to like orient us as like, what are we talking about funding? Let's clarify that, because I think that'll be helpful for them going into how could we fund that which we are working towards or seeking. So whoever would like to begin, but funding for what? What is your vision for the future

that you'd like to see projects, organizations, movements be funded for? Yeah, so not to belabor the point, but you know, the Zapatistas said, we're fighting for a world in which many worlds fit, right? And that's like the context upon which Nehru and I started working together was in the New Economy Coalition

in particular. So that being a movement that envisions our lives are no longer dominated or determined by capitalism or any other extractive system. And so we envision a world in which everyone has what they need, where people have collective agency and self-determination. And specifically, the way in which we organize, and this is a shift in our organizing structure over the past handful of years, is that we recognize that the ways in which we can build this solidarity economy movement

are through regional solidarity economy ecosystems and federating those and building those together. So what is this clunky term like regional solidarity, economy, ecosystem, loosely defined, it's regions that can be defined by watershed or by municipality, et cetera, in which housing, schools, food production,

local governance, healthcare are all controlled and governed by the people and led by those most marginalized by our current system of racialized capitalism. And so the solidarity economy movement isn't found in a single land project or a specific worker cooperative or public banking initiative or even like a single rad political ed podcast like Upstream, right? It's when we weave a tapestry of relationships, of cooperation, of strategy and base building together of all those things. So that's what

I would say is like when we're talking about what we're envisioning here, that's the nature of the analysis. And what I will say as well as for the nerds, because I know that this is a Patreon app and so just to get a little under the hood, our coalition really holds folks who are on the spectrum of coming from a more anarchist lineage, a more Marxist lineage, and those who are coming from more of like a progressivist lineage. And I did just want to share that as well of like, there are strategic distinctions between these different lineages, of course, but there are many ways in which the tactics of the Solidary Economy movement can really engage that wider tent. Yeah. And if I can just chime in, one element of what it is that we're funding for and hopefully

gets resourced is, as Zach was saying, right, is that, you know, coming from more of an economic development and community development background, it's not enough to just have resources for one little nonprofit over here on the side that's maybe a worker-owned cooperative or some other kind of democratic governance structure while your city or municipality is recruiting big firms like Amazon or in the case of Baltimore City where I used to live, Under Armour, while simultaneously having a rad bookstore like Red Emma's. And I think what I'm really interested in resourcing is how do we get these kind of smaller initiatives that are sometimes on the fringes or margins of a particular

municipality to scale and not in the sense of like, how do we have them, you know, get 10x times return, but how do we make sure that they're not just on the fringes, but really are again, supplanting our economic system to really kind of show us what does it mean to kind of manage our shared home, right? What does it mean to kind of collectively govern our economic system? So when I think about a movement that is fully resourced, fully funded, it's actually doing that work of transitioning our economies in ways that, again, like as Zach was speaking to, really are governed and are led by the most affected and most marginalized in today's context. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with

Nirudi Shastri and Zach Chapman. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month, but usually two or three. Our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Check out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast or at upstream podcast dot org forward slash support. Thank you.