Old Money New System: An Invitation to Ask and Explore Challenging Questions
Old Money New System Online Platform
State-sanctioned violence against Black bodies has already become increasingly publicized. The current uprisings and multigenerational unrest are fundamentally transforming our collective focus. We have seen corporations and philanthropic institutions pivot quickly to exercise, with urgency and determination, the full potential of their resources. We have also seen foundations and enterprises put forth statements in defense of Black life and encourage acutely vague sentiments to listen to black voices’ and act with an anti-racist lens’.
The conditions of the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to impact daily life in the United States in unquantifiable ways, have cultivated an endless stream of propaganda that has invoked a deep moral compass in some to begin to act in the best interest of all Americans. However, the chaos has also raised vital questions about the intersection of these historical power structures and emerging actors, definitions and visions of true abolition and liberation, and who actually is committed to the longevity of this journey to achieve it.
We invite you to join Old Money, New System’s, online platform for a community of practice that challenges the nonprofit industrial complex and its delusional inner workings of white neoliberal patriarchy and capitalism. It includes workshops, collective learning and new ideas that explore messy questions and generate renewed approaches and grounded strategies on how to practice multi-class solidarity in philanthropy. Old Money New System is a network of resource mobilizers, movement practitioners, grant-makers, impact investors, asset owners, activists, organizers, culture bearers engaged in building shared, evolving liberatory frameworks.
Co-create with us to:
Generate and sustain power shifting momentum
Deepen analysis on the intersection of racial equity, capitalism, and philanthropy
Build political imagination, transformative action, and reflection
Position these reflections in a tangible context within and beyond the nonprofit industrial complex continuum
Background
This platform grew out of the work of Movement NetLab’s Resource Working Group (on decentralized participatory wealth redistribution in local movement ecosystems) with Allen Kwabena Frimpong, June Holley, and of former board member the Group, Mike Haber (and his work in creating standards of accountability for private foundations), Intelligent Mischief, Mary Joyce, and Abraham Lateiner. As a network of resource mobilizers, movement practitioners, grant-makers, impact investors, asset owners, activists, organizers, and cultural alchemists, over the past four years we have organized around critical questions about the nonprofit industrial complex and its capacity to support transformation within and across our movements.
Old Money New System aims to create:
Decentralization of participatory grant-making in local movement ecosystems
Community-led & controlled transition into efforts that directly support communities marginalized by racism
Shift priorities from capitalist-informed to community-centered
An expanded scope of possibility and agency
How it works
Topics:
Individualism & Becoming Self-Made: A Paradox
Self-Preservation, Sufficiency, & the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Stages of Economic Changes: Choice Points & Re-Entrenchment
Philanthropic Accountability: Grant-making, Impact Investing, Capacity Building
Disruptions of Capitalism and Wealth: Support Strategies that Integrate Defense AND Offense
Plantation Politics in Philanthropy: What Would it Look Like to Either Hospice and/or Leave the Plantation all Together?
...and more!
The structure of each topic:
Explore frameworks, backgrounds and analysis using collaborative and sequential online discussions and written pieces;
Use storytelling and virtual interviews to ground and spotlight concrete approaches/models
Generate a practice of genuine solidarity throughout all workshops and co-created learning
The time is now
A declaration for alternative approaches to redistribute wealth for resourcing community-driven grassroots work is growing louder. Choosing to act because it’s “right” or “politically safe” will continue to challenge the movements ahead of us. There must be a reconciliation. We can no longer tolerate neoliberal white fragility, class entitlement and privilege in our philanthropic work, movements and lives. Old Money, New System will not hesitate to name complicity where it stands or reject mediocrity for what it truly is. Our partnership with the #DisruptPhilanthropyNOW! Blog and the Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practictioners (WRAP) will reflect this.
Alternative funding and investment initiatives in our sector that are some examples of the new systems we deserve in philanthropy: Buen Vivir Fund, Resist Foundation, Solidaire, Boston Ujima Fund, The Cypress Fund, Cllctivly, Camelback Ventures, The Giving Project, Emergent Fund, The Kindle Project, Washington Area Community Investment Fund, Transforming Power Fund, Seed Commons, The Weavers Fellowship, & Fund for Democratic Communities that recently sunsetted, signal that progressive practice in the philanthropic sector is evolving.
Through our partnerships, Old Money New System is a network for reframing how we work towards connecting and cultivating communities of care and solidarity at the interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. Our journey is as much about the foundational underpinnings that define our relationships and reconfigure our connections as much as it is about achieving our bold visions for economic democracy.
A closing thought. Consideration must be held for how capitalist systems and markets drive economic behaviors that support narratives, especially on initiatives such as this, in the replication, further complication, or derailment of existing complex social change processes. Our goal here is to invite others into knowing that this space is aligned, accessible and open-sourced.
If we truly aim to achieve these goals, no tax status, private foundation or self-identified progressive knowledge producing organization can be exempt. We must hold space to move through messy and complex paradoxes that call us to grapple with what we think we understand. We must ask: What does it actually look like to win, for real? We welcome you to be in this question with us.