Solidarity, Not Charity

By Jidan Koon, Diamond Walton, Chris Landry, Berhan Taye, and Sasha Costanza-Chock

Solidarity, not Charity
Key learnings and best practices for transformative grantmaking

What does it look like when grantmaking is shaped by the movements it’s meant to serve?

In our new report, Solidarity, Not Charity, we share what we’ve learned about how to responsibly fund systems change.

Even since our early days as a think tank researching economic democracy, we’ve understood that ideas without resources are not enough to change how our economy works. Economic democracy is the idea that we, the people, can and should decide how resources (like land, labor, infrastructure, or money) are used to meet our needs. Communities can make deliberate, informed decisions about shared resources, and when they do, the results are real improvements in people’s daily lives. The seeds of economic democracy are already sprouting everywhere, but how might we nurture those seeds towards widespread systems change?

Heeding the call from our partners that ideas without resources were not enough, in 2023 we began to resource the economic democracy ecosystem. By the end of 2028, so far we’ve committed to move $65 million in grants and mission-aligned investments toward this vision. To evolve our grantmaking strategy, we organized a series of listening sessions with leading-edge funders and philanthropy-serving organizations. We asked a simple question: what does it look like to responsibly fund systems change? This report, authored by Jidan Koon, Diamond Walton, Chris Landry, Berhan Taye, and Sasha Costanza-Chock, summarizes what we learned.

The learnings we share here are not exhaustive, nor are they a prescription for all funders. Rather, we provide a snapshot of an evolving field within which we are humbly finding our place. The full report includes six key learnings that now form the bedrock of our grantmaking approach, five transformative tools, and five leading-edge practices that are pushing the boundaries. You’ll also find an appendix with links to key resources from those who have been advancing this work since long before we arrived.

Among the key findings:

  • Listen to movement leaders. Transformative funders follow movement strategy rather than imposing their own theories of change.
  • Move power as well as money. Participatory grantmaking—where communities hold real decision-making authority—leads to more relevant funding.
  • Prioritize learning over evaluation. A learning orientation centers grantees as experts rather than positioning funders as judges.

These learnings are shaping our own evolution from traditional grantmaker toward participatory funder through our Horizon Fund, where grantee partners help govern resource allocation using our Common platform. We’re learning alongside others, not prescribing answers.

Read the full report to explore the research, or learn more about the Common platform to see how we’re putting these principles into practice.