SPEAKER_01 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast with Rodney Games. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, Rodri Davis, and this week we are in conversation with Farai Chidea. Now, Farai is an academic and a journalist and a writer who has done work uh all uh over the place in politics and philanthropy and civil society. Um she has in the past worked for lots of uh well-known uh media outlets, including 538, ABC News, MPR, uh, and many, many others. Um, she's also previously worked in the philanthropy space um at the Ford Foundation, working on their journalism program, um, and more recently has done um writing and thinking about the role of civil society in the intersection with politics. Um and particularly um quite recently at the start of this year, she was one of the lead authors of a report that was put out by Bridgebon Group um on philanthropy for a multiracial democracy, uh, how investing in pluralism can open the aperture for democracy funders. Um, and uh I was lucky enough to be put in touch with Farai. Um, someone got in touch because I think they'd heard uh the previous episode of the podcast that we'd done with Daniel Stid talking about pluralism um in uh in the US and the role of Flint P in sort of supporting pluralism and pluralism within Flunt P and thought this might make for an interesting follow-up, and indeed it did. And so I sat down not long ago to talk to uh Fry about the report and what's in it, and we discussed you know what it means to build a genuinely multiracial um pluralist society, kind of why that's important as an ideal and what barriers and threats there are at the moment that prevent it being uh realized. Um we talked about um what it means to have a particular view, sort of positive view of pluralism, and particularly the importance of it being uh multiracial and inclusive rather than just sort of assuming that pluralism will happen by itself. Um we talked quite a bit about what that means in practical terms, because that's a lot of the focus of the Bridge Ban report, um, in terms of how funders can go about trying to achieve that, um, both sort of democracy funders, those that position themselves as interested in those issues, and funders more broadly. And we talked about things like um the value of focusing at a local level, because often that's where a lot of the kind of grassroots action is happening. And and also I think really interestingly, it's it's the place where it's perhaps most easy to bring people together across divides, which is obviously kind of increasingly different, uh difficult in a polarized society, but actually at a local level, people still often have to kind of come together despite their differences. And so if you start from that point, sometimes you can get further than if you try and address things um at a national level first. We also talked about some of the opportunities and challenges for foundations when it comes to funding grassroots organizations and social movements, um, and things like the importance of funding core costs uh and being willing to take a certain level of risk in funding organizations that might uh take approaches that are slightly more uh kind of combative than your own as a funder. We also talked a bit about the success of conservative philanthropy and sort of um uh growing the space that has allowed the political pendulum in the US to shift over the last 40 years and what lessons progressive funders potentially could learn from that. And we also talked about some of the current challenges that the nonprofit sector is facing in the US as a result of the uh executive orders and policies being implemented by the second Trump administration and what the choices are and what the challenges are for funders and for civil society organizations in trying to think through what they should do about some of those. Um so without further ado, let's go into the conversation. I think it's you know a really uh timely and important one. I think this issue around democracy and pluralism and the role of philanthropy is getting more and more acute by the day, certainly with a view to what's going on in the US, but I think also you know that raises the same questions elsewhere. So I think it's been really good to have another opportunity to explore this issue, and I hope you will really enjoy the conversation. And I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Farai Chudea. Hi there, Farai. Hi, Rodri. Well, really great to have you on the podcast. Uh, and as anybody who's listened to the intro will know, you are a journalist, an academic, a speaker, and an author of many things, uh, including the particular thing that's kind of the starting point for this conversation, which is a recent paper that you worked on with Bridgeband Group and a number of other co-authors, um, looking at the idea of uh philanthropy's role in creating a multiracial democracy. Um so maybe the best place to start is if you could just say a bit about how that piece of work came about and what some of the kind of key findings and ideas in the paper were.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah, thank you. Um I think that it it was really a process of looking for best practices. So, first of all, doing a landscape of how funders can contribute to pro-democracy efforts. And the phrase I I deliberately used the phrase pro-democracy because um being an American, very often Americans have used pro-democracy as something that happens other places. And right now we're in a bit of a tight spot with democracy, so we have to think very much along the lines of having pro-democracy actions and funding streams for the United States. And so it looked at specifically how you foster multiracial democracy. American democracy, of course, was funded to uh empower white land-owning men. So not women, not black people, not indigenous people, um, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And really the evolution of a multiracial democracy continues to this day, but certainly on a basic legal level, the last major court case that determined that America would be a multiracial democracy happened in 1972, and it was about um voting access for indigenous Americans, you know. And so we're a relatively young democracy in some senses. You know, a truly multiracial democracy is something that we haven't had for even a century. And how do we foster that? So we were looking um specifically from the standpoint of where money flows to democracy and how funders can contribute to that, but also what organizations are playing a role. And we can talk more about that, but we really did a lot of profiles of organizations that were holding up the sky when it came to democracy.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah, absolutely. And there's loads I'd like to pick up on there. I guess taking the the last point there first, um are we talking sort of primarily about organizations that would see themselves as democracy funders, or is it also about what all funders can do to kind of factor in democracy as a lens to their funding?

SPEAKER_00 8:08

I think that it's both. You know, we we interviewed some donors who specifically were working on funding democracy, but I think that a lot of entities, both larger philanthropies and individual donors and donor collectives, don't have to be democracy-focused donor collectives. They just need to look around and see what the need is. And I think that um in terms of the organizations that we profiled, some of them are likely to bring in donors that are overwhelmingly focused on democracy, and others of them, for example, might be local community efforts, and maybe most of their funding is coming through a pipeline of having people look at um how they help a specific community. So there's a lot of different ways that people enter this space.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Yeah, and I notice one of the kind of themes that runs throughout the paper is um uh kind of an idea that too often when people talk about democracy building and the role of philanthropy, they immediately move to um a focus on elections, which is obviously a very important part of it, but you're kind of at pains in the paper to point out that it's by no means the whole story. Could you maybe say say a bit about why it's kind of important not to get too sort of single-minded in thinking about elections as the only part of democracy funding?

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Absolutely. I mean, the the reality is that democracy is an ecosystem. It's not a single action like voting. You you can't you can't create or uphold democracy by just holding up voting rights, as important as that is. So we talk to organizations that uh a lot of them work on the commons in one way or the other, whether it's a local commons or the national commons. And then one of the areas that I'm really fascinated by is narrative change. Narrative change has always been a part of, I think, of philanthropy and of civics. Uh, people didn't always call it that, but it's the way that cultural messages can be used to uplift, in this case, democracy or other social pillars. And so we talked to people like Bridget Antoinette Evans, who's the CEO of the Pop Culture Collaborative, uh, which is an organization that funds everyone from organizers like Igen Pooh, who works on caregiving, to comedians, um, to podcasters. And they have a broadly um pro-democracy, pro-civ focus. And it's it's work that might have been considered less important in the past uh or a little bit boutiquey. But I think now we realize that people get their information about how to engage civically, um, not primarily through news. You know, I think most people get it from either their local civic culture, what's happening in their neighborhoods, what's happening in their communities, or um from media that is not always news media. So in the course of this report, we discuss a number of different approaches, including narrative change, place-based work, um, democracy um wielding, which is, you know, um, once you get power, what do you do with it? So we enter through a number of different portals.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Yeah, and I mean it's really interesting. I really liked all of those aspects of it. I'm just picking up on what you said there about narrative um change, because I I agree. I think this is a sort of fascinating area, and I do think a growing number of funders are kind of waking up to that realisation that actually a carefully crafted piece of narrative work in the arts or in sort of popular culture can actually have significantly more impact than 10,000 policy reports. And I say that as somebody who's written policy reports myself in the past. Um, I I just what did you find in terms of what it might require in terms of a shift of approach or mindset from funders? Because it always strikes me that that kind of work doesn't necessarily always fit well with approaches that are very uh focused on a particular type of measurement or kind of attributing outcomes directly to interventions. Did the people you spoke to have anything to say about that?

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Yeah, I mean, most of the things that they talked about was that you can't have outcomes if you are funding, if you're in and out, meaning you drop a bunch of cash on an election and then you're like, don't bother me. Um, that you really see outcomes if you sign up for longer funding cycles and have more of a relationship to building that power. And so there are organizations, um, you know, pooled, there's a pooled fund called the California Donor Table, which is really spending time monitoring the evolution of power and democracy in California, and they can take those pooled funds and apply them consistently, you know, month over month, year over year, in order to achieve their goals. And they pointed out that they were able to make a number of changes in, you know, the government in San Diego, California. And I think that organizations like that are very good at acquiring funds and then redistributing them in a consistent way. But I think all of the organizations that we speak to, um, that we spoke to are interested in ways of having a consistent funding cycle and not just a one-off, because it's very hard to fund around a one-off.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess as well as that sort of consistency and slightly longer-term time horizon, I mean, one of the things you hear quite a lot in terms of debates at the moment about funding of social movements or grassroots organizations is that the the type of funding is important. Was were some of the people that you spoke to, I mean, did they also talk about things like the need for unrestricted funding or funding core costs, which it strikes me must be important?

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Yeah. People talked about unrestricted funding and also the funding mechanisms. So um the California donor table, which I mentioned, uses C3 funds, which the donors can get tax deductions for, C4 funds, which can be used for lobbying and which are not tax deductible, and also they use some of the funds to run an LLC, a limited liability corporation, where they create, they created a corporation to basically be a vendor to some of their grantees. So if their grantees needed uh help publishing things or technical assistance, they could go to this LLC and get uh low-cost services. So those are all different mechanisms and different donors, some donors may say, I only want to fund tax-deductible C3 work. But many of the organizations said that C4 money, um, which is less restricted, was actually more useful to them. So it's also about how the donors interact with the different mechanisms they can use to make change and what they expect for themselves, you know, whether it's a tax break or acknowledgement, or in some cases the opposite of acknowledgement, anonymity. Those are all different things people may want.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

And that's really interesting because you mentioned there the certainly in the US, the distinction between doing work through uh 501c3s, 501c4s, and potentially other models like LLCs. And one of the differences there, it strikes me, is you know, if you're funding through a 501c3 or more tightly bound by rules that prevent, you know, overtly quote unquote political um uh funding or or funding causes that are overtly political in nature. Is that one of the sort of bigger challenges for any work around funding democracy, which is that you these slightly kind of artificial boundaries that we have between things that are seen as kind of acceptable funding for democracy and things that stray over into being political? It's getting harder and harder to navigate that.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Yeah, I think that there's some new challenges with the second Trump administration, which is that J.D. Vance, in particular, the vice president, has hinted that he is going to go after philanthropic institutions, depending on what they fund. There's an idea of disbanding philanthropies that back terrorism, and in this case, it seems to be applying to, you know, Hamas, etc. But there's a much bigger agenda of potentially dismantling some of the tax deductions for doing philanthropy. So it's a very fraught time. Um I think a lot of people in philanthropy, I'm I'm actually at a conference that is philanthropy meets journalism, and there's a lot of concern about what might lie ahead in terms of potential government restrictions on philanthropic efforts.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Absolutely. Um, you know, as you say, an enormous amount of um kind of concern in the in the US nonprofit sector and and elsewhere beyond that, because I think what happens in the US has has kind of echoes and direct implications. Um I wondered what your sense was of that question that seems to be facing a lot of philanthropists and institutional funders at the moment of what to do given that that kind of that threat of increasing politicization and the fact that that um they might be kind of targeted um d uh directly. Do they essentially kind of dial down some of those efforts that might make them a target for that kind of criticism and try and you know work with the world as it is, or do they accept the risk and lean into it and just say, well, we're we are going to get criticized and we're not gonna stop what we're we're doing? What's your sense at the moment of how um uh organizations you're speaking to are kind of thinking about that?

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Yeah, I I think that um I spent four years as a grant maker for the Ford Foundation. And certainly, you know, we were asked to be very aware that we needed to be nonpartisan. Other groups like the Democracy Fund decided that they weren't going to be nonpartisan and that their business in the democracy space required them to essentially pick sides. And so different organizations take a different approach to this, and I think that will only intensify with the scrutiny on philanthropic organizations from the federal government. I think some, I think more philanthropic organizations may kind of pre-vet how their work is going to come off, how it's going to be seen by others, including seen by the government. And then I think others will just basically, as you mentioned, kind of lean into it and keep going in a direction that may be perceived as more ideological. So I I think that it's it's you're going to see different outcomes depending on the entity.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Um and I guess one of the other aspects to that is there's there's the sort of short-term reality for lots of organizations that they need to make decisions about whether to take a kind of uh slightly more antagonistic approach to the current administration. And then for some, there's also, I guess, the question of if they have a longer-term interest in the idea of fostering a healthy democracy, um, do they kind of um stay out of that in the short term because that will harm their interests in the longer term in fostering uh a kind of a healthier civic space and a more pluralistic civic space? Um, one of the things you talk about a lot in in the paper is about this idea of kind of building a pluralistic multiracial um democracy. Do you think that how do you think what's happening in the short term now with the second Trump administration is is going to affect those kind of efforts? Is it going to make it harder potentially to sort of talk about them in the short term?

SPEAKER_00 20:27

It's going to make it much harder to achieve the goals of pluralistic multiracial democracy. And pluralism, as we are using the term, really refers to having a civic space where people of different backgrounds each have a say in the government. So it's not about excluding conservatives or excluding white people or whatever. It's about acknowledging that a civic space, a healthy civic space that has a diverse group of people in it, should have diverse governance in terms of who holds power and the ability to synthesize an approach to governance that respects the ability of each person to access the gifts of a democracy. And I think what we're seeing, you know, I also have covered politics uh for more than a quarter of a century. So I saw some of this building. I covered, for example, the um 2016 election for the organization 538, and I uh covered voters in the field and spent a lot of time with Trump voters who were evangelicals and other ones who were in the rust belt. And they deserve to be a part of a pluralistic society. Like I think that having a pluralistic society by nature should respect the differences among different groups. But what we have now is a government that is essentially saying only certain people should be empowered. And that other people should be actively disempowered. The war on DEI that you see under the current Trump administration. I mean, DEI is just not that powerful. So the point of going after DEI is not to destroy, you know, a powerful, hydra-headed beast as they are indicating. It's to create a blame game. And I think we'll see a lot more of that, where aspects of anything that seems like it could be pluralistic is attacked, you know? And um, and again, organizations, both the organizations doing the work and the organizations that are funding are going to have to consider how they deal with these changes in how the federal government is operating.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And and I guess one of the challenges I w when talking to other people about this is always that um I think there are lots of people who buy into the ideal of pluralism, although not everybody, it has to be said. But even amongst those who do, I guess there's a sense that that actually the the way things are going currently makes it more challenging to get to that point when you're genuinely willing and and able to kind of engage with people who have sort of fundamentally different political views from you, because the spaces within which it's possible to do that are no longer there in many instances. And I noticed one of the things you wrote about in the report was the importance of focusing locally, because actually it's at that level often you can bring people together. Maybe you could say a bit about that, because I thought that was fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that you know, um, there's the the saying all politics is local. And I think it's not just politics, but all civics is local. Even when it's national, it's it's a bunch of local actions and attitudes that contribute to the national. But we talk to people like SERGE, which is an organization that um it's the it's an acronym for standing up for racial justice. And it specifically focuses on getting white Americans who may not be on the surface interested in partnering with people of color to examine whether they have common cause. So they will do things like, you know, caucus among um rural white southerners and ask them what's on their mind. And it turns out in one case that housing was on their mind and that they didn't like uh landlords that were predatory. Well, who else deals with predatory landlords? Lots of people, including black people in the city of Memphis. Um, so they brought rural white Americans from uh Tennessee together with urban black Americans in Tennessee to fight for a common cause. And I think that that's a great example of how local organizing can have, you know, a regional and statewide impact. Um and and you have to have a real sensitivity to culture. You don't want to go in and shame people like if you walk in someplace and you perceive that people may have a reluctance to find common cause with black people. You're not gonna be like, you should really like black people. You're gonna be like, well, you know, uh, do you want better housing or not? You know, sometimes you just have to get very tactical and not worry too much about um whether everyone not everyone has to be on the same page for nice and sweet reasons. Sometimes you're just on the same page because you have to be on the same page. So there's a lot of um organizing that really meets people where they are. And that's something that we focused on in a number of different uh circumstances.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. And in terms of the wider context, I mean, what's your sense of um well, first of all, you know, is the is the sense that it's become harder to do that and to find common cause amongst people who don't necessarily sort of in general have much you know much reason to agree with each other? You know, has that genuinely become more difficult? And if so, you know, why why is that? Is it that the some of the infrastructure at a local level has become eroded, those places that kind of peep bring people together physically and have those opportunities to sort of find commonalities? Or, you know, is it other things? Is it the influence of social media or or the way that political narratives have gone?

SPEAKER_00 26:30

I think it's the influence of media and social media is part of it. I mean, it's not just the influence of media, but I do think that one of the big factors is the influence of media, and actually television is probably the most significant factor in the media ecosystem. So national news tends to be much more partisan than local news. There are some exceptions, but when you look at people who have a television diet that's almost all national news, they tend to be more polarized than people who have more of a mix of local and national. And there's no re there's no question that the political polarization of national news is being done for profit. You know, it's more profitable to um preach to the choir if you're MSNBC or to um, you know, enervate the the viewers if you're Fox News. And it's it it makes it very problematic and very difficult to find a space where you can connect people from different backgrounds through the media. It's the media really has become overwhelmingly polarized. And yeah, so that's that's definitely one factor.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

And and in terms of of how you overcome that and particularly the role of fund people, we're talking about kind of the the benefits of trying to do things at a small scale local level. Is is there a challenge then that there's potentially a sort of gap between the scale and size of those kinds of projects that might genuinely have an impact on this problem and the scale of the sort of funding often that larger funders are operating? And that, you know, these kinds of projects might too often be sort of just basically flying under the radar because they're too small and too local in scale to get spotted.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

Yeah, there's there's a number of large-scale initiatives that have to do with journalism, with a pro-democracy bent. There's something called um press forward, for example. Um, and then there's national organizations of all types that work on politics. But I think that I think that there's still space that is needed to really resource organizations that, for example, might focus on national issues but do it from a local perspective. I think that those are very valuable because people really do want to be connected on a local level. And if you can reach them, so for example, let's say are you if you're dealing with reproductive justice, that's a national issue. But if you approach it locally from the healthcare resources for the local region, that's often more productive than than trying to just talk about the national picture.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I just wanted to circle back to the the question of pluralism as a as an ideal. And I guess you know, we've talked about it a bit as the idea of you know pluralism um at a societal level. There's a lot of debate at the moment about pluralism within philanthropy itself. And I just wanted to ask about kind of how you think those two things are related. Um, I mean, essentially, do you think that if we had um genuinely pluralistic philanthropy that kind of represented um uh you know all of the different possible uh views and values, that that would automatically result in the kind of pluralism that we want to within society? Or is there a danger of being a bit naive about that? Because in reality, you know, the the money skews towards one direction or another, and so we have to be a bit more active, perhaps?

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Yeah, I think that there are a lot of different factors that go into how philanthropic donors and funds and institutional philanthropy give out their money. Um, one criticism of institutional philanthropy is that during the um ramp-up of the first Trump administration, they were too both sides-y, you know, and didn't recognize the threat to democracy of some of what was happening. That is that is an open debate. Some people would say it's not our place to do work that seems to favor one political party or one side over the other. Other people, like I said, the Democracy Fund um decided not to be nonpartisan because they didn't want to be restricted in pursuing what they see as their values in uh upholding democracy. So I don't think philanthropy, I think philanthropy is pluralistic in some ways, but not in others. So for example, it's rare that you're gonna find people from truly low-income backgrounds in philanthropy. Um, philanthropy tends to be a space that is dominated by people with some societal and educational resources, not wealthy people, but highly educated, highly credentialed, etc. It's it's um on a larger scale, you don't see a lot of people who represent vulnerable communities who are in the philanthropic space. You may see that somewhat more on a local level, but I think that sometimes you miss things. Like if you have, you know, I went to an Ivy League school, and if you have a bunch of people from an Ivy League school uh who are all together trying to decide how to save the world, you can have some, you can have some challenges there.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Yeah, absolutely. Um it's really interesting because it's kind of the I guess there's a version of talking about pluralism philanthropy that that is presented as if it's you know what we need is a kind of laissez-faire approach, which is just you know, let let everybody do what whatever it is that they want to do, and then we'll get the result we want. Whereas I guess, you know, the the point there is actually given that there are these existing inequalities and barriers in society, no, we won't, and that we do actually have to take more active steps. Um, although going back to what we were saying before, I guess the deliberate targeting of the kind of ideas behind things like um DEI might make it harder to make arguments for that sort of targeted support for historically marginalized um communities at the moment, which might be a challenge for pluralism. Um I wanted to ask as well about when you were talking about democracy and the kind of funding of democracy initiatives through through philanthropy, and and that's partly about the kinds of things that get funded. But I wondered also about um whether the the way in which the funders themselves operate is relevant and whether there's any sense that to be a truly effective democracy funder, you need to look at yourself and try and make your own mechanisms more democratic, whether that's through kind of making them more accountable or whether it's by introducing sort of participatory methods. Um, had you seen any any funders kind of thinking about how they themselves do things uh as part of the picture?

SPEAKER_00 33:16

I I definitely do see um organizations thinking about how they operate. And, you know, this may or may not be useful, but it just comes to my mind that from what I've seen in philanthropy, during the run-up of the first Trump administration and the aftermath of the first Trump administration, um, philanthropy made more of an effort to reach out to Republicans and conservatives, but they often were reaching the most uh mainstream Republicans and conservatives who were not the ones most deeply in power, you know, sort of the the neocons as opposed to MAGA. And the question is if you are seeking to understand America, how much do you need to reach out across the ideological spectrum? Um I I think that that's also a that is very much open to debate. Some philanthropic organizations are going to want to keep feelers in a lot of different places in society, and other ones will decide, no, we know who we're serving, and we're just going to focus on their needs. So there's there's not one right answer. Um I personally favor at least knowing what's going on with a wide variety of people because that's that's how you really learn what's going on, but it doesn't mean that you have to serve everyone. Like a a philanthropy who's um really focusing on pluralistic multiracial democracy is not going to partner with or fund an organization that's part of the DEI witch hunt. It's just not going to happen. So um, I'm talking more about having an informational approach where you really do dig into understanding the way that society works and you know, where you can build bridges and where you can't.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

And yeah, that's I mean, absolutely I agree. And I think the idea sometimes people have the you know, acceptance of pluralism ideal means that you just have to agree with everybody and get on nicely and work with them is you know, that that's not the reality of it. I guess it's kind of respecting the the ability, you know, the right of others who might fundamentally disagree with and hold different values still to kind of exist. I guess that leads me to a question about, I mean, pluralism a whole, but particularly I'm interested in the context of philanthropy, which is it feels as though one of the challenges at the moment is that people's willingness to accept those boundaries around pluralism feel as though they're being tested. So, in the example you give there of, you know, a progressive funder or foundation, obviously they you know they won't necessarily want to work with a uh another type of foundation or a donor that's part of the DEI uh witch hunt that's going on. But do they, as part of that sort of ideal of pluralism, accept that they have a right to exist within the kind of broad tent of philanthropy or civil society? Or actually, does there come a point where you say, no, I don't think that is okay, I don't think that is a legitimate form of philanthropy? Because it feels like that that is the the kind of the crux of the question, really. What what's your sense of that? Do you have to kind of live with that discomfort if you're going to genuinely accept pluralism?

SPEAKER_00 36:32

I think so. You know, I I think that pluralism pluralism can be very joyous and um generative, and it can also be scary. You know, um I I often say that I would rather um have a democracy where neo-Nazis can participate than one where I pretend that there are no neo-Nazis. You know, I would rather stand up with the strength of the vote and the strength of culture. I've I spent um many years covering uh white supremacist and domestic extremism, and one reason I could do that as a black woman is that they love publicity. And so I I asked this one person from the Aryan Nation, which is a now defunct white supremacist organization, uh they they're defunct because they killed someone and were sued out of existence. Um it was a phone interview, and I said, um, I'm black. At the end of the interview, I'm black. Would you have granted me an interview if you knew I was black? And first she said no, and then she said, Yes, I would, because for every person who reads your article, for every 10 people who read your article, one of them will follow me. Now I think that that was an ambitious framing, but she viewed it as a chance to recruit people. And I think, you know, organizations, you know, I I realize this example may seem a little outsized, but organizations, even ones who join a coalition sometimes view it as um something where they're going to get publicity. And so they may join a coalition that doesn't really fit with what they do ideologically if they think they can get something out of it. And it's up to um the entities who are building a coalition to decide what the rules are. So are you going to build a coalition that's a bit safer and that serves people who all believe in a common idea of pluralism, you know, because there's refinements within pluralism. What does it really mean? So um if you're putting together an organization that has uh common ideas of pluralism, you're gonna have one set of rules of the road. And if you're doing work on democracy from either as a funder or as an organization where you really want to um expand the scope of what is acceptable ideologically within the course of doing the work, then you have to have a much more sophisticated approach to setting rules. I think that organizations, whether they are funders or community-based organizations or national political and civic organizations, have to be really clear on how broad their engaged community is, whether they're willing to deal with people who may be perceived as problematic by other people in the coalition, and to really have the social skills to be able to moderate conversations that that go with having kind of a mixed cohort of people.

SPEAKER_01 39:52

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's right. And it's I think it's important, you know, that point you make that that pluralism can have enormous benefits, but it can also be quite a challenging thing to kind of embrace fully. And I think being realistic about that's hugely important. Um I just wanted to ask as a final question um in this conversation, which I found really fascinating. You know, I guess what's been running through a lot of what we said is it's a particularly difficult time for democracy, it feels at the moment. I mean, certainly at the moment in the US, but in lots of other places uh around the world as well. I I guess my question is, you know, to what extent can we remain optimistic about democracy? And, you know, what in your view is the part that philanthropy has to play in making, you know, kind of justifying that optimism? What's the most important thing that funders can be doing at this moment in time?

SPEAKER_00 40:40

I think one of the most important things that funders can do is to really do a deep dive into which practices of theirs are working and which ones are not. So if you're someone who has been trying to split your focus between people of different ideologies, but that's not paying off for you based on what your mandate is, you may consider changing that. And it can also go the other way if um you are if you've been focusing on people with one ideology, maybe you need to broaden it. So then the number one thing that has to happen is a spirit of inquiry. And um, you know, the Democracy Fund, for example, has been very good about producing research reports that talk about the efficacy of their work and also the efficacy of the field of democracy funding. And those entities who have the resources can do the research, which then raises uh the awareness of everyone who can access that research. Um, but it also takes, you know, just endless amounts of humility to do this work. And that's why we were so grateful to talk to all the organizations that we spoke with, because they have the humility to say, hey, I tried this, it didn't work. Let me try again.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

Yeah, I mean I think that that point about humility and willingness to talk about failure as something you kind of learn from and can take positives from is, I mean, cuts across a lot of philanthropy, but it's particularly important, um, as you say, when it comes to these challenges around democracy. Um listen, Farry just uh remains to say thank you ever so much for finding some time to come on the podcast. It was great to have a chance to to talk to you. I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find uh the report and other things that you've written um that they might be interested in. Um and yeah, look forward to to hopefully staying in touch in future.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

Absolutely. I really enjoy this, Rodri.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Farai for uh finding some time to come on the podcast. It was really great to have a chance to talk to her. Um I will put links in the show notes to places where you can find the Bridgeband report and also some other things that uh Farai has written that are relevant to the conversation we had, and also some things that I've written and other episodes of the podcast that you might be interested in. Uh, if you are interested in issues around philanthropy and civil society more broadly, then you should definitely check out why philanthropy matters, the website. Um, there's all kinds of articles and uh shorter guides and back episodes of the podcast and news updates and things that are uh touch on all sorts of areas around philanthropy and civil society, and hopefully you'll find some kind of interesting thoughts and insights in there. Uh, if you want to stay up to date with me um more broadly, follow me on social media. I'm on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Um, not really anywhere else. I actually finally deleted my uh ex or Twitter account uh the other day, which felt quite cathartic. If you have ideas for people we could talk to on the podcast or topics that you'd like to see us cover, do drop me a line. You can get the uh email address at the website. Other than that, just like, subscribe, uh tell all your friends about it, because I think personal recommendation helps, or leave us a nice review or if it is so you get your podcasts, and I will see you next time. Bye.