Fundraising in alignment with our vision, mission, and values means fundraising differently!
Movements that we draw from
Here’s an example of a powerful fundraising philosophy from Young Women’s Empowerment Project: Fundraising From Our Roots
Here’s an excerpt.
Our Fundraising Philosophies
Over the years, we have come up with a few guiding principles to help us stay true to our beliefs. Because YWEP uses consensus to make decisions, these rules were agreed on by our membership, staff, adult allies and board of directors.1. Young people need to be involved in all levels of fundraising. Young people work on grants, manage data collection for their programs, maintain the individual donor database, help get new donors and funders through the door, and participate in budgeting, fundraisers, and all money management. We do this because we believe that young people can and should be the leaders at YWEP, and we do not want to see them tokenized. We also think that these skills can be transferred back into our daily lives and be useful to us personally.
2. We do not use our personal stories to raise money. In fact we do not use anyone’s life story or even fictional stories. Even though every training on fundraising we have ever been to has told us we “have to” do this to be good at getting money, we have decided that the stories of young people of color, especially young women and queer young people, are already exploited enough. We believe that our activism, art, and role in the wider movement for liberation should be the story that we tell, and that should be valued.
3. If we can’t agree on it then we do not take it. This means we do not take money from “pimps.” For example, the Playboy Foundation has offered us money in the past. Many of us wanted to take the money, but others felt like this would be using money that has harmed people in our constituency. Because we could not reach consensus, we did not take the money from this particular foundation.
4. We take no city, state, federal or corporate money. These groups want information about our lives and membership that we do not want to give out. We also feel like these groups work in opposition to our larger goals of liberation and empowerment of our constituency.