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rights & justice
When We Stand Together…
Philanthropists and funders must show we are part of movements to protect the most vulnerable.
May 18, 2025
The last six months have been devastating for these United States. The government has kidnapped students, placing them in detention in states hundreds of miles away from their loved ones and schools. The government has openly questioned long-standing and hard-fought norms: the freedom of speech, the right to legal representation, and citizenship as a right of those of us born here. The government has handed over our most sacred information and resources to billionaires who became that way because the government invested in them and subsidized their fortunes. Now these same people want to pull up the ladder behind them, guaranteeing that nobody else can benefit from a government that supports its people.
I’ve been proud of my sector, philanthropy. We’ve approached this crisis front-footed and full-throated in our commitment to protect the freedom to give. It’s been a powerful testament that hundreds of my peers preemptively coordinated and called out our freedom to give, freedom of speech, and freedom to serve communities.
As we enter this next moment, when the boundaries that were once fixed are challenged not by proclamation or executive order, but through the allocation of our tax dollars, we have an opportunity to show that when we are part of movements that protect the most vulnerable among us, we protect ourselves. It is an invitation to remember that our government is not a natural representation of our best selves. Let’s be honest: The best parts of our government are a product of people, overwhelming the poorest and least powerful people, organizing against greed, exploitation, and exclusion. Free public education, Medicaid, and protection from racism and sexism are evidence of what government looks like when movements win for our most treasured resource: our people.
Our commitment to trust, discipline, and love is the best medicine for this moment. We need to transform spaces of dread into spaces where we can join together in solidarity to dream...
As we plan and resource efforts that focus on shielding our institutions from the upcoming budget reconciliation, I hope we remember this budget reconciliation fight is not simply an attack on philanthropy or the nonprofit sector. It is not simply a way to poke a thumb in our eye because we’ve supported community-based organizations that open their doors to all of us, community services providers that make housing and healthcare more affordable, and student groups that come together to fight genocide.
The current fight about our resources cannot be fought on their terms or with their words. Above and beyond increasing the tax rate on foundations, this budget reconciliation includes:
- Stripping $290 BILLION from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or, as it’s commonly called, “food stamps”), the largest cut in this program since its inception. SNAP provides millions of poor people with extra money to buy food to sustain their families. It is a lifeline to farmers and local businesses that provide this food. It is one way that our poor kids get fed at school.
- Cutting $715 BILLION from Medicaid, leaving millions of people uninsured and unable able access or afford critical health services. The forced labor requirements of this proposal alone create conditions where eligible recipients are forced off Medicaid or forced to make impossible choices between exploitation and care.
And let’s say these two lifesaving provisions are not front of mind for you or seem ancillary to your mission. There is this:
- The budget reconciliation includes a provision that gives the Executive Branch unprecedented power to strip nonprofits of their status without verification, an investigation, or due process. This administration has not signaled, but shouted its commitment to consolidate political power in the hands of billionaires, challenge hard-fought fundamental rights, and drastically alter those institutions that have long been the scaffolding of civil society in this nation, like nonprofit organizations. This would be a death nail to nonprofit organizations that educate community members about their rights, bring people together to demand dignity, and ensure we all understand that our government should protect and serve all of us, not just the most powerful.
There are a million metaphors describing the role of leaders at this moment; the most difficult for me to accept is the “oxygen mask guidance” used by airlines: protect yourself before you protect others. Philanthropy must do something different. Protect the most vulnerable among us who are being kidnapped, exploited, and starved by this administration. Come together with healthcare providers and labor unions fighting to protect Medicaid, food banks, and public schools working to protect SNAP, and legal service providers, like CUNY’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility, working to limit this administration’s overreach.
Our resolve to unite in this fight is the best antidote to these attacks. Our commitment to trust, discipline, and love is the best medicine for this moment. We need to transform spaces of dread into spaces where we can join together in solidarity to dream, build, and attend to the preservation and celebration of all life.
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Love From Violence and the Beloved Community
The point I’m struggling to make in this moment is that love— in the deepest possible meaning of the word—is more powerful than growling dogs and firehoses and jail cells.
May 26, 2024
We will not evolve into the future with closed minds.
And nothing closes the human mind—either individually or collectively—like the weapons of war . . . and the freedom to use them. Step one: Dehumanize those you’re about to kill (i.e., accuse them of being who you are, as exemplified by, among so many others, our old pal George W. Bush, who declared that America’s enemies “view the entire world as a battlefield” and proceed to turn the entire world into a battlefield).
But there’s a far deeper irony here as well—a positive irony, according to Martin Luther King. Consider the fourth of his six principles of nonviolence:
“Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform. Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation. Unearned suffering is redemptive and has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.”
This is not yet a principle that has entered the collective human consciousness. It is not a principle at the core of mainstream news coverage of conflict, which remains linear in its scope: who’s winning, who’s losing. This is the case even though King’s nonviolent civil rights movement structurally transformed racist America. It defeated Jim Crow not by killing the segregationists but by . . . caution: this is going to sound crazy . . . not by fighting back but by loving back.
“While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist,” he said in a 1963 sermon. “This is the only way to create the beloved community.”
Oh my God, the “Beloved Community”? No one talks about this – certainly not at the level of politics and national or global power. The point I’m struggling to make in this moment is that love—in the deepest possible meaning of the word—is more powerful than growling dogs and firehoses and jail cells. It is more powerful than burning crosses. It is more powerful than 2,000-pound bombs. It is the force that is able to embrace conflict and transcend it—and it should be at the core of how we envision the human future.
There are three kinds of love, according to MLK. There’s romantic love (eros) and affectionate or friendship love (philia), and then there’s agape love, which he has described as “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all, an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative . . . the love of God operating in the human heart.”
Why is love generally reduced to a geopolitical sneer word? In war reporting, it’s flicked away like an annoying mosquito. But perhaps it’s the most powerful force on the planet—and we have access to it!
In King’s words: “Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people. . . . It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. . . . Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”
This is a world with a $2.4 trillion collective military budget. It’s a world with some 12,000 nuclear bombs (implements of mutually assured destruction). It’s a world obsessed with what it hates, what it fears and what it wants to control. Yet what makes life possible is community, which is an organic structure. Why are we much more interested in the destruction of communities than their creation?
“The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption,” King noted. “The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermath of violence is emptiness and bitterness.”
And yes, the Beloved Community is an endless, ever-evolving, organic creation. It is not declared by fiat. We all play roles large and small in creating and sustaining it. And suddenly I’m thinking about an incident that happened to me about a dozen years ago, one night after I’d gone bowling with some friends. My driveway was inaccessible because an accident a few days earlier had damaged my next-door neighbor’s garage, so I had parked a few blocks from my house and was walking home.
What happened was that three, or maybe four, boys came running at me out of nowhere—out of a “hole in the night,” as I later called it. One of them punched me, knocked me down. All the while, they were having a helluva good time. They wouldn’t let me get up. I called for help, braying like a goat (so it seemed). They ran away. I was left with a bruised cheekbone but hadn’t been robbed. That was it. I walked home.
Beloved Community? Yes, yes, it was, and is, present in my imperfect, Chicago life. I was very much involved in the concept known as Restorative Justice—a unique way of connecting with people, which I have written about numerous times over the years. We sit in a circle; everyone has a chance to talk: to tell their stories. It can be, simply, a means of getting to know people, but primarily it’s used in the aftermath of harm or wrongdoing, as a means of healing.
A few days after the attack, some of my friends in the Restorative Justice community held a healing circle for me. We sat in loving connectedness and everyone talked about times they had been afraid, times they had been harmed, how they had transcended the moment. Oh my God! I was not alone. We sat for two sacred hours. I was almost in tears.
As I wrote in my journal the next day: “This feels so much bigger than the occasion that brought us here.” I later thought of the circle as a form of alchemy, a means of creating gold out of harm. If my attackers had been caught, oh, I would have loved to hear their stories and understand why they did what they did (and know they learned the affect it had on me).
“Real power occurs in silence,” I wrote, “the silence of reaching out, listening, understanding. And as I talk to people about my encounter, as the flow of love begins to heal the emotional rift, I feel a silent determination grow inside me to stay the course of peace.”
As I say, this was over a dozen years ago. That sense of determination, the belief in agape love and the ongoing creation of a Beloved Community, both locally and internationally, is still fully alive in my soul.Keep ReadingShow Less
Brazilian Supreme Court Delivers 'Historic Victory' to Indigenous Peoples
The court ruled against the Big Ag-backed "time limit trick," which would have only recognized Indigenous land claims if the group could prove they were living in a given territory on October 5, 1988.
Sep 22, 2023
In a major victory for Indigenous rights, Brazil's Supreme Federal Court rejected an argument Thursday that could have forced hundreds of thousands from their ancestral lands.
The so-called "time limit trick," backed by the nation's powerful agricultural interests, would have only recognized Indigenous land claims if the group could prove they were living in a given territory on October 5, 1988, the day the current Brazilian constitution was signed, as Survival International explained. The proposed rule ignored the fact that Brazil's military dictatorship displaced many Indigenous groups before it finally ended in 1985, The Guardianpointed out.
"I'm shaking," Jéssica Nghe Mum Priprá of the Xokleng-Laklano Indigenous group toldThe Associated Press while celebrating the news. "It took a while, but we did it. It's a very beautiful and strong feeling. Our ancestors are present—no doubt about it."
"The Supreme Court has shown that it cares about our lives and that it's against genocide."
The particular case the nation's highest court heard Thursday involved a land dispute in the state of Santa Catarina, Reuters reported. The Xokleng people were driven from much of their traditional lands in the state during the 1950s, when Brazil sold the land to tobacco farmers, the outlet explained in 2021. Santa Catarina then used the 1988 time limit to push more members of the Xokleng group out of a national park, prompting the current dispute.
"Before they killed us with guns, now they kill us with the stroke of a pen," former chief João Paté told Reuters in 2021.
However, the court on Thursday ruled 9-2 in favor of the Xokleng.
"Areas occupied by Indigenous people and areas that are linked to the ancestry and tradition of Indigenous peoples have constitutional protection, even if they are not demarcated," Justice Luiz Fux said.
The only two dissenting judges were appointed by right-wing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who supported extractive industries at the expense of Indigenous rights.
The court also said that the decision had "general repercussion" status, meaning it would apply to other rulings involving Indigenous land claims.
"This is a momentous, historic victory for Brazil's Indigenous peoples, and a massive defeat for the agribusiness lobby," Survival International research and advocacy director Fiona Watson said in a statement, adding that a broad application of the time limit trick would have threatened many Indigenous groups in the country, among them the uncontacted Kawahiva.
"It was all part of a devastating assault on Brazil's Indigenous peoples and the Amazon rainforest, so this rejection of it is hugely important, not only for Indigenous peoples, but for the global fight against climate change too," she said.
Indigenous peoples gathered in Brasilia celebrated the news with dancing and weeping, The Guardian reported, as did those following the case from their homes in the Amazon region.
"We're crying with joy," Aty Guasu, an organization representing the Guarani group, said in a statement translated by Survival International. "Today we're going to sing the song of life and dance the dance of joy. The Supreme Court has shown that it cares about our lives and that it's against genocide. It has listened to the cry of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil."
National Indigenous rights group APIB also welcomed the decision, but said that there were other pending threats to Indigenous rights.
"We have indeed emerged victorious from the time frame thesis, but there is still much to be done," the group's executive coordinator Dinamam Tuxá said in a statement.
Tuxá pointed to a bill currently in the Senate that would only allow new reservations in land occupied by Indigenous groups as of 1988, as Reuters described it. While the court decision may make this provision harder to pass, the bill would also ease the way for mining, farming, dams, and transportation projects in Indigenous territory, AP explained.
"We remain mobilized," Tuxá said. "We continue to fight because we need to ensure and protect the rights of Indigenous peoples."
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