By Nate Levin-Aspenson, grant writer and student of movement organizing
This is institutionalizing the riot. Social benefit organizations can act as a ratchet. When smaller militant organizations push progress forward, larger more moderate ones hold and consolidate gains. The choice is simple: be divided and ruled, or act as part of an ecosystem and win.
I had to rewrite this several times because being a new parent is (unsurprisingly to everyone except me) very time-consuming and because our collective situation keeps getting worse. Every day I wake up like the proverbial frog in boiling water—except me and the other frogs all know the water is boiling and we all have Frog Bluesky so every day we’re posting about how hot the water is and how we should all get out of it.
My first draft was Do Not Obey in Advance, which is no longer timely because A) we no longer have the luxury of being in advance of a fascist takeover and B) most organizations already did.
My second draft was Nonprofits Have to Fight if They Want to Survive, which I discarded not because the doom of our field is inevitable or because there has been no fight (not enough to my taste but not nothing), but because the stakes are no longer whether nonprofits will survive, but whether we will survive.
So here we are.
At time of writing, the GOP budget bill (the sycophantically trumpian-titled “One Big Beautiful Bill”) has just been signed into law. When implemented, 17 million Americans will be kicked off of their Medicaid insurance and the budget and $100 billion in new funding would be poured into the American Gestapo, further empowering them to kidnap and terrorize people.
All that is to admit that by the time you read this, the terrain of struggle under our feet will already have changed. Since I don’t want to scrap this again and start over, let’s pull back and look at the big view of what we need to do.
I. Where we fit
In Full Spectrum Resistance, author Aric McBay describes the concepts of radical flanking and institutionalizing the riot.
One of the many details lost to popular memory of the Civil Rights Movement is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once thought the Freedom Rides were too radical, and spent the night before the first ride trying to convince the organizers to call it off. But the riders went ahead, and the core of the movement moved with them. Radical Flanking describes the concept of radical or militant organizing moving the Overton Window of what is considered acceptable and sensible further towards a liberated society.
Just like the Deacons for Defense and other militant self-defense groups made the Freedom Riders seem more acceptable and sensible to ordinary people, people revolting in LA and New York create room for organizations in the nonprofit sector to push successfully for protections of the rights of immigrants and queer people.
As long as you don’t fall into the divide and rule trap of disavowing or condemning groups that are using more confrontational tactics.
In 1969, gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City, led by trans women and drag queens, spontaneously and violently fought back against the police repression that they had been suffering under for years. These police raids were routine, with people dressed in “women’s” clothing escorted to bathrooms to have their gender “confirmed” by police officers and those dressed more masculine were lined up to have their IDs checked. Being gay was illegal and criminalized. Arrests and beatings were commonplace.
On June 27th of that year, the customers at Stonewall Inn spontaneously decided not to comply. Eventually, their defiance coalesced into a riot and participants attacked police vehicles and moved too quickly to be effectively countered by the lines of cops. Unlike previous riots in response to police raids on gay community hangouts, Stonewall led to the activation of a new generation of Gay Liberation movement organizations that were able to lock in the social gains made by the Stonewall Riots. They were using new and effective tactics like “zaps”—ambushing and heckling politicians, demanding they state their position on gay rights—to gain ground. Publications that previously wouldn’t publish the word ‘gay’ were now talking in detail about these organizations and their goals.
This is institutionalizing the riot. Social benefit organizations can act as a ratchet. When smaller militant organizations push progress forward, larger more moderate ones hold and consolidate gains. (This is an incredibly brief overview of what McBay desribes, and I cannot recommend highly enough reading the book.)
The choice is simple: be divided and ruled, or act as part of an ecosystem and win.
II. Tactics
One of the sad things I had to recognize in writing this piece is that for many people who read it, your workplace has already hung you out to dry. Maybe they have already elected to find a place to hide in the new fascist landscape; maybe they have fully disavowed whatever values drew you to them in the first place. But maybe they have remained steadfast and are using their institutional power to fight fascism.
Whether you have the backing of your bosses or not, the core of my recommendation is the same: do not try to go it alone.
No one person or one organization is ever going to be enough to stymie or eventually overturn the fascist state, and they don’t have to be. Because they are not alone.
As a fundraiser, you are uniquely positioned within your organization to build and strengthen inter-organizational ties that can turn into networks and alliances of mutual support and protection.
When I was working for a community mental health center during the pandemic lockdown, we found that building multilateral funding relationships to pursue emergency funding from governments and philanthropy was also having a knock-in effect of building inter-organizational relationships that helped us advocate as a bloc for the importance of our work during a time of emergency.
You can and should use that position to build multi-organizational networks. These can form defensive blocs when state or federal government entities target your funding or your constituents, as well as begin to throw around the economic power of your local third sector. Use the power that your bloc has to pressure state and local government officials for protections for your constituencies.
Throw your weight around. Power that you or your organization have is worth nothing if it sits idle on the shelf. No time like the present. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
Now, if your organization is incapacitated by fear or apathy, there are still things you can do with just yourself and like-minded friends and colleagues.
First, as others have advocated right here on The Hub, unionize your workplace. Join a union. The power of organized labor is one of the strongest tools we have right now to exert pressure on the regime and protect your community.
If for some reason you can’t unionize your workplace (and you should try), there are still things you can do to be part of an ecosystem of resistance. No matter where you are, I guarantee that there are political projects near you that can use your particular set of skills as a fundraiser. That could mean raising money, sure—you would be surprised how little money some projects need to do their thing compared to a full organization—but communications, connection-building, and logistics are boons to local political projects. Hell, many of them are starved for simple admin: scheduling, keeping track of meetings, etc. It doesn’t sound like much, but adding capacity can nourish a local movement way more than money.
Find your niche. Find what you can support, and don’t neglect what supports you.
Because we are in this for the long haul.
III. The long haul
A lot of smart people have written about the MAGA tactic of flooding the zone to immobilize their enemies with indecision and anxiety and make their agenda seem powerful and inevitable.
They do this because they’re not, and it isn’t.
Don’t mistake me, the MAGA movement currently commands a tremendous and dangerous amount of power, but they are engaging in this tactic because they are fundamentally weak and fearful. They’re losers. And they are motivated by being losers who are afraid of everything. I say this not to hype up how easily our side will win (if the title didn’t give it away, I don’t think it will be easy or fast), but to better understand what we’re up against.
The MAGA movement is an unstable and brittle coalition, and they fall apart quickly if they don’t get to be on the offensive. With a multilateral ecosystem of resistance pushing at them from all sides, using a variety of tactics, refusing to be divided and ruled, and leveraging the social and economic powers dormant within our sector, we can push them onto the defensive for as long as it takes for their movement to collapse.
We are not filling an annual campaign thermometer. Nothing magic will happen if 3.5% of the population engage in sustained nonviolent protest. We must grow a community of culture and practice to uproot, dismantle, and destroy fascism and trumpism in the United States.
The nonprofit sector can be part of it. Fundraisers can be a part of it.
You can be a part of it.
Nate Levin-Aspenson
Nate Levin-Aspenson (he/him) is a writer, fundraiser, and container for dread based in North Texas. He has been writing things to ask people for money for over 10 years but is also learning to do more important things as part of his local ecosystem. You can find him posting through it on Bluesky or growing new things with the rest of The Equilibria Collective. If you appreciate his writing and want to give him money, don’t! Give to flood relief efforts in central TX and NC instead.
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