Calling Funders In: It’s Time to Make the Economy Work for All.

Today, we are taking the time to call you in directly. The last few years of grantmaking have shifted away from racial justice towards a variety of areas and notably towards the defense of fair elections in a democracy. Given the outcomes of the election at the federal, state, and local levels, we have come up short. As we can see, unfortunately, authoritarianism will not be quashed by a singular focus on our electoral process nor on the political and information environment in which we are steeped.

This is now an opportunity for you to broaden your funding priorities and to take a more expansive view of the several pillars that support a multiracial democracy, including building an equitable economy. For example, we are thinking about immediately urgent areas where funding is needed: issues of racial justice, immigration, reproductive, and LGBTQIA rights. But we at Common Future caution that this fight be not only on the short-term front. We also need long-term investments to shift the economy towards inclusive change.

We know from our work at Common Future that communities of color have strategies to build an equitable economy, a necessary component of a multiracial democracy. However, they face systemic barriers to building and sustaining power, including extractive financial systems; exclusionary and fractured power structures; and predominant and harmful narratives.

As such, we have been working to reprioritize our work towards three Strategic Pillars. We were already moving in this direction in the next iteration of our strategic plan, and the recent election results affirm that these Pillars are critical as we seek to build an equitable economy and multiracial democracy in a polarized society:

• Change Capital Flows: We invest in models that challenge the standard notions of risk and wealth primacy to demonstrate the promise of community-led solutions. 
• Build Power & Influence: We build economic power to financially and strategically back organizations, connecting them to a broader ecosystem to develop and pursue collective goals like policy and narrative change. 
• Create New Narratives: We use our work as evidence to counter harmful narratives and tell new stories that center the power of Black and Indigenous communities and demonstrate how a more equitable economy is possible.

As Funders, we want to invite you into what we are seeing in this changing landscape, as well as its stakes and what it would take to make a meaningful investment, now, in prioritizing an equitable economy as a necessary precursor to a multiracial democracy. We will not get there without multiyear, unrestricted support.