How Do Social Movements Fund Themselves?
Social movements often struggle with finding the material resources needed to support themselves. Yet with seemingly little to work with, social movements grow, thrive, and succeed. How do they do it?
We’re looking at this question right now in Mexico. Together with Scott DuPree of Civil Society Transitions, we are doing three case studies of how people’s movements in Mexico are getting what it takes to organize people, craft good messages, get the word out widely, and protect their rights in the face of corporate and state opposition.
I was in Mexico recently and spoke to a Mexican TV news station about what we were doing. Here are excerpts. (If you want to see the whole story, you can watch it here.)
If your Spanish is a bit rusty, here’s what we said:
“For us it is interesting to see how people organize, participate, to defend their rights, and to defend their economic and cultural interests. We will also have a two or three page summary and also a presentation to use in public forums. If we can give a little help to understand our struggles in the world, it would be good.â€
The three cases involve communities fighting against an ammonia plant to be built on the shores of a thriving coastal fishery, a proposed gold mine in an area supported by tourism, and a massive dam that will displace Indigenous people and threaten fisheries downstream. We’re finding that people are ingenious in coming up with what they need to keep campaigns moving, and that it makes a huge difference who it comes from. Movement allies who support them – local NGOs, businesses, and sympathetic donors – can not match the huge money that corporations are putting in. But organizers turn down the much greater amounts of money, goods, and services that corporations are offering in order to maintain trust within the movement.
The work is funded by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, based in Washington, DC. We will be releasing the study late in 2019.