The Case of the Collective Abundance Fund
The architecture of philanthropy, for all its stated intentions, often reproduces the very power imbalances it purports to address. At the intersection of social movements and institutional wealth, a deep and telling awkwardness persists. It is a gulf not merely of resources, but of trust, language, and lived reality. On one side are funders who venture into activist spaces, seeking proximity to the frontlines. On the other are grassroots organisers who must learn to navigate the labyrinth of institutional philanthropy, acquiring its jargon and its etiquette, simply to survive. This uneasy dance reveals a fundamental dysfunction, one that organisations like the Collective Abundance network were deliberately structured to confront.
The awkwardness when a programme officer visits a grassroots collective is palpable. It stems from an unbridgeable power gap. The funder, however well-intentioned, arrives with what political theorist Niamh McCrea identifies as a latent threat inherent in all philanthropic relationships: the power of exit. As McCrea argues, even when movements strategically accept funding, they must constantly “resist funder conditionalities, and preserve egalitarian modes of organising in the face of practices which undermine participatory ideals and threaten relations of care and solidarity” . The funder’s presence, often framed as “learning” or even “solidarity,” can feel like a safari precisely because they can leave the meeting, and the geography of struggle, at will. For the community, this visit is not a social call but a high-stakes audition for survival. Trust, the essential currency of movement building, cannot be built in such fleeting, asymmetrical encounters. It is earned through shared risk, consistent presence, and a demonstrated accountability to the community’s own agenda; things that a traditional grant cycle, with its due diligence forms and impact reports, cannot buy.
Conversely, the effective grassroots organiser is increasingly required to be a hybrid creature: part mobiliser, part grant writer, part networker fluent in the dialect of foundation strategy. This is not a choice but a necessity; to be outside this circuit is to be perpetually on the brink of precarity, one funding cycle away from dissolution. Yet, in mastering this world, they risk becoming estranged from the very base they represent, never quite belonging in the polished boardroom or the gritty community centre. Kelly Waltz, in her critique of the nonprofit industrial complex, frames this as a process of co-optation, where movements are “institutionalised” and their “counter-revolutionary goals and values” are subtly enforced by the “inconsistent financing from the state and wealthy donors” . The organiser must acquire a “toolkit” and a “networking-arsenal” simply to access resources that should, in a just system, flow to them as a matter of course, all while the very act of acquiring them threatens to sever their organic links to their community.
This is the chasm that Collective Abundance was created to bridge. As their mission states, they use “philanthropic funding as a tool to help strengthen the climate justice movement-ecosystem,” acting not as a traditional intermediary but as a redistributor rooted in the movement itself. They are a group of “organisers spread across geographies,” not grant makers in a distant office . Their model directly confronts the trust deficit. In Spain, however, their first attempt at a participatory process revealed just how deep the toxicity of scarcity runs. When they asked ten grassroots groups to distribute €100,000 amongst themselves, the process landed poorly. As the organisation reflects, “The responsibility of dividing up a pot of money was received as an unwelcome invitation for each collective to have to prove their worth, rather than an opportunity to resource one another” . This was a powerful, real-time lesson in the damage wrought by years of forced competition. In response, they did something radical: they “put money decisions to the side” and spent the rest of the gathering “dancing, laughing and getting to know one another – exactly as it should be” .
This pivot is the “punk edge” in practice, a refusal to let the logic of the market dictate the terms of relationship. It reveals the need to disrupt “Northern NGO-centrism.” They argue that true localisation requires not just shifting funds, but recognising that Southern and grassroots organisations possess a distinct form of “cultural capital, rooted in community affiliation, local knowledge and astuteness” . Ironically enough, this north/south divide, while existing on a global scale is also a divide we see within the European continent. Collective Abundance’s model operationalises this by creating local nodes of funding through country-based teams that work with coalitions of grassroots groups, embedding resourcing within a context of relationship and local knowledge. Their participatory ecosystem funding directly addresses the pernicious effect of scarcity, which “pits grassroots and frontline groups… against each other to compete for scarce funding” . In Poland, informed by the Spanish experience, they offered €10,000 to each collective with an invitation to spend the first year simply getting to know one another, keeping collective funding decisions for year two, thereby genuinely moving “at the speed of trust” .
Their dual role, resourcing movements while educating funders, is crucial. They hold the complexity, translating the needs and nuances of grassroots organising to institutional donors, while insulating movements from the distorting effects of direct funder pressure. The Robert Bosch Stiftung, a major partner, openly admits that they “would not have been able to reach the activists and movement partners that the Abundance Fund was able to reach” and that “trusting the Abundance Fund, letting go of control and being flexible created the right conditions” . This is not just rhetoric; it is a structural admission that the traditional model has failed. McCrea’s strategic case for accepting philanthropic funding hinges on this very point: it is only justifiable insofar as it “pushes existing configurations of power in more egalitarian directions” . By working with “wealth holders and people in philanthropy to help develop new participatory funding practices,” Collective Abundance aims to “provoke realistic but tangible shifts within philanthropic culture to transform how funders engage with grassroots organisers” .
Real power is not transferred through a grant agreement; it is cultivated through shared struggle, mutual accountability, and the patient work of building trust-filled relationships. As one organiser from the Abundance Fund put it, the goal is not to turn “grantees into grantmakers,” but rather to insist that “funders need to become better organisers” . By placing values-led community organisers at the centre of resource distribution, and by fostering collective decision-making amongst them, Collective Abundance is modeling a form of resourcing that is less a transaction and more an act of solidarity. It moves philanthropy from a performance of activism to a genuine investment in collective power, proving that when trust is the foundation, abundance is not a dream but a practical outcome.
References
McCrea, N. (2019). Critical issues in philanthropy: power, paradox, possibility and the private foundation. In N. McCrea & F. Finnegan (Eds.), Funding, power and community development (pp. 21–38). Policy Press.
McCrea, N. (2024). All things considered, should egalitarian movements accept philanthropic funding? Res Publica, *30*(2), 285–303. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09622-8
van Selm, G., Bukenya, B., Kamya, I., Kumi, E., Yeboah, T., Banks, N., Elbers, W., Schulpen, L., & van Wessel, M. (2025). Northern NGO-centrism in localisation processes: reproducing power inequities in the aid field. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2025.2543349
Waltz, K. T. (2024). Altruistic imperialism: The co-optation of mutual aid by the nonprofit industrial complex https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5678/
