A Lesson From COVID: Direct Relief and Systems Change Funding Are Inseparable

When Liberty Hill Foundation was founded in 1976, our slogan of “Change, Not Charity” challenged the prevailing notion of philanthropy—which at the time, generally meant direct relief to people in need. Our model attacked root causes of suffering, such as racism and social and economic inequality, by supporting grassroots organizations as they built power in their own communities.

The decades since have seen the philanthropic sector move toward a greater emphasis on community organizing. Today, many of our peers do extraordinary work with grassroots groups.

But when COVID-19 exploded across the country, there was no question that philanthropy would be called to action in new ways. Just as community organizers would need to pivot to provide direct relief in response to the immediate problems caused by the pandemic, they in turn would need philanthropy to have their backs. At the same time, we learned that when community members got the support they needed, they were able to organize and win catalytic change, even as the pandemic raged.

This experience offers philanthropists an opportunity to reexamine the relationship between “change” and “charity.” Liberty Hill’s motto was never meant to minimize the importance of direct services. Instead, it calls upon us to ensure that, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., philanthropists do not “overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that make philanthropy necessary.”

Responding to immediate needs

Liberty Hill has always supported organizing that met immediate community needs, because quick, tangible benefits for community members has always been a hallmark of building power through organizing. One of our grantees frequently employs the example of the 19th-century settlement house movement, which distinguished itself with leaders like Jane Addams, who made no distinction between direct service and organizing. They were as likely to help residents in poor urban neighborhoods set up a health clinic, a theater program or a labor union. Their chief insight, which endures to this today, was that the community was the best expert on its own needs.

Today, those needs may include helping local residents gain access to benefits such as nutrition assistance or medical care. It can mean pressuring government agencies to install stop signs or maintain the streets in South L.A. as well as they do in Beverly Hills. Wherever offered, direct services to meet immediate needs can build power for lasting change if it dismantles, rather than perpetuates, the underlying causes of poverty and injustice.

With the onset of COVID, the needs of the communities and organizers Liberty Hill supports became ever more acute. Members of our grantee organizations, many already in precarious economic positions, were now losing jobs, facing new challenges to feed their families, and often badly in need of personal protective equipment. At the same time, the organizations themselves needed to keep their lights on and their doors open. How could we help our partners and their communities extend their work from wrestling with systems to making sure members had money for food, groceries, medical bills and the like?

We began raising and distributing funds for our COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund in March, as soon as the breadth of the pandemic’s impact on our home region of Los Angeles County became apparent. We distributed those funds as unrestricted grants that provided maximum flexibility, allowing grantees to adjust their operations to the new demands of life under the pandemic.

Our partners used these funds in a variety of ways. They provided direct aid in the form of food and PPE, cash for rent relief, or cell phones to allow community members to stay in touch. They created mutual aid funds so that neighbors could help each other directly. They invested in the technology that would allow employees to operate remotely once door knocking and in-person meetings were impossible.

Under pandemic conditions, grassroots community organizing groups reached people that no one else could—monolingual non-English speakers, undocumented workers, tenants living in slum conditions, formerly incarcerated individuals, unhoused neighbors, and many others who were not being reached by mainstream nonprofit and government service providers, either because those marginalized communities didn’t trust them, or because they were denied access to services.

Liberty Hill, in turn, took our cues from our community partners. As the pandemic dragged on and government responses faltered, the importance of our core work to support systemic change became clearer than ever, as did the importance of girding that work with funding for direct relief. People and organizations dedicated to empowering their communities deserved to be entrusted with the funding to help their communities through the crisis, and to have the latitude to use it as they knew best.

How relief funding made structural change possible

With the initial wave of relief funding out the door, we could see how the pandemic would reinforce and worsen pre-existing structural chasms rooted in race and class. Our grantees, stabilizing their footing, could now address those structural forces and lead a new movement for a just reconstruction—not a disappointing restoration. By supporting our partners in surviving the immediate crisis of the pandemic, we helped them come back fighting for meaningful change in a world newly hungry for answers from grassroots leaders.

Much of our rapid-response relief focused on the three pillars of Liberty Hill’s Agenda for a Just Future: housing, environmental justice and youth development. And in each area, grantees went on to win remarkable successes, despite the monumental challenges of 2020.

Led by grantee STAND-LA, our environmental justice goal of ending urban oil drilling in L.A. took a huge step forward when a key committee of the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to advance an ordinance that would effectively shut down oil and gas extraction in Los Angeles.

In the field of housing, our combined efforts with our partners to ensure a roof over every head led to the creation of Los Angeles County’s Stay Housed L.A. program, which helps ensure that tenants most vulnerable to eviction know their legal rights and have access to counsel and community support. This program promises to save homes and lives as experts predict an “eviction tsunami” when protections expire in California in early 2021.

Our support for youth justice organizing has reached even further. During the onset of the pandemic, our partners successfully advocated for the release of 100 young people from incarceration to protect them from COVID-19. When protests erupted in May and June, our justice-focused partners were on the front lines organizing and leading the protests and shaping the demands.

Then, in October, a broad coalition of L.A. County stakeholders released a far-reaching report, “Youth Justice Reimagined,” which was shaped by Liberty Hill staff and partners, and called for transformative changes to the youth justice system that would defund and deemphasize punitive, carceral approaches in favor of a community-rooted, care-based approach. The report proposed replacing the youth probation system with a youth development system, housed in a brand-new county department built from the ground up, that would focus on mental health and social service support rooted in community connection. The county supervisors voted to advance it unanimously.

What philanthropy can learn from the pandemic

The extraordinary success of our partners in simultaneously helping their communities to survive and advancing their core priorities to build power reinforces a valuable lesson: People who are committed to building community power know what to do with money. They can see, often long before funders can, how action can be humanitarian and power-building at the same time. Helping a family keep their lights on is undeniably an act of compassion, but it can also be an act of solidarity. It is a signal that we can expect more from one another, and that our society can be more than what it is, if we make it so.

Liberty Hill’s motto will remain “Change, Not Charity.” There will always be food banks and relief organizations with wide reach and broad appeal, and our deep connection to organizing to build power is part of our DNA. But the work of our grantees in 2020 teaches us that the strong relationships of support and trust we maintain with our grantee partners depend on meeting them where they are during times of crisis. Similarly, they must have the flexible funding to meet their community members where they are.

That kind of flexible, responsive support for community organizing groups comes with the double benefit of addressing immediate needs and fostering long-term structural change. For funders, it can also illustrate the importance of putting resources into multi-year general operating funding, with the faith that it can lead to better direct services as well as structural change.

This year has taught profound lessons about how best to support the people and organizations who represent the deepest aspirations of their communities. No matter what crises may come our way, that commitment will never change.

Shane Murphy Goldsmith is president & CEO of Liberty Hill Foundation.

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