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Economic Democracy Weekly

Welcome to this week’s Economic Democracy newsletter! If you want economic justice, you have to design for it. Today, we feature two articles on that topic. Nonprofit scholar Lester Salamon looks at digital inequality and identifies a design—a publicly seeded foundation—that can bring far greater equity to the field. Meanwhile, Mitty Owens, a former Ford program officer, offers impact investors a social justice architecture to frame their work. This week we also include an excerpt from a newly published book on participatory grantmaking that illustrates sharply how the word “participation” has often been abused by philanthropy, and a short article on two social justice donor group efforts to mobilize resources amidst our present record economic inequality.

Featured Content

How a Publicly Funded Foundation Can Lower Digital Inequality

To reduce the digital equity gap, the US should endow a Digital Futures Foundation with the proceeds from auctioning public airwaves to cell phone companies. Read more...

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Features

“Ladder of Participation (Arnstein, 1969).” Drawn by Juliet Young. Image: Tim Bonnemann

Building the Social Justice Architecture for Impact Investing

While impact investing has promise, realizing that promise requires developing common principles embedded in a social justice architecture. Read more...

Philanthropy and the Zen of Participation

In Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good by Giving Up Control, Ben Wrobel and Meg Massey call for philanthropy and impact investment elites to cede decision-making power to community groups. Later in the book they outline specific ways to make this shift a reality, but here they very persuasively outline what’s at stake—and how the status quo in philanthropy often works to control and strictly limit genuine community participation. Read more...

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Policy

Social Justice Donors Double Down in Face of Growing Wealth Inequality

Spurred by unprecedented wealth inequality, #HalfMyDAF expands its efforts, while Resource Generation unveils its vision of transformative investment principles. Read more...