NGO Funding: Some Things You Should Know...
I’ve been looking into NGO Funding over the past few months, and although I kind of had an idea that things weren’t quite right in this field, I also hadn’t been 100% fully aware of just how bad they had gotten. The bottom line is: ‘You know all those progressive organizations that want to get big money out of politics? Turns out they’re funded by big money.’
You can read my Long Read article on Spiked Online here. This one mainly focuses on Pierre Omidyar-funded organizations, with a splash of James Murdoch thrown in (I mean, what would an article about political funding without at least one Murdoch be?)
What’s most concerning about this entire complex though is how much ‘pro-democracy’ organizations are funded in ways that are anything but ‘democratic’. In other words lots and lots of organizations that are ‘committed’ to ‘democracy’ and ‘hearing every voice’ and ‘helping everyone participate’ get a lot of money from big foundations that often don’t even accept unsolicited proposals. I got onto this, because sometimes these organizations try to squeeze me, and my actual, tiny voluntary organization off the stage. They can be a bit bullying really about not letting the ‘wrong people’ participate! That was the initial tip off to me that something odd was going on. So I explored. You’re welcome.
While I didn’t have time to go into it in this article, there’s a great book that mainly focuses on the Bill Gates NGO complex called: ‘No Such Thing as a Free Gift’ by Linsey McGoey, which covers a few more angles of this issue (eg foundations funding their ‘philanthropy’ while simultaneously avoiding tax).
Another interesting read by a more conservative author is Michael Lind’s The New Class War. It’s relevant because it stresses the need for mass-membership organizations as an integral part of democracy.
Finally, of course, if you want to do some serious thinking about democracy, there is my own In Defence of Democracy. Also a Finalist in the People’s Book Prize, which you can vote for here (it’s decided democratically!)