Here is how the voice of Headwaters Foundation for Justice sounds,
Injustice isn’t an accident. Take spying on your own citizens without warrants. Or siphoning money away from after-school programs. Or not opening an investigation when a black girl gets shot. Or looking the other way when a woman gets beaten. Folks shrug their shoulders because the issue seems too big to confront. Or too small to reveal its place in a larger pattern. They explain away these things as accidents. Oversights. Hard choices. Which is why we fund. And why we train. And how we’ve created a movement for changing society at its core by connecting the many involved. Welcome to Headwaters.
To those who see philanthropy as a non-threatening, though inefficient, industry, or as a kind of money management job, or a client service for people with more money than brains, let me say, Boo! More is at stake than fits within that business-fixated frame. Justice is not an industry, unless you mean the for-profit prisons. Justice is, according to some, the fundamental basis of a workable commonwealth or social compact. What is being renegotiated on the sly, I think, is the very framework of a free society. Will we continue to use the passionate language of justice, rights, and advocacy, rallying people in solidarity for social change, or will the well-bred and well-fed change the vocabulary to that of investment analysts, and business executives, and social venture investors? Within the language of money management, tactical philanthropy, concierge philanthro-services for the rich, philanthropic capital markets, the philanthropic industry, blended value propositions, balanced scorecards, and double bottom line social ventures you just are not going to find the indignation and fighting spirit cited above. The bland but controlling market-speak is made to move over and surreptitiously swallow up the space once devoted to the social acitivsm that might threaten the hegemony of the MBA world view. I guess, that is one reason so many funders pump money into the bland mythology of social venture investing. Life is good inside the MBA bubble! Don't let me puncture it.
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