Relationship Building as a Resistance: My Love-Hate Relationship with Fundraising. Written by Faiza Abdulkadir and Co-Editors Daniel Seifu and Mariam Radi
Faiza Abdulkadir (She/Her) is a British Somali Muslim based in London. Her practices include arts and community fundraising, consultancy, and artist management. Faiza has been a fundraiser for award-winning London theatres such as The Bush, The Yard, The Gate and HighRise Theatre and most recently Birthrights. Faiza is also a Birkbeck, University of London Psychosocial Studies Doctoral Researcher exploring British Somali diasporas engaging in returned trips to Somalia and intergenerational conflicts between first and second generation British Somalis.
My love-hate relationship with fundraising…
My relationship with fundraising started as a door-to-door fundraiser in 2011, and then as a Contact Centre Representative for leading charities during my college and university studies. From day one, my Somali and Islamic practices never fell short in reminding me the importance of charitable giving. My determination to access capital for grassroots organising in London and beyond during the pandemic started in 2017 too. I started volunteering for Galbur Foundation, a grassroots charity founded by Birthday Twin and one of the most inspiring Somali women organisers in North London, Jamad Abdi. Our relationship started through a Somali sister and colleague working on an educational tech project, who also worked in the Contact Centre. Both of us were just hustling as university students really. Since then, Jamad and I have been inseparable - all because of our mutual internal fire of how systems of oppression are impacting the Somali community. We both understood this clearly: No one was coming to save us.
In 2020, I witnessed my nieces and nephews experience uncertainty in their education, a young generation trying to beat the odds and support was tight. The need within Somali and Arab-speaking communities was high. We were rapidly losing elders to COVID-19 and fell on the community to step up to support each other. We did, though, but the need for resourcing was unbelievable, and this is when my journey to bid-writing truly began. I was confronted by the harsh realities of philanthropy. The long-ass applications for just £5,000, unrealistic expectations, the networks and relationships you needed, the buzz words and lingo you had to learn - it was at that moment that my politics and values strengthened, to say the very least, and I needed to get better at fundraising.
“As social conditions change, so must the knowledge and practices designed to resist them”
Although my identity as a Working-class Black Muslim Woman had been politicised before I could name it, I always knew I was an ‘Outsider’ (a term coined by Black Feminist Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins in 1986), whether it be in the workplace, educational settings, or both intimate and public spaces, such as in healthcare or and the dance floor. My identity was always marked as an Outsider in one way or another, through respectability politics, misogyny, islamophobia or blatant racism. Growing up, I had always heard, “it’s all about who you know”, and I learned very quickly that relationships meant access for those with less proximity to power and resources. I was conscious I did not want to fall into individualism - one of the many traps of capitalism - keep your head down, work hard, and you’ll get rewarded. I knew that was bullshit. I knew the traditional routes into professional work were not on my cards, and I needed to be creative, brave and true to myself, and as a fellow neurospice. There could be no separation between who I was, my career and my job. It needed to make sense to my values. It was truly time to study and learn from those who had the experience, wisdom, knowledge, and vision to fight, survive, thrive, heal and resist colonial and imperialist domination because the solutions have always been there, alive and active.
I learned fast that our power always lies in our collective resistance, thinking, beliefs, self-determination and endless abilities to move away from a world fuelled by extraction and harm to reparations, healing and liberation. I wanted that to be true, so I started paying attention to what I needed to keep, release, and what I needed to learn.
“It is in our thousands, in our millions; we are all Palestinians. We chant “Free Palestine”, but it is actually Palestine that frees us - from the straitjacket of silence and complicity -”
Humble beginnings, the importance of staying humble, no matter what…
I first came across Giving Back: How to Do Good Better by Derek A. Bardowell in 2022 when I worked as Development Manager at the Gate Theatre. The Executive Director and CEO, Shawab Iqbal, had tagged me in a post on Twitter about Derek’s book release, which I pre-ordered immediately. I was still relatively early in my fundraising career in the arts (on paper, anyway, as fundraising has always been part of my everyday life, but I was still new to the field). The book release was timely and promising. The book addressed the hard truths of philanthropy, the social sector, and mirrored my own experiences and conversations in philanthropy thus far.
Giving Back radically alters our approach to ‘giving’ to good causes, whether volunteering or donating money, time, resources or ideas. Bardowell calls for a change rooted in justice, not charity, from giving as a top-down, bureaucratic, institutional approach, but to shift our approach into everyday practices rooted in the experiences and expertise of the acutely marginalised and most impacted communities. To simply, think and do differently, to see the difference.
Started from the bottom, and now we are here…
During my time at The Gate, a subsidised theatre, previously funded by Arts Council England, I was fortunate to have worked closely with Shawab (now current Leeds Playhouse CEO), who centred the Gate’s practices in anti-oppression and anti-racism and studied his MA in Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity at Birkbeck University before me. I completed the same MA a few years later. I joined the small team knowing that those confronting and challenging conversations about racism, ableism, classism and identity did not need to happen behind closed doors or outside of work because of his commitment, which was crucial during a transitional period post-pandemic.
The responsibility to facilitate those conversations did not sit with the Global Majority staff, as a collective understanding of how systemic and structural racism operates in the arts was already embedded in the work culture. Our lived experiences mattered. We all recognised that “the system is broken, and the most prominent arts institutions that receive the most funding only serve a section of our society, mainly the elite” (Bardowell, 2019). So, for the Global Majority staff, like myself, our relationship with our team was built on a collective vision and a fundamental understanding of how race, religion, class, gender, disability and sexuality intersected in the way we existed, operated, fundraised, produced programmes, and in our audience development.
I also worked alongside interim artistic director Stef O’Driscoll, co-founder of Classroom. Classroom is an artist-led program designed to support artists who identify as working-class, benefit class, and criminal class (WBC-C), remain in the arts, develop skills and progress to leadership. We collectively envisioned this transitional period as a historical moment to challenge the status quo since we moved from The Gate’s original 1979 Notting Hill home to Theatro Technis, an independent, grassroots multicultural arts centre in Camden.
We valued the importance of relationship building in our new home and the significance of preventing ourselves from replicating traditional arts relationships with funders, local communities, audience members and educational institutions by:
A) Refusing to engage in funding relationships with donors, institutions, trusts and foundations that thought our work was ‘too woke’ (which is often coded as too Black, too Muslim, too diverse, too ethnic, and not classy). We offered spaces to address backlash, microaggressions and centre care for staff, which was crucial at a time, we were changing what we knew to what we could do better. It was not easy - it upset a lot of donors.
B) Genuinely engaging with local communities, institutions (schools and colleges) and small businesses to avoid marketing tactics and quick fixes that offered discounted or free tickets as a tick box exercise.
We did our best in such precarious times and received our first grant in the summer for £2000 from Camden Giving for a joint application with Working Men’s College to fund theatre tickets and refreshments for their students and staff for our upcoming season of three shows. I spent a fun summer afternoon filming an interview application with around 10 drama students on my iPhone with The Gate’s General Manager, Wofai Je (and current Executive Producer of Initiative DK) and Executive Director of SCRUM Theatre. Those were only some of the many moments of relationship-building with the college and its communities that I’ll always cherish and could never have been rushed.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion”
Power to the people, always…
Through decolonisation and the centring of authentic relationships, this is when we can build a collective intelligence that encompasses dynamic, rich and deep communal practices. This is truly when we can make localised and systemic change, but the absence of diversity in the social sector remains shocking. Five years on, the social sector still lacks collective intelligence, intersectional practices and cross-sector relationships, although we are all experiencing the same harmful practices of racial capitalism and imperialism. We are still struggling to push and centre more individuals with lived, field and proximate experiences, such as practitioners, grassroots organisers, creatives, experts with technical skills on the ground who deliver work through an equity lens to be part of all decision-making processes (Bardowell, 2022). I found that not a lot of people and organisations do not speak or practice collection enough, there has been change but the absence of such collective practices is the very reason the social sector remains complicit in reinforcing colonial divisions, the white saviour complex, and poverty porn that uses pictures of people from the Global Majority to prove its false prophecy of diversity and inclusion.
Without this shift, the social sector will continue to function as institutions that rarely challenge the real structures responsible for society’s problems and remain complicit in racial capitalism. The social sector ultimately positions itself as a buffer between the ‘Empire and its subjects’, which we know historically aid has been an imperialistic project that consequently causes further harm to those from marginalised communities locally and globally (Bardowell, 2022).
The social sector is broken, and its simply time for radical change; to see the difference we want as a collective.
““We can’t undo what’s been done. The best we can do is recognise the history, the hurt and pain that it has caused, then heal, repair and use resources in a way that doesn’t cause further harm”
I’ve been recruited as a co-conspirator…
My fellow fundraising friend, Fezzan Ahmed, whom I met through the founder, director and fearless leader of JMB Consulting, Martha Awojobi, describes our relationship as “co-conspirators” navigating the social sector. When he named our relationship, I understood it straight away. It is when you build relationships with peers who believe liberation is the only destination. In our friendship, as fundraisers, we believe in decolonising wealth by constantly addressing how the social sector upholds and perpetuates white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in its everyday practices and existence. We plot and dream about how we can shift power and re-imagine the use of capital to liberate people from colonisation and capitalism.
“Far kaliya fool ma dhaqdo’ meaning you can’t wash your face with just one finger. It takes a team”
Good funding relationships do exist in the social sector…
“One role that institutional philanthropy could play is to resource the alternatives, enabling unorthodox ideas to flourish”
Late last year, I was working as Head of Fundraising and Business Development at Birthrights, a charity campaigning for better maternity care for women and birthing people. My fellow co-conspirator, Fezzan, introduced me to a few people working for funders who support racial and gender justice work as the organisation transitions to centring racial justice through a systems lens. I met with amazing Tudor Trust Programme Officers, Mariam Radi and Daniel Seifu. We immediately spoke the same language, and it was clear a lot of work had been done behind the scenes at Tudor Trust, which always creates a feeling of ease and lightens the power dynamics between the funder and grantee.
Tudor Trust is a UK-based funder dedicated to advancing racial justice by resourcing power in communities through capital and resources, supporting many of my favourite radical organisations, such as Coffee Afrik, The Ubele Initiative and CIVIC SQUARE. I left my conversation with Mariam and Daniel feeling inspired and validated. It was a reminder of what personal commitment and internal drive to push for more resources for organisations making radical change looks like. It was encouraging to see first-hand the shift in funders that are actually making in recognising the importance of personalised relationships and funding organisations long-term beyond project work. We spoke the same language in being bold in naming systemic issues, and how many organisations like Birthrights respond to the evolving needs and realities of being on the ground whilst fighting for systemic change.
We remained in contact, in fluidity and in open communication, no crazy chase-ups and much room for flexibility and transparency, and thankfully, through our new relationship, Birthrights received multi-year unrestricted funding. An experience that is now one of my proudest achievements and examples of collective action, and one of many examples of what it means to decolonise philanthropy. It emphasises that, regardless of the difficult conversations and relationships between funders, fundraisers and organisations because of the power dynamics, when the real one’s work (I) as an individual and (we) as a collective can actualise our vision for liberation and justice.
“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”
Not every opportunity is a strategy - in conversation with Mariam and Daniel
It came naturally to me to interview Mariam and Daniel for this piece. It was imperative to include their voices for me to be able to authentically share my experiences. Like myself, Mariam and Daniel, many other Global Majority co-conspirators in the social sector, we’ve had countless moments, we experienced microaggressions, racism, worked in organisations that thought they wanted to hire us but were not ready to, and times we just wanted to call it all a day, but always kept us was the bigger picture, the change we want to see despite the darkest times which particularly came to play in 2020.
What was it like for you back then?
Entering the social sector to build systems that work better for everyone, rather than the privileged few, always felt like a calling rather than a job search. Being a person from the Global Majority and a junior member of staff in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder within the sector was no small feat. You were expected to do your day-to-day role and switch to an equity, diversity and inclusion expert whenever needed. At the time, the extra hours, work or discomfort talking about race as the only racialised person in the room did not matter. Many of us thought we were doing something great, something that could change the organisations we worked at and the sector as a whole. So, what’s a few more hours spent drafting a statement or article that may or may not be published, if it helps the sector understand that the very structures and institutions it created to do good are rooted in, and continue to uphold, harmful colonial legacies?
How has it felt to navigate the social sector as staff from the Global Majority?
Stuck between personal survival and organisational reactivity, countless hours were poured into initiatives and programmes that would only ever create incremental changes towards racial equity. We did not stop to reflect on how the work was done, who was or wasn’t in the room to do it and if it was being resourced adequately. The purpose often was not to learn and understand how systemic racism, which led to the murder of George Floyd, is baked into the foundations of the charity sector. Instead, organisations sought to deliver something that looked diverse and inclusive enough to meet the moment but not radical enough to change organisational culture, strategies or ways of working.
The result, at least what we can see five years on, is fragmented. Some organisations continue to learn, recognising they need to constantly work to embed the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion. While others have perfected the art of hollow statements on glossy websites - many of which haven’t been visited or updated since 2020. In other words, not much has really changed, other than for a few organisations that were willing to overhaul their strategic direction and ways of working.
What do you think shifted in the social sector, and for you both as individuals?
The power of bringing in the right relation. As individuals, our experiences in the social sector have been shaped by how we felt following that summer of 2020, being part of a sector that is outdated and broken in so many ways. Working at the Tudor Trust has provided an opportunity for healing as we exchange anecdotes, mistakes and learnings that lead us to collectively strategise about how we can resource organisations and movements better. Fundamentally, we knew that being in right relation with those we resource was key. We needed to build our understanding by learning from and with communities closest to the world as it should be.
As a diverse team that somewhat reflected the communities we wanted to resource, we were able to combine our lived experience with professional and academic expertise to be in right relation. We knew how we wanted to show up for communities as a funder in a way that builds trust and centres relationships rather than metrics, and so we’ve intentionally built light-touch processes which aim to not take away from the capacity of those working within the community. We’ve been very lucky to get to know some incredible people, like Faiza, working in inspiring ways to imagine and build a regenerative future where everyone thrives regardless of their background. It is about the relationships you build when working towards liberation and justice…
Relationships are all good, even the bad ones…
Relationships will always be meaningful, even the bad ones. They all serve a purpose, a lesson, even in moments of confrontation; they provide endless growth opportunities and create inevitable change. For many of us, our relationship with the social sector has always been filled with constant confrontation from the moment we started working in it, regardless of our entry point. However, we chose to frame it. We all have a basic understanding that the social sector exists to address the failures of the core public services and the shortcomings of the government, and supposedly to do the opposite of the private sector… Somehow, still advocate for civil society despite the corporatisation of the sector and its history of aid and imperialism. Therefore, our relationships with the sector will always remain confronting and complex until there is radical change.
“In Somali, when we see injustice, we say ‘dhiiga kuma dhaqaaqo’, which translates into ‘Does your blood not move?”
Such confrontations often build relationships with one another within organisations, across the social sector, across borders, at the same time building a close relationship with ourselves as “the heart of justice is truth telling” - bell hooks
We cannot ignore those feelings of confrontation, as they serve as a tool for collective action to seek alternative systems filled with care and collective liberatory practices that embody all scales of life with depth, fighting against all systems of harm and their roots. Those confronting feelings should push for innovation, experimentation, and transformative practices and form collective powers to dismantle the material world created by the bricks of colonialism and capitalism. Only through such feelings of confrontation can we truly centre humanity, nature’s powers, justice, equity, universal healing, love, and belonging among us all; we just have to be committed to it.