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On a warm Friday in September 2019, Éric St-Pierre and his family hit the streets of Montreal,  the unceded lands of the Mohawk Nation. 

St-Pierre, the executive director of the Quebec-based Trottier Family Foundation, was there, as were half a million others, to demand more aggressive political action on the climate. It was the largest protest in Montreal’s history, and remains, today, Canada’s largest climate mobilization. 

During the demonstration, St-Pierre and his wife Sylvie Trottier, a foundation board member, alternated carrying their youngest daughter, then just six-months old, while their other daughter and her grandparents, the foundation’s benefactors, walked alongside. 

Later that day, famed Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the sea of demonstrators. “Last week, well over four million people in over 170 countries striked for the climate,” she said. “We spoke the science and demanded that the people in power would listen to and act on the science.”

But political leaders didn’t take note, she said: “So today, we are millions around the world striking and marching again. And we will keep on doing it until they listen.” 

When Thunberg addressed the crowd, the Trottier family was too far from the stage to see her, but thousands of others could. That simple fact was made possible in part by the foundation, which issued a rapid $100,000 grant to rent concert-grade audio and video equipment for the day.  

In the grand scheme, it was, perhaps, a modest contribution. Organizing the demonstration took the collective efforts of a small army of local climate activists, many of them students. Still, in the Canadian philanthropic landscape, such a contribution to support a mass protest is relatively rare. 

This mirrors the philanthropic landscape in the United States, where social movement educator Paul Engler has observed that the bulk of foundation’s advocacy efforts are directed toward “inside game” strategies — that is, funding research, or supporting lawyers or lobbyists to advance policy priorities.  

In late February, the Broadbent Institute released a new report that suggests this aversion to funding “outside game” mass mobilization strategies may need a rethink. 

The report tells the story of how dogged organizing on the part of Montreal climate activists helped bring hundreds of thousands to the streets, aided by contributions from a handful of climate-focused institutions — the Trottier Family Foundations, Greenpeace, and the David Suzuki Foundation, among others. 

It also issues a bold claim: that by resourcing mass demonstrations, funders can advance their policy goals faster than through campaigning, lobbying or other forms of long-term advocacy alone. 

But even if this premise holds, how do funders find movement groups to support? How do they legally flow money to them? And aren’t there important risks to consider? 

Why support movements and mass protest? The value of dramatizing the ‘moral dimensions’ of social issues

Before 2019, the Trottier Family Foundation hadn’t done much social movement funding. 

In its first decade and a half of work, the family foundation, established in 2000, supported more common philanthropic priorities, including local hospitals and universities. 

In 2016, the foundation changed course, bringing their two daughters onto the board, hiring staff, including St-Pierre, as executive director, and boosting support for their work on the environment, health, education and science. 

By early 2019, the foundation had assets of $241 million and was working to shape the City of Montreal’s ten-year climate action plan, leveraging traditional “inside game” strategies — working alongside several other foundations and a coalition of others to push for progressive policy. 

That summer, however, St-Pierre says he learned of work to organize a protest that could build political pressure for the policies they were pushing for. 

In July or August, he says, organizers projected about 10,000 people would attend the demonstration. Then, a few weeks later, that figure rose to about 50,000. In early September, organizers learned Thunberg would attend — and within days, St-Pierre says, projections swelled into the hundreds of thousands. 

Though issuing funding to support the demonstration was relatively new for the Quebec-based family foundation, St-Pierre says it didn’t require much of a mental leap, given how closely the mobilization dovetailed with their advocacy strategy. 

“We just really quickly said, ‘Look, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of people. This is really important. It’s going to raise climate ambition in Montreal,” he says. “We have this massive opportunity for this significant protest. Let’s try to make this happen.” 

Drawing on Paul Engler’s research, Tom Liacas, one of the three authors of Broadbent’s new report, argues mass protests play a critical role in driving social change by revealing the moral stakes of an issue. 

“You see such a mass of people out there on the streets,” Liacas says, “And if you’re not there with them, you question your own stance, like, ‘What am I doing now? This seems urgent to a lot of people. Should I care?’” 

In a 2018 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Engler argues that by asking the public to “pick a side,” movements can both increase the public’s awareness of an issue and alter mainstream public opinion. As public attitudes shift, Engler writes, movements “change the calculus for politicians about which side of an argument will be “safe” to support.” 

Engler says it’s rare to have an opening to win wide-scale federal social policy reform without a mass movement creating space for a new public debate on the topic and garnering the public’s backing. Mass protest, he argues, enables insiders, like lawyers and lobbyists to then, “formalize the agreements made possible by movement activity…[and to] take the ball and score.” 

For evidence of this phenomenon in action, Liacas points to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has, over the last decade, contributed to dramatic shifts in public opinion, social policy and police practices through mass mobilization. 

Since millions of protestors took to the streets across North America calling for racial justice, over 30 American police departments have passed policies that restrict the use of chokeholds by law enforcement and several American cities have trimmed their police budgets, among other policy changes. 

Closer to home, too, mass protests have also led to change on sticky social policy issues. 

To take one brief example: Boomers and Gen X-ers will recall the “war of the woods” — a series of blockades in the early ‘90s in Clayoquot Sound, BC, led by local Nuu-chah-nulth nations and environmentalist allies, which drew thousands of activists to the region to protest the clearcutting of the region’s old growth forests. 

Over the course of several years, hundreds of people were arrested for their activism. But in the end, the demonstrations helped to usher in a new approach to forestry in the province. In 1994, the BC government introduced tighter logging regulations and an independent oversight body to catch companies breaking the rules — measures that contributed to prevent the region’s old growth trees from being clearcut. 

Engler argues that when donors eschew funding for social movements and mass protests, leveraging instead only “inside game” advocacy, they “set their sights on narrow victories.”

Getting linked to movements: A little help from their friends

In the weeks leading up to the September 2019 climate protest, when Thunberg announced she would attend the Montreal demonstration, protest organizers quickly realized they had a problem: the small-scale speakers they had planned to use wouldn’t cut it. 

Staff at the David Suzuki Foundation who were working closely with local youth organizers managed to get a quote for a professional sound system, but it was pricey — nearly $200,000, St-Pierre recalls. DSF had been able to raise about $10,000, St-Pierre says, but that left them a mile away from their fundraising goal. 

Knowing their commitment to climate work, a DSF staffer who had an existing working relationship with St-Pierre reached out to him, asking if the foundation would help. Seeing the alignment, St-Pierre emailed the foundation’s board members, asking for $100,000. The response was a quick “Yes.” 

Alongside, St-Pierre recalls, he reached out to another family foundation, who agreed to kick in an additional $50,000, giving DSF enough to rent the equipment. 

Were it not DSF staffers and others working closely with movement groups, the Trottier Family Foundation might not have known about the opportunity to support, St-Pierre says. At the time, they had a team of just three, he says, which didn’t provide enough capacity to be tightly linked with social movements. 

Beyond the Trottier Family Foundation, other Canadian foundations that have supported movements have also learned about opportunities to offer support to social movements through movement-connected partners. 

In 2021, for instance, the Catherine Donnelly Foundation learned through Stand.earth, an environmental non-profit, about an opportunity to provide funds to support the Wet’suwet’en people in the effort to resist TC Energy’s work to lay the Coastal GasLink Pipeline pipeline through their territory. 

The foundation, which operates in Toronto on the territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, saw the request for support as closely aligned with one of their priorities — of restoring the climate in a just and equitable way — and offered $40,000, says Anne Mark, the foundation’s director of programs. 

Though a different approach, the Houssian Foundation, which is headquartered in Vancouver, on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, has also supported grassroots organizing by way of partner organizations who have relationships with people involved in social movements. 

Rather than providing rapid response support directly to movement groups, however, the foundation has provided $50,000 per year for three years to the Urgent Action Fund, which pools capital and re-grants it to feminist and LGBTQ human rights defenders in many regions around the world. (To access support, organizers can email the fund requesting a grant of up to about $11,000, and can expect money to reach them within a week, if approved for funding.) 

Liacas says it makes good sense for foundations to partner with organizations that have pre-existing relationships to social movements. For one, he says, it allows funders to move quickly because they’re able to leverage trusting relationships; and second, it can help prevent funders from making “faux pas” in relationships with organizers.  

He says the gap between the culture and expectations of grassroots organizing and philanthropy is often vast. Funders or non-profit organizations can sometimes come to movements expecting that they will implement their plan or drive toward their social policy objectives. “That usually doesn’t start things [off] well,” he says.

Ashley Torres experienced this firsthand in 2019. 

Torres is a founding member of LPSU (whose name roughly translates to “the planet is inviting itself to university”), a grassroots student movement that was a driving force behind the Montreal climate protest. 

Torres says in the lead up to Sept. 27, 2019 demonstration, an NGO offered to pay for a bunch of large, theatrical balloons, which, they suggested, could create neat visuals for photo-ops. It’s a fun idea, but Torres says movement groups already had their own creative ideas for the day, and needed money instead for speakers, for a stage, and for transportation. 

“Sometimes [funders] just don’t get it because [they’re] not in that terrain,” she says. Torres suggests a better approach is for foundations to engage with movements with a more open mind about what they could fund. 

Liacas says partner organizations, like the Climate Justice Organizing Hub, an organization that supports climate justice groups to build capacity, which he founded, can help to serve as those bridge-builders, providing funders with knowledge about what’s happening in movement spaces and translating between philanthropic and activist worlds. 

But even for foundations who are keen to flow money to movements, how does it work when so many activist groups don’t have charitable status? 

‘Service agreements’ one tool for flowing money to social justice movement groups

Canadian foundations who offer funds to support social movement organizing say it’s not as tricky as you might think to put money into the hands of organizers. 

For the Trottier Family Foundation, offering money to help rent the sound system in 2019 was as easy as any other gift, St-Pierre says. In their case, they issued a grant to the David Suzuki Foundation, who then rented the set-up — simple as that. 

For the Catherine Donnelly Foundation, too, flowing money to support social movements has been straightforward. When working with a movement group that has a charitable partner, Mark says, they’ll simply flow the funds to that organization. In supporting Wet’suwet’en people in 2021, the foundation flowed the funds to the Salal Foundation, a Victoria-based charity, which then acted as a partner for organizers on the ground.

In instances when the foundation wants to flow funds directly to a non-charity — or in instances where a charitable partner, like Salal, is working with a movement organization directly — a funder can use a “service agreement,” Mark says. 

This is a basic contract that outlines the work the group will undertake on behalf of the funder and how those tasks align with the funder’s charitable objects. Under this arrangement, the funder must maintain “direction and control” over the fundee’s work. 

In 2020, for instance, the Catherine Donnelly Foundation used this approach when they provided $20,000 to a group called Reclaim Alberta to undertake a public awareness campaign and research about Alberta’s orphaned oil and gas wells. 

The Maytree Foundation, an Ontario-based foundation focused on systemic solutions to poverty, also uses these two approaches to funding movement groups, according to the foundation’s president, Elizabeth McIsaac. 

For the past three years, for example, they’ve provided grants directly to ACORN Canada, a membership-based community union of low and moderate-income people, which fights for fair banking, affordable housing, and accessible internet, among other issues, through the organization’s affiliated charity, ACORN Institute Canada. 

For groups the foundation has supported that do not have charitable status, like TTCRiders, a Toronto-based transit advocacy organization, Maytree has used a service agreement, McIsaac says. 

Jenn Miller, a director with the Atkinson Foundation, another private foundation that offers funding for social movement organizing, says issuing this funding to support activism is straightforward, in part, because movement groups don’t work in isolation. 

“By nature of the work, the movement organizers that we work with are working in a coalition and are networked with lots of different types of organizations,” they say. This can allow funders to continue to use a granting approach they’re familiar with, while increasing their support for movement groups. 

But even if it’s possible to fund social movements, aren’t there risks?

There’s a big difference between political activity and partisan activity: Atkinson Foundation

When deciding to transfer funds to DSF in 2019, Éric St-Pierre says he wasn’t too concerned about risk. They were issuing a grant to another registered charity to purchase a sound system — something that didn’t flag any concerns with staff or board. 

Still, Paul Engler writes in his 2018 article, funder perceptions of social movements as “risky” is one of the main barriers he’s observed to more money flowing to support this work. 

He cites conversations with funders and activists alike who say foundations resist giving money to social movement-led organizing work based on a feeling that charitable funds should not be used for such “politically driven” work. Some funders may also worry that supporting social movement groups could compromise their charitable status. 

But Miller says there’s a big difference between “political” and “partisan” activities — and that it’s wise for funders to not conflate the two. Providing funding to worker-led movement groups so they can advocate for decent work conditions, as Atkinson has for many years, is not offside with Canada Revenue Agency. It’s political, yes, but it’s not partisan. 

McIsaac, too, stresses that while Maytree supports groups like ACORN and TTC Riders, they also do not fund partisan activities. She adds, however, that foundations shouldn’t shy away from supporting people to speak out. “I think that protest is an important part of a living, breathing democracy,” she says. “You can’t be afraid of it.” 

Mira Oreck, the executive director of the Houssian Foundation agrees. Oreck says she believes a strong advocacy strategy requires both “outside game” strategies, like protest and canvassing, and “inside game” strategies like lobbying and other traditional policy work. “I really do believe it’s part of a larger puzzle,” she says. “I believe that an “outside game” is as important as an “inside game,” but one doesn’t work well without the other.” 

Yet despite her role as an activist, Torres is sympathetic to the concerns funders have. “I think it’s very normal to have that mindset of being scared of the repercussions,” she says.  

She adds, however, that with bigger risk can come bigger rewards in the way of social policy victories. “At the end of the day we need this change,” and funders can play an important role, she says. 

Miller adds that contrary to what some funders might think, social movement groups also often have complex accountability structures that guide their actions; and are very thoughtful about how and when they take on risk. 

In Montreal, Torres was one of 12 spokespeople for her organization during the Sept 27. 2019 demonstration. She didn’t just get the role by volunteering, however. Instead, she was voted into the role, she says, by dozens of other students who, in the lead up to the demonstration, collectively decided who would represent them, in addition to the movement’s key principles and policy demands. 

“We’re much more organized than what people think,” she says. “We don’t just organize a protest by just ‘calling it’ and then making some signs. There’s so much work being put into it, and so much more strategy as well around how things will unfold.” 

But does protest work? Climate discussions have moved ‘out in the wilderness’ and into the ‘mainstream’ 

In December 2020, a little over a year after the Trottier family and half a million others spilled onto the streets of Montreal, the city passed its climate plan. 

The plan adopted the most stringent regulations in Canada for greenhouse gas emissions for buildings, committed the city to plant 500,000 trees, and banned non-electric cars in the downtown core by 2030, among other measures. 

In marketing the plan, Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante referenced the demonstrations and the strong support shown by her city’s residents for bold climate action. 

Still, Liacas says, the scale of climate policy change that’s required to properly respond to the climate emergency on a national level has remained elusive. “Typically, these things come in waves and sometimes there needs to be a couple of waves and then a couple of years to fully express themselves in policy.” 

It’s for this reason the social movement veteran says it’s essential for funders to support organizing long before a “movement moment” occurs. “Usually by the time thousands of people are in the streets, it’s too late for a funder to be involved in a useful way,” he says. 

Torres underscores just how challenging the ebbs of social movement organizing can be for morale — and how valuable it is for funders to offer support long-term. 

She says it’s during these “low points” that movement groups rebuild and restructure, strengthening their capacity to develop policies that support their work longer-term. She cites, for instance, the importance of developing a protocol for dealing with sexual harassment — without which, a movement group could be destabilized should an allegation be raised. 

“The low points are very difficult, but are just as important, because they will determine the high points,” she says. 

Planting seeds for the next moment of whirlwind

Since marching in Montreal, the Trottier Family Foundation has boosted their support for social movements. Board members were already committed to that direction, St-Pierre says, but their experience that day in September 2019 strengthened their resolve. 

In the intervening years, they’ve shifted their funding processes so that St-Pierre can now approve rapid response grants of up to $100,000 when they align with one of the foundation’s existing priority themes. 

The Foundation has also served as the founding funder for the Climate Justice Organizing Hub, providing about $600,000 over the past two years to get the initiative up and running. In addition, they’ve offered funding for a new campaign which aims to build momentum to change municipal policies in Quebec to prohibit the installation of natural gas in new homes.  

Being at the protest, St-Pierre says, was an important moment for his family. Surrounded by hundreds of thousands of others, fighting for change, “it reinforced the urgency of the climate crisis,” he says, “and reinforced our need to do more.” 

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