We work on several projects on the theme of wealth redistribution, which we believe is critical to supporting all other work we do. Our goal is to activate larger flows of money on more empowering terms to nourish grassroots movements, solidarity economies, and Black and Indigenous land sovereignty. Our resources draw on the Law Center’s experience supporting such movements, and our hypothesis is that funders would more boldly and creatively resource social movements if provided legal resources better aligned with movement values.

This work builds on our prior projects focused on Mutual Aid and Grassroots Finance—for example, supporting the Next Egg community to divest their retirement savings from Wall Street and helping the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative prepare a grassroots investment offering. In all of this work, we challenge dominant approaches to finance and philanthropy.

Resources

We are partnering with donor organizers and funder coalitions to provide them support to democratize philanthropy and mobilize assets. By creating legal resources, templates, and offerings that support existing networks of funders, we want to change the narrative of what the law allows funders to do. Since we believe in democratizing access to law and reducing dependency on lawyers, we strive to create free accessible resources such as:

🧰 Legal Toolkit: Funding Economic Democracy (2022)

Our flagship resource to help funders and intermediary nonprofits channel resources to frontline communities, cooperatives, and democratic organizations. Includes sample legal documents, analysis on the changing definition of "charitable," and how funders can make grants directly to non-501c3 cooperatives.

📝 Endowments in the Age of Extinction (2023)

In this blog post, we explain how foundations can legally activate their endowments to fight climate and economic crises. In addition to demystifying charitable endowments, we share ten strategies foundations can use to "break" their endowments and redistribute that wealth to movements.

📕 Beginner's Guide to Divesting from Militarism (2024)

Building on our February 2024 event series on "Embodied Divestment for a Ceasefire," our FAQ guide combines legal and financial insights with somatic and creative practices. In solidarity with calls to divest from genocide in Palestine, this offering is designed to help individuals remove their investments from militarism, war, and Wall Street more broadly.

🗃️ The Next Egg Resource Library (2022)

From 2019 to 2022, the Law Center co-led TheNextEgg.org, where we built tools so people could invest retirement savings in their communities. This large resource library collects many of the resources we created. We’ve moved away from this project, and it is now managed by LIFT Economy. See our essay on our shift away from The Next Egg and our essay describing the structural problems of 401(k)s and IRAs.

Legal Support and Narrative Strategy

Additionally, we are providing direct legal support to a reparations trust in Massachusetts, a decolonial fund in Puerto Rico, and other grassroots-led projects to support wealth redistribution.

Finally, we have engaged in writing projects that more directly address the harmful frameworks that conventional philanthropy and finance operate within to hoard wealth and power:

📝 Countering Donor-Dominated Philanthropy (2024)

The Law Center submitted a public comment to the IRS in February 2024 about new proposed regulations of Donor Advised Funds. We see this intervention as harm reduction in a current context of unlimited donor control in the nonprofit sector. While our suggested changes alone would not transform philanthropy into grassroots-driven funding flows oriented towards movement solidarity, not charity, we would see it as a step in the right direction—curbing the commercial DAF industry.

📄 A Just Transition for Finance (2022)

The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative can be used as a case study to reimagine finance. How can social movements build their own financial infrastructure to transform society? This blog post considers what post-capitalist finance could look like (if post-capitalism included finance at all).

📜 Rethinking Retirement Savings (2021)

Our Harvard Law Review article discusses how the legal framework surrounding retirement accounts trap savings in extractive industries. It proposes an alternative framework in which people take control of their retirement savings to invest in local, sustainable, justice-oriented initiatives.

If you have feedback on our resources or would like to collaborate in this work, please feel free to email Mohit [at] theselc.org.