How To Transition From Charity Model To Solidarity Model

Why Charity Persists Despite Its Limitations

Understanding why the charity model is so persistent requires understanding the interests it serves — not just the interests of those who give, but the structural interests of the nonprofit sector itself.

The nonprofit industrial complex, a term developed by activists including INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, refers to the ways in which the nonprofit sector — despite its stated social justice mission — reproduces relationships of power that maintain the conditions it claims to address. The critique is not that individual nonprofits are cynical or corrupt, but that the structural incentives of the sector push even well-intentioned organizations toward charitable service delivery and away from power-building and structural change.

Nonprofit funding comes overwhelmingly from foundations, corporations, and wealthy individual donors — the same economic actors whose interests are served by the structural conditions producing poverty, housing instability, and other social problems. Foundations that fund poverty relief are typically capitalized by wealth accumulated through the same economic arrangements that produce poverty. They fund charitable service delivery, which manages the symptoms of these conditions, more readily than they fund organizing, advocacy, and power-building, which threaten to change the conditions themselves.

The grant application and reporting cycle creates organizational incentives to prioritize legible, measurable outputs (meals served, clients housed, people trained) over harder-to-measure outcomes (collective power built, structural change achieved). This is not a conspiracy — it is a predictable consequence of accountability structures designed for service delivery rather than for social change.

The result is what political scientist Jennifer Wolch called the "shadow state": a vast infrastructure of nonprofit organizations that delivers public services, substituting for state provision without the democratic accountability of state institutions, while depending financially on private actors whose interests shape what services are delivered and on whose terms.

Transitioning from charity to solidarity requires grappling honestly with these structural pressures rather than imagining that good intentions are sufficient to overcome them.

The Power-Building Turn: Examples and Mechanisms

Several organizations have successfully made partial or substantial transitions from service delivery to power building, and their experiences illuminate what the transition requires.

The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), founded by Saul Alinsky in Chicago in 1940, established a model that explicitly rejected charitable service delivery in favor of organizing for political power. IAF affiliates — which operate in dozens of American cities — do not deliver services. They build dues-paying organizations of churches, schools, labor unions, and other civic institutions, train leaders from those institutions, and organize political campaigns around issues identified by members. The IAF model has won significant concrete victories: living wage ordinances, community benefit agreements, school reform campaigns, immigrant rights protections.

The political philosophy underlying the IAF model holds that power, not service, is the appropriate response to structural inequality. Services are provided by systems of power — by governments, by corporations, by markets. The way to improve services is to build power capable of demanding better from those systems, not to substitute private charitable services for better public ones.

The Right to the City alliance, mentioned in the previous article, represents a different model: a coalition of organizations that combine direct service (tenant organizing support, legal assistance) with political organizing and ideology development. Member organizations in the alliance work at multiple levels simultaneously — providing immediate support to people facing eviction while building the organizational capacity and political power to change eviction law and housing policy.

The Movement for Black Lives, emerging from the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2013-2014 and 2020, represents perhaps the most visible recent example of explicitly solidarity-model organizing at scale. The organizational entities associated with the M4BL explicitly reject the charitable service model and the nonprofit governance structures associated with it: they are membership organizations, they are accountable to impacted communities through explicit governance structures, and their goal is explicitly structural change rather than individual service delivery.

The Language Transition: Naming What Changes

One of the most important and most underestimated aspects of the transition from charity to solidarity is the language shift.

Charity language centers the giver: "we serve," "we provide," "our clients," "our beneficiaries." Solidarity language centers the community: "we organize," "we fight alongside," "our members," "our people." This is not merely semantic. Language shapes organizational culture, shapes how staff relate to the people they work with, and shapes what is legible as success.

The language of "clients" is particularly consequential. A client is a passive recipient of professional service. A member is an active participant in a collective enterprise. Organizations that have made the transition from charity to solidarity consistently describe renaming their relationship to the people they work with — from clients to members, from beneficiaries to participants, from the served to the community — as a pivotal step that had real organizational consequences.

Similarly, the language of "needs" versus "assets" matters. Asset-based community development (ABCD), developed by John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, reframes the assessment question from "what does this community lack?" to "what does this community have?" This is not optimistic denial of real deprivation — it is recognition that the resources and knowledge of community members are the primary resource for community development, and that external expertise plays a supporting rather than leading role.

Governance Redesign: The Hard Part

The most difficult and most consequential aspect of transitioning from charity to solidarity is governance redesign — changing who actually makes decisions.

Most charitable nonprofits have governance structures that concentrate authority at the top: a board of directors composed primarily of donors, professionals, and community leaders from outside the affected community; an executive director who manages the organization's daily operation; professional staff who deliver services; and "clients" or "beneficiaries" who receive services and have no formal role in organizational decision-making.

The solidarity model inverts or disrupts this structure. The people most affected by the problem the organization addresses should have genuine authority over organizational direction. This can take several forms.

Some organizations have adopted majority-affected governance requirements: bylaws that require a majority of board seats to be held by people who are directly affected by the organization's focus area. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, for example, is governed by a board composed entirely of domestic workers. This is not advisory — it is decision-making authority.

Others have adopted participatory budgeting mechanisms: processes through which community members make direct decisions about how organizational resources are allocated, rather than leaving these decisions to staff or board. Participatory budgeting originated as a municipal governance innovation in Porto Alegre, Brazil in the 1980s but has been adapted for use within organizations.

The worker cooperative model — in which the people who do the organization's work are also its governing members — is another approach, applicable particularly to organizations that employ community members as service providers.

Each of these models faces resistance. Board members who joined because they believed their professional expertise and networks were the organization's primary assets must accept that those assets are secondary to the knowledge and agency of community members. Executive directors who built organizations must give up control. Funders who expect to report to a professional, credentialed leadership must accept accountability to a different kind of authority.

This resistance is not mere selfishness — it reflects genuine uncertainty about whether less-credentialed, more directly-affected leadership can manage complex organizations effectively. The evidence, from organizations that have made this transition, is that it can — and that the outcomes, both for the people served and for the political impact of the organization, are better.

The Funder Relationship: Honesty as Strategy

The relationship with funders is perhaps the most fraught aspect of the transition. Foundations and major donors have funded an organization based on a particular model and set of expectations. Telling them that the organization is changing its model — moving from service delivery to organizing, from client relationships to membership relationships, from addressing symptoms to building power — can threaten funding relationships that the organization depends on.

Some organizations avoid this honestly, using solidarity language in their external communications while maintaining charity structures internally. This produces what sociologists call "institutional isomorphism" under pressure — the organization presents a solidarity face while its internal structures and power dynamics remain unchanged.

The organizations that have successfully made genuine transitions are typically those that have had explicit conversations with their funders about the transition — explaining what they are doing and why, providing evidence for why power-building produces better outcomes than service delivery, and being willing to lose some funders whose priorities are genuinely misaligned with solidarity organizing.

This requires knowing which funders to fight for and which to let go. Some foundations explicitly fund power-building: the Solidaire Network, the Emergent Fund, the Haymarket People's Fund, and several others have explicitly aligned their funding strategies with solidarity organizing rather than charitable service delivery. Cultivating relationships with these funders is a strategic priority for organizations in transition.

It also requires being honest about what change is possible within the existing funding landscape. Some aspects of a charity model may be necessary to maintain certain funding relationships. The question is whether those constraints are acceptable — whether the funding that comes with them is worth the organizational constraint it imposes.

Measuring Solidarity: The Metric Problem

One of the deepest challenges in transitioning from charity to solidarity is the metrics problem. Service delivery produces legible numbers: meals served, households housed, people trained, cases closed. Power-building is harder to measure: collective capacity increased, narrative shifted, political relationships built, new leaders developed.

The transition from charity to solidarity requires developing new measurement frameworks that capture what actually matters — collective power and structural change — rather than defaulting to the metrics inherited from service delivery models.

Several frameworks have been developed. The Power Building Framework, developed by Generative Somatics and used by several foundations funding social change, measures collective power through indicators including member development, organizational capacity, narrative and cultural shift, and policy and systems change. The Race Forward organization's movement metrics framework measures similar dimensions with explicit attention to racial equity.

These frameworks are more complex to operationalize than service delivery metrics. They require mixed-method approaches — combining quantitative indicators with qualitative assessment. They require longer timeframes, because power-building operates on timescales that are incompatible with annual grant reporting cycles. And they require funders who are willing to accept more uncertainty in exchange for the possibility of more durable change.

The metric problem is ultimately a power problem: who has the authority to define what success looks like? Solidarity organizations that have developed genuine community accountability structures find that community members often have clearer and more useful definitions of success than outside funders — because community members know what conditions they are trying to change and have a direct stake in whether those changes happen.

The Irreversible Step

Organizations that have made this transition describe a point of no return — a moment when the solidarity model became genuinely embedded and reverting to charity became both practically difficult and politically unthinkable.

For some organizations, this moment was a governance change: restructuring the board to give majority authority to affected community members. Once those members are in decision-making positions, the organization's direction is shaped by their priorities rather than the priorities of the previous power structure.

For others, it was a public commitment: explicitly naming the organization as a solidarity organization, an organizing project, a power-building institution — in funders' reports, public communications, and job descriptions. This public commitment creates accountability to a set of stakeholders — community members, partner organizations, ideologically aligned funders — who will call out backsliding.

For still others, it was a hiring decision: bringing on an executive director or senior leader who came from an organizing background rather than a service delivery background, and who built an organizational culture that embedded solidarity values in daily practice.

These moments of irreversibility are not automatic — they are the product of deliberate choices, often made by specific people who understood what they were doing. But they are possible, and the organizations that have made them demonstrate that the transition is not a utopian aspiration but a practical organizational achievement.