Keywords

As an undergraduate student, Todd earned money towards his tuition by taking a part-time telefundraising job for his university. On his first shift, he raised over $1000, more than any other student in the call room. He received a $1 bonus, a bag of chips, and something he did not quite grasp at the time: a new career direction. Soon promoted to student supervisor, he worked at the front desk of the Advancement office. From that position, he began to see beyond the telephones. As he recalled:

I saw the job postings for Advancement Professionals, and I’d see some of them coming to the office dressed up very nicely and so on, in suits like I’m wearing today. And I was like, wow, these guys look like they’re doing well. And I saw the pay scale. And it was like, wow, these guys are actually doing well! (Todd)

Upon graduating, Todd jettisoned plans for law school. It was 1995. His university had embarked on a capital campaign, and he had been “tapped on the shoulder” and offered a full-time job doing “grunt work” for donor recognition and special events. He explained, “It was frequent with confident students that if they wanted a job in Alumni Affairs or in Advancement that [the university] would create a place for [recent graduates].” At an event for donors, Todd encountered the university’s Vice-President, Advancement for the first time:

He gave this amazing speech, and these donors are crying and they’re so compelled … [The university] had taken generations of their family from poverty to affluence, and how appreciative they were and how this was the greatest gift that they could possibly give back and gave them the most amount of satisfaction. (Todd)

Todd was also deeply moved, but for different reasons: “I said, ‘Boom, this is exactly what I want to do! And one day I want to be better than this guy.’” From that moment, he said, “I actually really have not turned back.”

It did not take Todd long to be promoted to Advancement Officer. Three years later, he was still finding thrills in fundraising for the university when he was headhunted to take a position with one of Canada’s most prominent disease-related health charities. He turned to a mentor for advice: “I got this call from [the charity] that wants to hire me and they’re almost willing to pay me anything I want to go there, which is flattering, but is this the right career step for me?”

Urged to make the move, he went and led the charity’s annual gifts programme, but only for a year. “I said, I think I need something that’s going to give me a lot more initiative and goals and contact with donors. And I wanted to be in Major Gifts. I didn’t want to be pegged as an Annual Giving guy.” Whereas annual gifts are usually gifts of cash, given out of income, and used for a variety of general purposes and day-to-day operations, major gifts are given out of assets and designated to endowments, buildings, or significant special needs. Major gifts are often pledged over three to five years on terms stipulated in legal agreements or in the donor’s will, in the case of charitable bequests. Major gifts are valued at several times the amount of a typical annual gift. Although organizations receive considerably fewer major gifts, they constitute, by far, the largest percentage of nonprofit revenues.

The challenge of converting prospects to major donors appealed to Todd. So, when a U.S.-based international humanitarian charity advertised the inaugural position of Director of Development, Todd applied and got the job. He coordinated fundraising in over 35 countries, “met some of the most powerful, influential people in the States,” and “got to be the front person in terms of solicitation.” Returning to Canada after three years, he then led two successive multimillion-dollar campaigns in the position of Campaign Director for two different arts organizations. In 2008, at the time I interviewed him, he had just stepped into a new position, the top fundraising role for the provincial branch of a major national health charity, his sixth appointment in 13 years.

As an emerging specialist in major gifts fundraising, Todd especially “loved the exhilaration of speaking with and engaging people,” and he was proud of what his fundraising had accomplished. Beaming with the satisfaction of his work, he described his profession as the “business of hope.”

Taking up Todd’s expression, this book examines professional fundraising as a “business of hope.” By listening to the reflections of 50 experienced Canadian fundraisers on their careers from at least the mid-1990s through to the global financial crisis of 2008, and by situating their stories and perspectives within social change on national and global scales, I consider the political significance of the “business of hope.”

At a minimum, “the business of hope” referred to the promise Todd saw in fundraising to satisfy his career ambitions as he hoped to follow the mounting success of his more senior colleagues who had an early start in a burgeoning field. Fundraisers’ occupational mobility and achievement is a minor theme of this book. The major subject, and the overarching circumstance that made possible Todd’s advancement, is the consolidation of neoliberalism as the prevailing policy framework of the state, and its ascendance as a governing rationality. I argue that the present-day fundraising industry grew out of the merger of business and hope in the form of a utopian market rationality that has been on the ascent since the early 1980s and had emerged as the dominant governing rationality by 1995.

The Participants in This Study

The research for this book draws on qualitative interviews with prominent fundraisers from many nonprofit sub-sectors and specializations working in several major cities across Canada. Todd was one of the most junior of the 50 people I interviewed, with 13 years of full-time work experience. All but one of the 50 had at least 10 years’ experience and only 8 others had slightly less experience than Todd. Half had been fundraisers for over 19 years, while seven had started over 25 years ago. The most senior of the participants, Peter, started working in international development in 1975 when fundraising was part of a multifaceted job portfolio. Peter’s first full-time fundraising position with a Canadian charity did not begin until the mid-1980s.

As I detail in the Appendix on research methods, the fundraisers who volunteered to be interviewed included 36 women and 18 men. Twelve worked as nonprofit fundraising consultants whose agencies ranged from full-service firms that frequently led multimillion-dollar campaigns to smaller boutique companies that offered specialized expertise. Nine of the fundraisers worked for hospital foundations, and another six were employed by various health charities. Eight worked for educational institutions, mostly universities. Another eight worked for a social service charity, including two community foundations and a charitable organization that supported start-up business ventures. The remaining seven fundraised for organizations that benefited the arts, the environment, international humanitarian causes, and a religious organization. Collectively, over their careers, this group of 50 had held fundraising positions in 283 organizations, and the consultants had served hundreds more nonprofit clients. On the whole, they were experiencing considerable career success. As an indication of their status, 35 of the 50 held the highest possible rank in large nonprofit organizations or consultancy firms, or they had sole responsibility for all fundraising operations of the smaller organizations in which they were employed.

This set of experienced fundraisers had witnessed, experienced, and led profound changes in the fundraising industry. Most were involved in the leadership of professional associations for fundraising, and many had taught in new fundraising training, certification, and educational programmes. Many held the first fundraising position of its kind in their organizations. As a group, they have made their mark on the charitable organizations for which they have worked and on the nonprofit sector overall.

For example, Gordon’s 25-year career with two prominent consulting firms had involved international travel and work in all parts of Canada. For the better part of his career, he orchestrated the fundraising of major gifts for large capital campaigns across the province of Ontario. To illustrate his reach, he told a story about the successful end to a capital campaign for a new satellite campus of a university. At a wine and cheese celebration, one of the top volunteers reflected, “You know, Gord, this campaign was so easy, we probably didn’t even need you guys.” Laughing at the comment, Gordon told me, “I took it as a compliment, the fact that he wasn’t there when we were doing the heavy lifting for the building. This was so easy? I’m glad you think that (laughing).” Typical of the fundraisers in this study, Gordon operated in the background and gave volunteers and donors the credit for securing major gift agreements. Only those close to him knew the impact of his work. As he told me, “I can take my kids, and we can go for a drive and wherever it is, I can go, ‘Look. I was involved there, and with that. See that thing over there? I raised money for that.’”

Gordon’s career impact and Todd’s quick rise in the profession occurred in the context of Canada’s neoliberalization, which is the driving interest of this book. Though drawing on interviews with fundraisers, this book is not primarily about philanthropic fundraising per se. Research about fundraising from a practitioner’s perspective abounds. Indeed, three members of this study had each already authored a book about how to fundraise, and two others were making regular research contributions to trade periodicals. Within the academic literature of philanthropy, however, relatively little has been written about fundraising as an expert occupation. Philanthropy research is substantially focused on donors’ motivations for giving, institutional forms of philanthropy and their history, the potential of philanthropy for positive change, and its tendency for harm (Damon & Verducci, 2006; Mack, 2013; Reich et al., 2016). The scant academic research on fundraising has explored topics such as professionalization (Proper & Caboni, 2014; Warren et al., 2016); characteristics of the fundraising workforce (Lindahl & Conley, 2002); the regulation, management, and ethics of fundraising (Lee, 2003; Phillips, 2012); the public image of fundraisers (McGee & Donoghue, 2009); and comparative analysis of national fundraising regimes (Breeze & Scaife, 2015).

By situating the careers of Canadian fundraisers within the welfare state transformations that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s, this book contributes to research on fundraising and to the broader literature of philanthropy. Ultimately, however, this is a study of social change as it was lived through an occupational group that was thrown up on the wave of neoliberalization and surfed that wave successfully. Just as waves can reshape a shoreline, neoliberalism wrought a new political landscape that fundraisers grew into. By studying fundraisers’ accounts of their careers, I aim to understand the relationship of these careers to neoliberalism, how neoliberalization has shaped fundraisers’ political subjectivity, and how fundraisers in turn have had a role in shaping Canada’s neoliberalization.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Neoliberalism?

Examined through the rise of the fundraising industry in the 1990s and early 2000s and the perspectives of those leading fundraisers, the object of my research is the process of neoliberalization in Canada. I understand neoliberalism as a set of economic doctrines that restructured the welfare state, and a cultural matrix that became a governing rationality. However, neoliberalism as a change process is difficult to study. How do you catch a wave and pin it down?

The inception of neoliberalism is said to have been the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris in 1938, an event that drew together 26 European and American intellectuals united in their opposition to collectivism and their intention to reconstruct and revitalize liberalism (Dardot & Laval, 2013). Rejecting the classical liberal doctrine of laissez-faire, these first neoliberals called for strong states to take an active role in the economy, but to limit that role to establishing and enforcing private property rights, competitive markets, and free trade. Their early meetings and writings laid out the intellectual and policy foundations for an elite-led project that could challenge nineteenth- and twentieth-century social movements and stop governments from implementing policies for wealth redistribution, labour rights, industrial and financial regulation, economic and social planning, and the expansion of social protections, which had widespread popular support (Dardot & Laval, 2013).

Neoliberal ideas remained on the academic and political margins for about three decades, disseminating gradually through the work of well-endowed think tanks, most notably the Mont Pelerin Society founded in 1947. Eminent academic champions based in prestigious universities in Geneva, London, and Chicago worked to give neoliberalism a footing in international governance institutions in the 1970s, which imposed neoliberal programmes of structural adjustment and export-led development in former colonies. The election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in 1980, and Brian Mulroney in Canada in 1984 marked the ascendance of neoliberalism from fringe political philosophy to dominant political-economic orthodoxy. An assortment of pro-market policies and prescriptions typified neoliberalism in the wealthy industrial countries: decreased social spending, reduced labour costs, increased securitization, commodification of public goods, and the devolution of responsibility for human and environmental wellbeing onto smaller social units including families and individuals. The market-oriented rationales for these measures gained ubiquity and the status of common sense. Their outcomes came to appear as normal, just the way things are.

Whereas neoliberalism’s proponents initially coined the term to promote a reconstructed liberalism, the concept has come to be deployed within a vast critical literature on neoliberalism’s harmful social impacts, such as extreme wealth inequality, sacrifice zones exploited and abandoned by unregulated industry, national and local governments made subservient to speculative capital movements, lives made precarious and cut off from public goods in the push to privatize. The scholarly critique of neoliberalism has been so expansive that charting and comparing theoretical approaches has itself become a key contribution to the literature (England & Ward, 2016; Larner, 2000; Mudge, 2016). Stephanie Mudge (2016), for example, presents three lenses for observing neoliberalism: as an historic phase of capitalism featuring post-Cold War American geopolitical hegemony and the dominance of international financial capital; as a political strategy of governments to reconfigure social life according to a market model; and as a cultural project to instil market values, such as entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and individualism, into daily life. Neoliberalism, she argues, is “irreducibly all of these things” (p. 93).

In view of expanding conceptualizations of neoliberalism, several thinkers problematize the concept (Eagleton-Pierce, 2016; Hall, 2011; Guthman, 2008a; Mudge, 2016; Peck, 2013; Springer, 2016). They worry that neoliberalism’s proliferating usage has reduced it to a general-purpose label for changes in contemporary capitalism (Eagleton-Pierce, 2016). In considering whether neoliberalism has turned into a mere buzzword, they have weighed the importance of what the term might still accomplish with the inadequacy of alternatives and concluded that the concept is “fuzzy and politicized, but as-yet irreplaceable” (Mudge, 2016, p. 93). However, this questioning of neoliberalism’s ontological status—how in seeming to describe everything, it may explain nothing—does not tempt these thinkers to pin down a definition. On the contrary, their concern about the vagueness of “neoliberalism” is matched by their determination not to essentialize a process that has never been singular or stable. They accomplish a non-essentializing analysis through three commitments that guide my own analysis in this book: contextualization, comparison, and broad theorizing.

The first commitment is to study neoliberalism in context and to recognize it as complexly variegated and contradictory. Some scholars have contributed to this stance by writing about local “neoliberalisms” and about “neoliberalization” as an ongoing, adaptive process, not a universal or static condition (Springer, 2016). Others have periodized neoliberalism to emphasize different phases, such as the “roll back” moments of gutting state capacity for social protections, and the “roll out” moments of imposing neoliberal institutional forms (Peck & Tickell, 2002).

To contextualize neoliberalism is to aim for nuanced accounts that connect local to trans-local scales and that observe the dialectical and constitutive relationships between neoliberalisms at different levels of abstraction. Accordingly, this study places neoliberalism in the context of English-speaking Canada during the apogee of neoliberalization, from the mid-1990s to the financial crisis and recession of 2008. By tracing the neoliberal careers and political subjectivities of fundraisers, I describe the workings of particular neoliberal policies and discourses within what Canadian fundraisers call “the sector,” the world of nonprofit and voluntary sector institutions they inhabit in their professional lives.

My second commitment follows from the first: to study neoliberalism in relation to its “others.” Abstract neoliberalism appears monolithic, but as Peck (2013) argues, “residues of preexisting social formations will never be entirely erased or rendered inert” (p. 154). Vrasti and Montsion (2014, p. 4) remind us to situate neoliberalism as, “the latest phase of a longue durée of capitalist accumulation that goes back to feudal land enclosures, the inquisition, 18th century industrialization and urbanization, 19th century institutions of liberal democracy, and 500 years of colonial and imperial subjugation.” Studying neoliberalism in relation to its “others” means viewing it as a process of continuity and change and recognizing ways in which all historic periods of capitalism remain embedded in the present.

Just as neoliberalism is contingent on what came before, neoliberalization is also reactive to its challengers, however distant or marginalized. These challengers include neoliberalism’s own variants elsewhere and over time, its crises and disruptions, and “its various competitors, would-be successors, and alternatives” (Peck, 2013, p. 135). For the purpose of this study, the primary challenger to neoliberalization in turn-of-the-century Canada was the residues of post-war Keynesian welfarism, as I will describe in Chaps. 2 and 3. Since the project of free-market reform can never be fully realized, the course of neoliberalism is indeterminate. Identifying neoliberalism’s “others” is key to understanding how it achieves its dominance, as well as to imagining possible post-neoliberal political futures.

A third commitment of my analysis of neoliberalism is to bring into dialogue two divergent theoretical approaches—political economy and neo-Foucauldian perspectives—by recognizing their significant overlap without minimizing their disagreement (Guthman, 2008a; Springer, 2012). The political economy literature tends to conceive neoliberalism as an agenda of pro-business activists to redistribute wealth upwards and to fashion the ideological schemas and rhetorical devices, such as appeals to “freedom” and the Thatcherite slogan, “there is no alternative,” which make the growth of inequality acceptable (Harvey, 2005, pp. 39–40). The emphasis on neoliberalism’s agents and its ideological underpinnings goes a long way to explaining why neoliberalism is not the exclusive domain of the traditional political right. However, political economy approaches struggle to explain the conundrum that even people who reject neoliberalism “writ large” often engage in practices that end up furthering neoliberal culture (Guthman, 2008a, p. 1172), as interviews with nonprofit fundraisers will show. Even fundraisers for agencies whose causes are most compromised by neoliberal programmes (such as those that serve low-income and vulnerable people) appear constrained to speaking within neoliberal categories.

To interpret fundraisers’ positionality I engage with scholars inspired by Michel Foucault’s approach to power. I especially draw on Wendy Brown (2015), who demonstrates the relevance of Foucault’s College de France lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1978–79, to understanding how neoliberalism has hollowed out twenty-first-century Western democracy. Following Foucault, Brown argues that one of the most successful neoliberal political strategies has been to demote government while governing populations “at a distance” from coercive state institutions. To do so, neoliberalism constructs society as a self-regulating market, models social relations on competing enterprises, and shapes human subjects as essentially economic creatures: homo oeconomicus. In this way, neoliberalism achieves a level of consensus and ubiquity more fundamental than ideology. It governs by managing, “to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decision-making criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic” (Foucault, 2003, p. 207). It governs by inviting its subjects to become self-governing and self-responsible in all areas of life. For example, we see this governance at work in nonprofit management where organizations hold themselves accountable for providing value to stakeholders (including government funders) through annual reporting, audited financials, operational efficiencies, labour flexibility, cost-cutting, and other corporate best practices.

Neoliberal rationality, Brown (2015) argues, inculcates a market orientation as everyday common sense. Governed by this economic rationality, we seek to be self-reliant individuals, engaged in competitive, entrepreneurial activity to enhance our own “human capital.” Mirroring the financial economy, our preoccupation is to think of ourselves (as well as our community, workplace, school, or nation) as an enterprise in which we are invested. The language of markets pervades even non-market spheres such as health, relationships, political, and religious life, where we seek to improve our rankings, ratings, and portfolio assets to maximize future value (p. 36).

With Brown (2015) and other neo-Foucauldian scholars, I am interested in how neoliberal economic rationality primes some patterns of thought and being, and obscure others (Guthman, 2008a, 2008b). Specifically, I observe how fundraisers’ optimism and idealism are tied to their acceptance of competition, individualism (e.g., as evident in tax-aversion), and sense of the inevitability of public sector restructuring. I also explore how neoliberal discourses substitute market values for the political values associated with the welfare era, and how this substitution makes it possible to rationalize wealth inequality, depoliticize public subsidies of philanthropy, and represent elite activity as democratic, as many fundraisers do.

I will examine these arguments by drawing on fundraisers’ interviews in the chapters to come. In Chap. 2, I describe fundraisers’ political context with an overview of three areas of policy change that took place simultaneously around the pivotal year 1995 (which happened to be the year that Todd, from the opening of this chapter, began his career): first, the start of downloading, core funding cuts, and the turn to competitive proposal funding of nonprofit social services and the arts; second, the inauguration of the Voluntary Sector Roundtable; and third, changes to the charitable tax credit to incentivize major donations. This constellation of policies laid the groundwork for the two most significant trends in philanthropy that fundraisers identified: more competition among charities and a shift from mass-appeal to major gifts fundraising, resulting in more revenues being generated from fewer donors. Chapter 2 concludes with an overview of a fundamental debate over changing the Income Tax Act to favour major donors.

In the subsequent three chapters, I explore changes in how Canadian fundraisers constructed the meanings of philanthropy, fundraising, and their own careers. In Chap. 3, I describe the shifting emphasis from fundraising for special causes and innovation within an overarching social safety net to the urgency fundraisers felt to create a culture of philanthropy in the face of government retreat from social, cultural, and environmental responsibilities. In Chap. 4, I consider fundraisers’ work as a vocation. While most fundraisers would say their purpose was to match donors’ philanthropic ambitions with organizations’ greatest needs, the field increasingly emphasized donor-centric approaches that placed donors’ agency and gratification as fundraisers’ priority. I present the story of one fundraiser whose critique of the profession put the dominant practices in vivid relief. In Chap. 5, I look at Canadian fundraisers’ tendency to make cross-national comparisons about fundraising landscapes, looking especially to the United States. As neoliberalism erased Canada’s social advantage vis-à-vis the U.S. in terms of the generosity of social programmes, fundraisers took up concerns about Canada’s “generosity gap” in terms of individual donations. I conclude the book in Chap. 6 by reflecting on fundraisers’ contributions to neoliberal politics of hope. The Appendix offers a detailed account of my approach to this research and analysis.