Keywords

In the late 1980s, Ruby, an administrative assistant for a travel agency, responded to a newspaper ad for a telethon secretary at a children’s hospital foundation. This would be her entry point into a stellar fundraising career. “I fell into [fundraising] by accident,” she reflected, “which I think is pretty common for people who have been in this industry for as long as I have.” She did not know of any of her contemporaries who set out to work as fundraisers. “It really is only recently that I’ve seen people start to choose fundraising as a career coming out of high school or university,” she observed.

In this chapter, I consider the extraordinary career trajectories of Ruby’s cohort of Canadian fundraisers who were excelling at their work through the 1990s and the years leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. Drawing on their interviews, I describe how Ruby and 49 of her peers understand their work as meaningful to them beyond other jobs or careers they may have had. As other research with fundraisers has found, the participants in this study viewed their work as a vocation to better society (Breeze, 2017).

In 1905, Max Weber showed how the notion of a secular calling became widespread among European Protestants in tandem with the rising spirit of capitalism in the sixteenth century. I am interested in exploring how twenty-first-century fundraisers similarly embraced their work as a vocation: “the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume” (Weber, 1958, p. 80).

My conversations with fundraisers showed that not all interpreted their vocation in the same way. Some sought to affect change by helping institutions achieve their mission. These vocational orientations often reinforced neoliberalism by normalizing and depoliticizing the reconfigured relationships among governments, nonprofit organizations, citizens, and business elites that gained momentum in the 1990s. Some fundraisers primarily sought to change individuals. This group spoke of their work in quasi-religious terms about a mission to help wealthy people become more spiritually fulfilled by practicing generosity. The effect of this vocational rationale, beyond legitimizing economic inequality, was to sanctify the mega-philanthropy that neoliberalism was making possible.

Only one of the fundraisers whom I interviewed, Vivian, created a vocation to change society through grassroots fundraising for social movement organizations contributing to human rights and environmental justice. Her story illustrated the difference between neoliberal and social justice-oriented discourses of social responsibility. Vivian’s willingness to take political action, not only through her fundraising causes but also in the way she conducted herself as a fundraiser, brought her into conflict with colleagues, a conflict that highlighted the dominant conception among fundraisers of what it meant to do good in the world.

Accidental Careers

The fundraisers interviewed for this study began their careers in the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, but most, like Ruby, began in the late 1980s when fundraising was still a new occupation. Most had another career before fundraising. Only 19 of the 50 participants were introduced to fundraising as a component of their first job. Nine of these launched their fundraising careers starting as university students working part-time in the Advancement office, soliciting donations from alumni over the telephone among other jobs. None of the 50 claimed to have had an early life ambition to become a professional fundraiser. Even among those whose first job involved fundraising, few embarked on the work as a consciously chosen career. On the contrary, whether fundraising was a first job or a job switch, most participants spoke of “falling into fundraising” or starting the career “by accident.”

If Ruby’s “accidental” start in fundraising was typical of her generation, so too was her soaring career trajectory, which eventually made her vice president of a national consulting firm:

So, I was there [with the hospital foundation] for 13 years and rose through the ranks, and when I left, I was Director of Corporate Major Gifts within the organization. So, within a 13-year period I went from a secretary to a director position, which was phenomenal because, to be honest, one of the reasons I had looked to make a change with my previous employer was because I was pigeon-holed as a secretary and was having a hard time trying to get out of that hole within the confines of the organization I worked for. (Ruby)

Sharon similarly started out in an unfulfilling career with no prospects for advancement. Realizing she was going nowhere professionally, she changed course and accepted a position with an established social service organization. Within 19 years of her switch, she was head-hunted into her fourth fundraising role, a top-level executive position for one of Canada’s largest hospital foundations. She described how the demand for fundraisers came about at the time when she was gaining experience.

[The first organization I worked at] has been the training ground for lots of senior fundraisers because, that many years ago, that was 1990, there weren’t nearly as many charities fundraising. The government was still covering lots of costs. […] And you know, quite frankly, even universities were starting, but hospitals, many hospitals weren’t really actively fundraising yet. (Sharon)

As Chap. 2 details, the fundraising industry expanded in the years following cuts to transfer payments from the federal to provincial governments. As successive governments restructured social spending, nonprofit and voluntary organizations needed to ramp up fundraising. Designated fundraising positions and fundraising consultant work emerged as job opportunities just as public and private sector careers were being eroded by the double whammy of government cutbacks and recession in the early 1990s.

Glenn, for instance, identified fundraising as an occupation only after training and practicing as a social worker. His graduation with a Master of Social Work coincided with the imposition of Ontario’s “Common Sense Revolution,” a radical neoliberal programme of cutbacks to social services.

My intention was to go into the community organizing side of social work but Mike Harris [Ontario Premier, 1995-2002] had just to come to power and there were all kinds of cuts to social services and so there wasn’t a lot out there. But through information interviews, I learned about fundraising, that it was a profession. And the more I learned about it, the more I thought, wow, this sounds very interesting because it’s very relationship-oriented, you’re working for a cause, it’s entrepreneurial, it’s creative, so it seemed like a good fit for me. (Glenn)

As fundraising career paths opened before them, and these early entrants gained traction, Ruby, Sharon, Glenn, and others came to consider their seemingly accidental work as a vocation. Ruby was not alone in feeling that, “it was like it was meant-to-be.” Like many of her peers, she transformed her unforeseen entry into fundraising into a mission-filled expression of her life’s work.

Falling into a Vocation

These career stories align with Beth Breeze’s research with U.K. fundraisers about the nature of their occupation. In The New Fundraisers, Who Organises Charitable Giving in Contemporary Society (2017), Breeze found the vast majority of her interview respondents regarded their work as “more than a job” that pays the bills but a calling to make positive change (p. 173). Unprompted, fundraisers spoke of the satisfaction they derived from doing work that makes a difference in the world.

The generation of successful Canadian fundraisers whom I interviewed, identified many ways their work felt satisfying: earning what many thought a good living, achieving career mobility, excelling at the technical aspects of their jobs, enjoying the pace and variety of the work, the challenge of meeting goals, and the pleasure of cultivating relationships. Even so, for most, fundraising was much more than a decent job and a good career choice.

These consistent findings that successful fundraisers view their work as a calling are not surprising. Acting on a sense of vocation as a fundraiser may actually propel career success (see Breeze, 2017, p. 173). Participants in my study made this point emphatically: when required to serve as a spokesperson for an organization’s mission, it helps to believe in that mission. For example, a senior fundraiser of 25 years, Ken argued that to be a successful fundraiser, you must “have a genuine and sincere interest in people and in the organization that you’re serving, a belief in its mission, its purpose, what it’s trying to accomplish to make society a better place.” Ken lamented the frequency of fundraisers “flitting around,” by serving a charity for two years before moving on to “the place across the street” for a “25% salary increase.” Another fundraiser, Bruce, worked for five organizations over 17 years, and claimed, “Whatever you are doing, you have to be really passionate about the cause.” Perhaps feeling susceptible to the kind of critique levelled by Ken in relation to frequently moving jobs for higher pay, Bruce added, “I think you just have to believe, also, on a more personal level, that you have a mission to create a better world. You have to really believe in doing that and making a difference.”

Believing they were following a calling was also a way for fundraisers to mitigate the stress of the work. As many pointed out, in this line of work failure is visible and quantifiable. Working as the only fundraiser, or as one of only a few staff, could be especially nerve-wracking when the continuity of programmes, services, and other staff members’ jobs depended upon meeting annual targets. In larger organizations, toxic work environments, so-called poisoned shops, were not uncommon, according to my participants. Despite these stressors, Michael, a veteran fundraiser of 34 years, typified the vocational attitude when he said: “I don’t want to ever think of myself as living off of philanthropy but living for philanthropy.”Footnote 1

Ways of Living for Philanthropy

As fundraisers constructed their vocation, they worked with and against clashing public images reflecting neoliberal culture. On the one hand, fundraisers could be regarded as heroic because they brought needed money to organizations that had been starved under neoliberal restructuring and austerity. Fundraisers were seen as mitigating the harshest effects of neoliberal policies by helping the nonprofit sector fill a role that had been undermined or vacated by government. Whether they were organizing mass participation events or brokering multimillion-dollar donations, they were champions who helped their organizations thrive in hard times.

On the other hand, neoliberal rationality of value-for-money placed fundraisers under scrutiny. Was their work effective and efficient? What were the costs of fundraising and what percentage of donations went towards overhead, including their own salaries? Fundraisers faced suspicion about the value of their jobs and whether they were benefitting unduly from the generosity of donors. Fundraisers in large organizations needed to establish their legitimacy against neoliberal denigration of bureaucrats in quasi-governmental workplaces. Those in smaller organizations, especially women, struggled against the notion that charitable work should be performed by volunteers or receive a low wage.

As I listened to fundraisers, it turned out that “living for philanthropy” meant different things. All fundraisers wanted to affect positive change, but vocational priorities fell into three tendencies: the desire to change specific institutions and locales for the better, to change individuals for the better, and to support movements for social and environmental justice. The third, least common, mission contrasted with the neoliberal rationalities evident in the first two.

Building a Caring Capitalism

The first, most typical way fundraisers were called to make change was by working through their nonprofit agencies to support worthy goals. Fundraisers’ work brought about tangible results, enabling institutions and programmes to better serve people and communities. For example, Ken pointed out the ways he had contributed to his city over his 25-year career:

I look around this community […] and I can say, ‘I helped facilitate that new building at the hospital. I helped ensure that renovation of that theatre. I helped create that new art gallery. I helped build […] endowed funds for student aid that wasn’t there before I helped.’ So, I can look around and see the results, but none of those things has my name on it. It’s all the result of facilitating those things for donors […]. The donor’s name is on those things often. I just know that those things just wouldn’t have happened without our involvement in some way to facilitate things. So that’s hugely satisfying. (Ken)

Ken’s satisfaction in his career success typifies the first sense of fundraising as vocation: facilitating work that makes a positive difference to people or their communities by supporting organizations’ infrastructure or programmes.

Some of the scholarship of neoliberalism makes it difficult to recognize Ken and other fundraisers as neoliberal subjects in the fashioning of such moral vocations. Simon Springer’s (2016) anatomy of neoliberalism, for example, emphasizes neoliberalism as violence. Springer argues that neoliberal discourses have material effects which perpetuate colonialism, dispossession, violence, inequality, and poverty. He goes further to vilify neoliberals as greedy, selfish, and uncaring:

By refusing to confront the inequality, poverty and violence of its own making, neoliberals console themselves by happily looking not at cause and effect, but only to their own accumulation of wealth. It is a discourse that perpetuates and even actively promotes utter and extreme selfishness. But the true believers of neoliberalism have proceeded as though we are all none the wiser. … They simply don’t care. … Can’t we admit that sometimes it is crucial to appreciate the common good? Neoliberalism refuses this, where any notion of collectivity is dismissed and demonized. (Springer, 2016, p. 134–6)

Fundraisers and the philanthropists they court complicate and contradict Springer’s argument that selfish “neoliberals” do not care about the common good. In all likelihood, they do care.

Neoliberalism refers to the extension of market rationality into non-market spheres of life, including social morality (Dardot & Laval, 2013). The problem and perversity of neoliberalism is that it institutes a “caring capitalism” that redefines what it means to care in market terms. Emily Barman’s (2016) book by this title examines various fields in which markets and social values are intentionally entwined, including nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, socially responsible investing, corporate social responsibility, responsible investments, inclusive business, and impact investing. In these fields, “value entrepreneurs” define and measure social value in complex ways to establish the moral underpinning of economic enterprises.

The most commonplace of fundraisers’ vocations for social change, as exemplified by Ken, is inflected by a market orientation that seeks to do good by means of individual choice, competition among service providers, and striving to achieve value for money. Under caring capitalism, fundraisers construct what it means to care and to be generous as an individual, private matter. To such an orientation, the threat to social morality is not individual self-interest, or even selfishness or greed, but universal, tax-funded social programmes delivered by the state and provided as a social entitlement to all citizens.

Dardot and Laval (2013) argue that, for neoliberals, the welfare state is deemed costly to society not only in financial terms but also because it “demoralizes,” which is to say, the state is thought to remove the impetus for individuals’ moral behaviour:

According to a number of [neoliberal] polemicists, it is on the moral terrain that public action [of the state] can have the most negative effects. More precisely, it is on account of the demoralization that it risks creating in the population that the policy of the ‘welfare state’ has become especially costly. This major theme of neo-liberalism has it that the bureaucratic state destroys the virtues of civil society—honesty, the sense of a job well done, personal effort, civility and patriotism. … It is the state that undermines the springs of individual morality. (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 164)

Ken’s fundraising career illustrates how caring capitalism was pitted against the welfare state. Ken developed his fundraising forte in planned giving from a background in financial planning, which gave him technical financial knowledge: “that sense of understanding structured instruments, working with life insurance, gifts of securities, remainder trusts, gifts of annuities.” He warned that unless our financial wealth is planned, it will be subjected to taxes upon death (probate fees, capital gains, and income taxes):

Unless we choose to influence how we’d like to see it [capital] invested in society, it will be invested by government. We tend to talk facetiously, in the planned giving world, about ‘inherit a new child,’ a charity of your choice and disinherit the government by taking action during one’s lifetime. (Ken)

The notion of “disinheriting the government” is the epitome of a neoliberal worldview that grounds social morality in personal choice and pins hope for social change on individual agency. The fundraiser’s mission of raising “voluntary income,” as opposed to coerced taxes to fund social programmes, lowers expectations of the role of government (Breeze & Scaife, 2015, p. 592). Ken’s dismissal of government denies that tax-funded, democratically organized, politically determined state forms of social provisioning could also be an expression of social morality. In contrast, Ken allies himself with caring capitalists who glow in the virtue of giving and revel at paying as little tax as possible.

Changing the World by Changing Donors’ Hearts

Along with the commonsensical understanding of fundraising as advancing good work for worthy causes, fundraisers expressed another, more specific, calling: to cultivate and facilitate donors’ philanthropic ambitions. Indeed, the most frequent response to my question of what makes their work satisfying was the pleasure of working with donors. Consider, for example, how Duncan extolled the donors to the major arts organization, religious charity, and other nonprofits for which he had worked over 15 years:

[These donors were] some of the most outstanding individuals and examples of humanity that I’ve ever met. And I’m so grateful for the opportunity to meet them, to be enriched by them emotionally, to see their gifts go to an organization where they feel strongly about how they’re making a difference. It’s very, very satisfying. (Duncan)

This sense of satisfaction fuelled a vocation to change the world by changing wealthy individuals. Darlene illustrated this donor-centric career orientation as she reflected on her 20 years with a large hospital foundation:

What I am able to take home at the end of the day is the deep sense of satisfaction that a donor has for being able to do what they’ve done. […] There’s lots of studies out there about how good it makes people feel to give and I think it’s definitely true. I’ve seen people’s faces light up in ways that I didn’t know was possible. […] That would be something that I strive for on a day-to-day basis, is to bring that sense of gratification to our donors. And if that is working, then I’m feeling fulfilled. (Darlene, emphasis added)

In a concrete way, Darlene’s work served the hospital foundation, but her primary sense of vocation was in making donors feel good. Such donor-centrism was identified as a new trend over this period, as Mavis explained based on her experience as a fundraising consultant in planned giving:

One of the trends that you see happening that they talk about in the sector now is, quote, the new donor. And how the new donor is different than, you know, (voice trails). And when I talk about donors, I’m thinking about major donors. So once upon a time, a wealthy person would write a cheque and give it to an organization and get their thank you and that would basically be it. Whereas the new donor, it’s all about, you have to be donor centered. We have to meet the, quote, needs of our donors. (Mavis)

Whether donor centrism originated with a changing generation of donors, as Mavis suggested, or in new fundraising practices, it had become a significant approach in raising major gifts. A fundraising manual by Carl W. Davis, Because Donors Want to Share (2015), underscored just how far this trend had gone by the mid-2010s to upend traditional approaches. Fundraisers, and the nonprofits that employed them, were not serving clients, wrote Davis, they are primarily serving donors: “Nonprofit organizations exist as conduits for charitable minded individuals to accomplish their personal philanthropic goals” (p. 1). Such a donor-centred orientation allowed Sharon, cited earlier in this chapter, to reflect: “I don’t feel like I’m asking people for money. I feel like I’m helping them accomplish something important and showing them the opportunities.” To a strongly donor-centric way of thinking, the purpose of fundraising is to help donors experience their wealth as agency. As Davis put it:

Our nonprofit agencies exist as tools for donors to use to bring their dreams to fruition. It makes sense to call a nonprofit organization an agency because it is an agent of the donor’s philanthropy. (Davis, 2015, p. 2)

Donors’ realization of agency in giving could be a powerfully emotional experience for fundraisers themselves, who witnessed major gift decisions. For example, Gary, who had worked with a social services agency, a university, two national disease charities, and a national consulting firm in his 19-year fundraising career, described the experience and its significance:

Gary::

I’ve been with a few donors in my career where you’re actually there when they change. They literally transform right in front of you.

Interviewer::

What’s that like?

Gary::

Well, it’s an adrenaline rush for you, and for them, they’re literally taking another step up towards self-actualization. And that’s what it’s really about.

Gary tied philanthropic agency to transformative spiritual growth. Changing donors’ lives was core to how he and fundraisers like him defined their vocation.

Gary’s enthusiasm to facilitate donors’ spiritual growth is reflected in a subset of fundraising manuals written for the staff of Christian religious charities, including leaders of church congregations, but also Christian parachurch organizations such as religious schools, chaplaincy programmes, religious outreach programmes, and charitable social services. For these authors and their readers, Christian fundraising constitutes a ministry that is not reducible to utilitarian goals of soliciting contributions to Christian causes. This approach epitomizes donor-centrism because it makes donors’ spiritual growth fundraisers’ foremost priority. For example, the authors of Growing Givers’ Hearts: Treating Fundraising as Ministry (Jeavons & Basinger, 2000), compared fundraising as ministry with traditional fundraising:

[In fundraising as ministry,] relationships with donors should be built around the desire to spur their spiritual growth. The ethical baseline is more proactive and less minimalistic. It makes doing good for the donor a primary concern rather than either a side benefit or a “selling point” to entice the prospect. (p. 4)

Celebrated Catholic theologian, Henri Nouwen (2010), similarly argued that fundraising must be good for the donor, not only the recipient. This stance goes beyond teaching religious precepts and practices related to generosity such as tithing; Christian fundraisers have a calling to facilitate a conversion experience for donors as a result of their philanthropy.

In fundraising as ministry, … we want them [donors] to experience that they will in fact benefit by making their resources available to us. We truly believe that if their gift is good only for us who receive, it is not fundraising in the spiritual sense. Fundraising from the point of view of the gospel says to people: ‘I will take your money and invest it in this vision only if it is good for your spiritual journey, only if it is good for your spiritual health.’ In other words, we are calling them to an experience of conversion. (Nouwen, 2010, pp. 19–20)

Only one of the fundraisers in my study worked for a Christian church foundation, but several expressed non-sectarian versions of this idea of fundraising as promoting spiritual growth and conversion. For example, this was how Elaine, a fundraiser of 16 years, described her passion and purpose:

Fundraising is about […] creating those meaningful exchanges where donors feel, ‘Not only am I creating change, I’m experiencing a personal change because of my act of generosity.’ That spirit of our work as fundraisers is critically important. […] So in terms of my own passion and commitment for the work of philanthropy, for me, that’s where it is. (Elaine)

Gary, cited earlier, expressed this vocational orientation the most emphatically. Drawing on popular understandings of Buddhism, he recounted the thrill of witnessing moments when donors attained “philanthropic enlightenment”:

If the fundraiser is doing their job, the person [donor] really feels the difference that they’re making. So, it’s no longer they’re supporting you. It’s that they’re creating a difference in the world and they’re supporting something much larger than themselves. So, it’s taking them away from themselves into, again, Buddhist enlightenment is the closest parallel that I can think there might be. They change. They change. (Gary)

The vocation to change people for the better through individual major gift philanthropy has similar political implications to caring capitalism. The perceived opposite of fundraising, social provisioning through taxation, would eliminate the prospect of helping to impart the aura of enlightenment on the philanthropic class. Fundraisers want to contribute to societal change as well as individual betterment, and they see these goals as connected through cultivating generosity. The threat to generosity is comprehensive state provisioning, which would take away these conversion opportunities.

A Vocation for Social Justice

As neoliberal social and economic policy paved the way for the fundraising profession, fundraisers tended to adopt a corresponding political rationality. However, neoliberal subjectivity was never universal. Competing moral and political frameworks remained available, as Vivian’s uncommon case reveals.

Vivian described her start in fundraising much like her peers: “Many people like me in the ‘80s fell into it,” she said. Her “fall” started with a part-time job that had a fundraising component while she was training in a different field. Upon entering her first full-time fundraising job, “It was like, ‘Oh my God!’ (laughing) I was totally hooked because I got it.” She dropped her original career plans in favour of a new role in a health charity where she was the only fundraiser on staff. Here she said she was expected to run a capital campaign, start an annual giving programme, and independently do, “everything, from meet with bank presidents to send receipts and thank-you letters.” She took fundraising courses in the evenings and attended annual conferences to learn from more senior fundraisers.

After two years, in the late 1980s, Vivian went to work for a large international humanitarian NGO. After five years, she was head-hunted to a second international NGO and seven years later, a third. I met her a decade later, when her combined fundraising experience of over 24 years included 16 years as a national fundraising director. Reflecting on her career, she explained that early on she’d had, “that sense that, ‘Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do!’” Like other fundraisers, she said of her work, “It felt like a vocation.” Unlike others, however, she went on to specify her vocation as working for social change through collective, political avenues: “It felt like, this is something I can do [well] and this is something I can do for social movements.”

Vivian’s commitment to environmental justice and human rights was the foundation of her career, but she found that practicing her political values as a fundraiser sometimes put her at odds with professional colleagues. “I have a complicated relationship with the profession,” she told me, laughing, but continued in a serious tone: “Because I love being a fundraiser, and I think this [profession] is some of the best of our society, in this sector. But I also think it’s some of the worst masquerading as some of the best.”

One way Vivian stood apart from her peers was in being selective about where she worked. Once she had her start, she chose organizations that she had previously supported as a donor, member, or volunteer. Her respect for these agencies’ politics and personnel led her to want to stay on over the years, despite the lure of higher salaries elsewhere. “I get head-hunted a lot,” she confided. “I see lots of other jobs and they just don’t have the same appeal, but this [current job] feels very compelling.”

From time to time, friends in the field expressed surprise that she had not yet traded up for a more lucrative salary at another charity, as was common for fundraisers after 18 months to 2 years, she explained. At one point, persistent questioning from others led her to question herself. Was there “something wrong with me?” she asked. Did she lack career ambition? Did she undervalue her talent? Was she selling herself short? Ultimately, she dismissed these doubts but not without soul-searching. “Once I realized that I didn’t want my epitaph to be, ‘She earned as much as she could,’ I was fine with not making more money,” she said. She committed to staying on with an agency she admired, leading a staff team she liked, and doing work she intrinsically loved. Prioritizing mission over money concretely exemplified the ideal of living for, not off, philanthropy.

Another thing that distinguished Vivian from others who claimed fundraising as a vocation was her relationship to donors. She was far from donor-centric in the ways her peers emphasized. In part, she did not need to adopt donor-centrism as a fundraising method; her workplace relied on small, monthly donations from a broad member base rather than on soliciting mega-gifts of capital for buildings, major projects, or endowed funds. Broad-based giving was the type of fundraising Vivian preferred in principle because it circumvented reliance on the rich, which she argued, drew out the worst tendencies in fundraisers. “There is something appalling about our adulation of the rich as a profession,” she started, and went on:

Many fundraisers wish they were rich. We have this fascination with the rich. And I say we, inclusively, in that I’m a fundraiser, but I don’t share that fascination (laughing). […] Many people in the profession either feel that they should be rich, that they are entitled to be of the rich, or they really love the rich, or they want to hobnob with the rich. There is this kind of fascination, and ‘what the rich do is good,’ sort of notion. And many, many charities are just propping up the status quo. (Vivian)

Following Vivian’s logic, the problem with adulating the rich was just this: many of the donors who commanded fundraisers’ attention were not actually interested in world-changing causes. As a result, fundraisers seeking to change the world were limited to advancing the kinds of charities towards which wealthy donors gravitate. Vivian explained with an example:

A lot of what we do, especially at universities, is endowing a chair in commerce in a school of management creating MBAs. It’s very much not about changing society. There are parts of universities that do change society, but it [philanthropy] is very much about reinforcing the status quo. And many charities do that. We do it with our structures, the rich boards, and the way we deal with things. (Vivian)

The way fundraisers “deal with things” referred to the kind of donor-centrism to which Vivian most objected:

There is something about the profession that props up the wealthy, in all sorts of ways, and admires the wealthy and says the wealthy are good. You trickle down some of your donations down to us and, ‘Oh that’s great, and you’re a good philanthropist.’ And we’ll give you all sorts of awards and do all sorts of things that I don’t subscribe to. (Vivian)

Vivian made her politics visible in fundraising circles. On one memorable occasion near the start of her career, she attended an international conference of the National Society of Fund-Raising Executives (NSFRE, now Association of Fundraising Professionals) in Chicago, where delegates witnessed the Award for Outstanding Corporation presented to Shell Oil Company. The year was 1995, and Shell Oil was facing intense protest campaigns, locally and internationally, over its documented environmental and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta. At the time of the conference, the writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight other Nigerian land defenders were imprisoned, awaiting execution by hanging. Shell Oil was implicated in the false testimony at their trials and international condemnation was mounting (Ezeonu, 2018). Yet this was the year the NSFRE named Shell Oil Company “Outstanding Corporation” in a move that stunned Vivian:

There are all sorts of reasons you could campaign against Shell because they’re not good corporate citizens on all sorts of levels, but especially right now, they are complicit in the persecution of the Ogoni people, [in a region where] secret police are killing people. It’s a terrible international travesty. (Vivian)

In response to the award announcement, Vivian and a few colleagues mounted a protest by leafletting, not merely boycotting, the awards banquet:

Not going to the dinner was not enough. So, we did these little leaflets, and we put them at all the plates at dinner. And it was just a Shell logo with oil dripping down like blood, basically, and what their record was in Nigeria. (Vivian)

The icy response to what Vivian considered a mild protest struck at the heart of her disaffection with the profession:

Of course, that [protest] was considered something that was ‘not done.’ You are not supposed to (voice trails off; switches to mimicking her critics)—‘These are good people, with money. We’re letting them whitewash their money through our charities, so how dare you raise the fact that they’re killing people in Africa. And nobody cares about Africa anyway.’ And all that sort of stuff. And I know it was ‘not done’ and I’m usually a well-behaved person, but we were disgusted with our profession. This goes beyond having a disagreement. (Vivian)

Many years later, Vivian remained appalled that the award decision came about, “just because they’d given some money to some place in Texas who had nominated them,” despite the controversy surrounding the corporation. “We’re shameful at times,” she said, in a fervent rebuff to fundraisers’ claims of caring about social issues, “we just don’t care about that stuff.”

Since then, Vivian has remained ambivalent about the profession:

I want to be proud. You’re supposed to be proud of your profession, and I am proud to be a fundraiser. I think what we do is great, but I think a lot of people […] think that having money in itself is some kind of virtue. And too much of our profession is that way. There’s actually very few of us that don’t think that the world is structured the way it should be (pause), that the poor shouldn’t have to rely on handouts. Very few of us actually think that. (Vivian)

Fundraising can be an appealing line of work, according to Vivian, because she and her peers “get to call ourselves one of the good guys.” Yet, for those interested in changing the world, the project of cultivating virtue in individual donors through a kind of ethical makeover cannot replace the slow work of fundraising to sustain the campaigns of social movement organizations. A rare member of her profession, Vivian exposed her peers’ vocations as invested in a mode of world-changing work that deepens the tracks carved by neoliberal movements towards caring capitalism. She also rejected the project of spiritually empowering a more agentic donor class.

The Limits of a Vocation to Fundraise

The growth of fundraising careers in Canada was more than a marker of neoliberalism. Fundraisers also participated in neoliberalization in ways they constructed as a vocation. Social theorist Wendy Brown (2015) wrote that prior to neoliberalism, the functions of government and business within the capitalist state were more distinct. Neoliberalism brought about a merger that saw governments more actively partnering with business in making economic growth and national economic health their common goals. At the same time, under caring capitalism, business increasingly took on civic goals, such as education, ethics, and inclusion, that had been the conventional domain of government. The emerging fundraising industry, by downplaying the social role of government and giving more prominence to an activist business class, contributed to this inversion of roles, where “government prioritizes economic growth, credit ratings, and global economic positioning while business represents the interests of the needy or underserved” (Brown, 2015, p. 149).

Fundraisers with a vocation for social change were limited in the kinds of change they could accomplish when they defined their mission as helping elite donors achieve their philanthropic goals. For example, expert advisor Carl Davis (2015) wrote in support of donor-centric fundraising: “Donors give to the need they want to meet. They give to make the world look the way they want it to look, to be the way they want it to be” (p. 2). Donors may be interested in exercising power like that of government to determine social priorities, demonstrating their social responsibility as caring capitalists. However, they seldom want to change the social conditions of the world that placed them atop the donor pyramid.

Vivian’s singular example shows an alternative vision for world-changing work. She dedicated herself to fundraising for organizations that fiercely challenged both government and business arms of the neoliberal capitalist state. This calling to social and environmental justice positioned her at odds with much of the fundraising profession, and yet she was able to use fundraising skills towards radical world-changing priorities that ranged outside of the neoliberal change efforts of her contemporaries.