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Gail’s fundraising career began with her layoff from a public relations position with a big corporation. While living on her severance pay, she started volunteering, lending her skills in event planning for a small, local health charity. Having studied business management with a focus on marketing and PR, she had never considered nonprofit work. When her volunteering led to a job offer, she joined the one other fundraiser in the office. Within a few months, she was offered the senior position and began to introduce a suite of fundraising methods that she learned on the job.

I spoke with Gail 20 years after this first fundraising job, when she was 4 years into the role of Director of Major Gifts for the provincial office of a national health charity, her fifth fundraising position. I asked about her outlook on Canadian fundraising as someone who had witnessed long-term trends. Her response exemplified the optimism that many fundraisers considered part of their role:

As fundraisers, we work with philanthropists, and I think part of our outlook, and who we are as people is, we’re always so very positive and always thinking that there’s opportunity. And that’s how we look at what we do in life generally. […] We always see opportunity, that’s what our job is! (laughing). (Gail)

The timing of my interviews corresponded with the “great recession” of 2008–2009. Endowed funds were plummeting in value and donors were backing out of long-term commitments. Even so, Canada’s leading fundraisers presented a perennially positive outlook. For example, when Sherry, the senior associate of a national consulting firm, spoke about her recently missed targets, she added, “I have to be optimistic, I’m a fundraiser.” Gail also acknowledged the recession in passing: “Even when people talk about, you know, ‘We could be going into recession, this could be a very bad time,’ but people [fundraisers] always say, there’s always this other opportunity. So, I always have a positive outlook.”

Gail and Sherry would not allow an economic recession to cloud the neoliberal social imaginary they projected—their shared vision of the state of society and of the future—characterized by pervasive optimism. Their counterpart, Todd, was introduced in the first chapter as a relatively young fundraiser who had catapulted from being a university call centre manager to the top executive of a large health charity. He dubbed the occupation, “the business of hope,” epitomizing this social imaginary.

The “business of hope” can be interpreted as operating in two ways: as a literal expression of fundraisers’ sales work to solicit donations and major gifts, and as a metaphor for neoliberal governance that made the marketization of social life (e.g., voting with our dollars) seem the right way to divine and determine the public good.

Fundraising as a “business of hope” communicated more than fundraisers’ enthusiasm for their own work and careers, although they had reason to be enthusiastic about their personal opportunities. Fundraising as an occupation in this period offered entrants excellent prospects. Fundraisers were in high demand, with 60% of survey respondents in 2002 reporting that their organization had increased the number of paid staff during that year alone (Saunders, 2003). In the same survey of 1393 Canadian fundraisers, 78% said their current work was “satisfying” or “very satisfying,” with workload said to be the largest downside, followed by pay (Saunders, 2003).Footnote 1

Dissatisfaction about pay may be attributed to the wide range of salaries across different sizes and types of agencies, a persistent gender pay gap across all salary levels, and the growing number of entrants from backgrounds in private sector occupations with comparatively higher pay scales. Nevertheless, the demand for fundraisers was quickly pushing up salaries. At the time of my interviews (2009), the median income of all Canadian fundraisers was $70,000, and the top 25% earned at least $93,000 annually. For fundraisers with 10 years’ experience, the median annual income was $77,500, and the top 25% earned over $100,000 (Healey et al., 2010). By comparison, the median annual family income for all Canadians in that year, 2009, was $48,900 (in constant 2011 dollars) (Statistics Canada, 2015).

For these reasons, it is easy to see why successful fundraisers of this cohort would feel positively about their own career prospects and about the whole industry. For example, Joyce, the president of a hospital foundation, whose 18-year career had covered many areas of fundraising, layered optimism about the future of fundraising onto a neoliberal forecast:

I think we’re developing a culture of philanthropy. […] I think more people are getting aware of what the opportunities are, and also the fact that the government is not going to do it all, and they can’t do it all. So, I think the future is pretty promising for us. (Joyce)

The bright side of the loss of confidence in the social role of governments, for Joyce, was the opportunity for a cultural shift towards reliance on philanthropy. The undermining of the welfare state exposed charitable organizations to social need, which boded well for the future of fundraising. However, fundraisers’ optimism was not limited to their profession alone; they were generally optimistic about the efficacy of their work as fundraisers. In the introduction to a collection of essays on philanthrocapitalism, Gavin Fridell and Martijn Konings (2013) interpret such optimism as a feature of neoliberalism. They noted: “despite mounting evidence of a strong connection between neoliberal economic policies and growing inequality, … there remains a widely held sense of optimism in the West … about neoliberalism’s ability to eliminate the very problems it helps to create” (p. 7).

Fundraising as Privatized Hope

Many fundraisers saw their work as a kind of sales business. For instance, Anne, a fundraiser of 19 years for two universities, a hospital, and a provincial arts organization, defended the business orientation of her occupation, saying: “I don’t care what anybody says, we’re salespeople and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” As salespeople, fundraisers crafted a pitch, tailored it to specific prospects, and used a wide range of sales techniques to secure donations, according to their branch of fundraising and organizational strategy: annual, monthly, or legacy giving, special events, online giving, major gifts, and so on (Mallabone, 2022). Sales often succeeded when fundraisers could tap into donors’ hopes that they could make a positive difference by putting money where it was needed. Following the gift agreement, fundraisers worked in a stewarding role, continuing to affirm donors’ hopes that their generosity would result in improved lives (Moreau, 2022).

What did it mean, sociologically, that charitable institutions were selling hope in this period of neoliberalism? For Ronald Aronson (2017), neoliberalization entails the “privatization of hope,” which he defines as the “maddening profusion of personal hopes,” amidst an assault on, “the kind of hope that is social, the motivation behind movements to make the world freer, more equal, more democratic, and more livable” (p. 116). Private hope refers to hope for one’s own life and family, such as winning the lottery, getting a better job, or curbing an addiction. As neoliberalism has come to incorporate an element of community responsibility, privatized hope also refers to hope for healthier communities through the uncoordinated, private action of individuals, through volunteering and donating.

Fundraisers privatized hope by promising individuals that their chosen charitable or philanthropic activity would make a difference. In doing so, they put social hope—shared hope in, and born of, social action—outside the frame. Wendy Brown writes:

The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies, new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning for the future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic discussion, law, policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus. (Brown, 2015, pp. 221–2)

Privatizing hope in fundraising was another way to extend market rationality in response to the social need that neoliberal policies themselves generated, further shifting homo politicus towards homo oeconomicus as neoliberalism’s preferred default rationality.

Brown argues that privatized hope is actually reflective of civilizational despair. She is not suggesting that civilizational despair is uniquely a neoliberal phenomenon. However, she argues that neoliberal rationality, “[through] its figuration of the human, its reality principle, and its worldview—‘there is no alternative’—consecrates, deepens, and naturalizes without acknowledging this despair” (2015, p. 221).

Fundraisers in the late 2000s had evidence to contradict their optimism and spark concern, even before the global financial crisis. There were signs that the culture of philanthropy they were attempting to foster was a plutocratic culture and that efforts to make charitable giving widespread in the population were failing. Years later, we can see that the extraordinary fundraising trends of 1995 through the end of 2007 set this period apart and have not been matched since (Lasby & Barr, 2018). As reported by the Canada Revenue Agency through tax-receipted donations, from 1985 to 1990, charitable revenues grew rapidly at 4.4% per year, and then levelled off over the next five years from 1990 to 1995. Starting in 1995, revenues surged at an average annual increase of 5.6% until 2007. Each year saw record-breaking totals until Canadian charitable revenues had almost doubled from $5 billion in 2005 to $9.6 billion just prior to the financial crisis (Lasby & Barr, 2018).

Significantly, in the same period, the number of Canadians who made charitable donations shrank despite population growth. In the 12-year zenith of fundraising (1995–2007), the growth in revenues came from major philanthropy. This growth trend proved to be unsustainable. Since the recession of 2008 and 2009, the lion’s share of fundraising revenue has continued to come from top donors, but totals have fluctuated below the peak in 2007. Since 2008, individual donations per capita have also continued to trend downward (Lasby & Barr, 2018).

The next major economic shock, the COVID-19 pandemic, further confounded the hope that individuals could and would step up with donations in a time of social need. In November 2020, Imagine Canada surveyed 1000 charitable organizations with annual revenues above $30,000 (excluding religious congregations) on the pandemic’s impact on their revenue, demand, and capacity. The survey found that a third of organizations, primarily in education, health, social services, and other human services, experienced a combination of increased demand and diminished capacity to deliver services. For many organizations, the loss of capacity was due, in part, to diminished revenues from gifts and donations. Three-quarters of organizations found they raised less money through at least one form of fundraising, primarily events-based fundraising, as expected, but over a third of charities reported that they had also lost revenue from a downturn in major gifts (Lasby, 2021).

Despite awareness of disturbing trends and dire social needs, fundraisers’ professional organizations often push attitudes of hopefulness. A quick keyword search for “hope” on the Hilborn Charity eNews blog, a go-to source of news and analysis for Canadian fundraisers, yields 200 hits, with many of the blog posts including “hope” in the title.Footnote 2 These discourses of hope reinforce Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2009) arguments about the widespread optimism in American business culture, in which “positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy” (p. 8). Such optimism, says Ehrenreich, closes off avenues of critical thinking and papers over more complex emotions that support the capacity for political analysis and social action (see also Scharff, 2016).

As an expert occupation with proximity to business elites, fundraisers are not alone in cleaving to privatized hope. Raewyn Connell’s (2010) study of Australian managers in the knowledge economy explored the “interplay of neoliberal capitalism and intellectual production.” Connell interviewed 12 managers about their intellectual labour, such as strategic planning. These interviews focused on the topic of the social surplus, defined as “the available material resources of society” (p. 779). In all but two cases, Connell’s managers embraced the neoliberal consensus and spoke as allies of corporate power. Yet, Connell observed that the pressure-filled conditions of their work life, such as busyness and stress, did not permit reflection. More complex and oppositional ways of thinking were unlikely for this group because “the possibility of reflective intellectual work [was] constantly undermined by the conditions of managerial labor” (p. 789).

Likewise, fundraisers’ positive thinking could be understood as stemming from the particular expectations of their work as fundraisers. Required to make a “case for support” that was confident and compelling, they could scarcely afford to perform critique or acknowledge despair. Yet without distress and outrage, without the impetus and intellectual wherewithal to conceive political alternatives, engage with political conflict, and fashion political action, the “business of hope” cannot deliver social hope.

Fundraisers should not be held responsible for rectifying the devastating effects of under-funding, privatization, and macro-economic conditions. Though fundraisers do good work on their own terms, they cannot be expected to disrupt neoliberal rationality without support and resources from beyond their own professional circles. Critical analysis necessary for social hope may be found in the work of groups such as Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, a radical editorial collective that penned a series of critical essays on the “non-profit industrial complex” (Incite! 2007). Their book title, The Revolution will not be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, updates and pays homage to Gil Scott Heron’s 1971 lyric, “the revolution will not be televised.” In this spirit, they challenge nonprofit workers to learn from grassroots, democratic, progressive movements about nonprofits’ political limitations, and alternative formations.

Fundraising and Neoliberal Governance

Long pre-dating neoliberalism, in the gilded age of the nineteenth-century United States, the standard critique of large-scale philanthropy was that the robber barons’ largess served to legitimate their oligarchic power, exploitation, and massive wealth accumulation (Wagner, 2000). This standard critique is seldom heard in relation to twenty-first-century major donors (but see Callahan, 2017). A new element that distinguishes the previous era of extreme inequality from neoliberal capitalism is neoliberal governance. It is contemporary forms of governance that account for this dulling of class-based critique and class conflict.

Neoliberal governance refers to a soft, horizontal mode of power that augments the direct, coercive rule of the state and gives corporate and financial capital a friendly face. Brown (2015) describes the relationship of neoliberalism and governance in this way:

Governance has become neoliberalism’s primary administrative form, the political modality through which it creates environments, structures constraints and incentives, and hence conducts subjects. Contemporary neoliberalism is unthinkable without governance. (p. 122)

The neoliberal state layers governance onto existing institutional ways of exercising power and authority coercively such as law, policing, collective bargaining, and overtly political processes involving contestation, class conflict, partisanship, brokering, and opposition. By contrast to institutional power, governance is a more diffuse, dispersed, and decentred form of rule, which is conducted, for instance, through agencies of the nonprofit and voluntary sector. Governance operates through management and administration, partnerships and networking, dialogue, and deliberation. Governance sidelines politics, in the sense of power struggles, conflict, and negotiation. Given its participatory form, governance makes power difficult to name and oppose, which undermines political contestation over different visions of justice and the public good.

In this way, neoliberal governance depoliticizes social struggles by making political power, including class power, less visible. Governance brings people on board neoliberal economic rationality and fosters the impression that we are all working towards a common goal. The social imaginary of optimism and the privatization of hope are primary tools of governance. Social hope, in contrast, feeds on political action, just as social movement mobilization requires social hope as its impetus.

A governance analysis of fundraising offers insight into how neoliberalism takes hold in everyday life at a distance from elite circles of corporate and financial power. The neoliberal rationality that infuses fundraising and many social fields is not imposed but nevertheless enjoys a broad cultural consensus. In Brown’s words:

Modern political power is extraordinary in its range and reach precisely because it is so relentlessly intermixed with daily life, so intimate with us where we are most needy and vulnerable, so without scruple in producing and incorporating these needs as part of its own expansion. (Brown, 2007, p. 11)

Fundraising is a quintessential case of Brown’s analysis of neoliberalism’s expansion through social vulnerability. Vulnerability is created in the first place as governments devolve responsibility for an array of social and community services to nonprofit and voluntary organizations without sufficient funds for core functions. In this governance arrangement, as Brown (2015) argues, “large-scale problems, such as recessions, finance-capital crises, unemployment, or environmental problems, as well as fiscal crises of the state, are sent down the pipeline to small and weak units unable to cope with them technically, politically or financially” (p. 132).

This devolution of social responsibility has brought forth fundraisers’ best entrepreneurial efforts and entrenched the “business of hope” in Canada’s political economy. This devolution of responsibility explains how a middle and working-class occupational group with high ideals for social betterment across a wide range of causes took on neoliberal goals such as expanding government tax expenditures to cultivate large philanthropy. It explains why fundraisers as a group endorsed market solutions, why they celebrated extremes of wealth, why they discredited government service delivery, and why they sought opportunities to enhance elites’ hyper-agency in advancing philanthrocapitalist projects.

Like other professionals, fundraisers lack opportunity for introspection, and their culture of positivity leaves little room for critical examination. By and large, they believe they do good work that is above politics, but their depoliticized practices offer only privatized hope. For Michael Apple, demobilization due to loss of social hope is, “a disaster in a time of radical reconstruction of education, health care, social services, and the entire public sector” (Apple, 2012, p. 148). To revitalize hope and counter cynicism, the nonprofit sector needs to be re-politicized. We especially need to reframe social change as a collective goal in an inequitable society, not as the automatic result of individuals’ personal choices in a market of charities.

Apple (2012), citing social theorist, Raymond Williams, argues that social hope is a vital resource in times of crisis. He reminds us of victories won in the political struggles of social movements within longstanding political traditions. Oppositional movements for socially just institutional arrangements need to be restored to collective memory as viable alternatives. All too often, neoliberal ideologies suggest that previous social movements were failed projects rather than models of change from which we may continue to draw lessons to develop educated hope:

The fact that there is such a long history of successful progressive movements in so many sectors in all of our countries provides a necessary resource when we are constantly being told that the neoliberal agenda is the only solution to the crisis that it itself created. (Apple, 2012, p. 148)

From this perspective, social hope—as educated hope and as historical memory—is not merely a rosy outlook.

How can such hope arise in bleak times? Some say social hope, like holding a light in the darkness, “constitutes its own conditions” (Thompson, 2013, p. 7). We only need to look for it. Others say the flame must be fanned and hope must be learned (Apple, 2012). Either way, as a society, we need shared hope to envision and collectively work in new directions. Nonprofits and fundraisers need to work together, with and within progressive social movements, to facilitate the political awareness and policy changes needed to challenge the business of hope that neoliberal capitalism generates. Social hope declares that by funding social and cultural needs sufficiently, fairly, and transparently, and through democratic, political allocation processes, we lay the foundations for a better world.