On this week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio, Anna Willats and Sean Lee-Popham talk about the Groundswell Community Justice Trust Fund, which is an attempt to address the lack of grassroots funding infrastructure for movement-related groups, projects, and organizations in Ontario.
As much as many of us would love it if robust social movements could be built solely from elbow grease and radical vision, there are inevitably moments when organizing cannot proceed without another kind of input: money. Though technology provides more options for grassroots fundraising than ever before, and the old tried and true methods can still be used, the truth is that movements in Canada have not been doing a very good job of figuring out how to get the resources that are out there in our extremely wealth society into the hands that need them to make it a more just and liberatory society. There are, however, experiments aimed at figuring out ways to do just that, and one of them is Groundswell, currently in its second year of raising money and distributing it to grassroots groups that are doing important work. Willats and Lee-Popham are long-time organizers with experience in a range of movements as well as board members at Groundswell. They talk about the vision that informs the fund, about how it works, and about their hopes for how it can grow and support movements in the future.
To learn more about the Groundswell Community Justice Trust Fund, including how to donate and how to apply for money, click here.
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada through in-depth interviews that concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. To learn more about the show in general, click here.
You can also learn more about ways to listen or go to the show’s page on rabble.ca. To learn more about suggesting grassroots groups and organizations for future shows, click here. For details on the show’s theme music, click here.
Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.
