Jason Lewis is the founder of Responsive Fundraising.
If every gift begins as an act of freedom, then philanthropy rests on something more vulnerable and more significant than revenue flow. It rests on the capacity of persons to initiate—to step forward without guarantee and begin something that did not exist before.
The mailing list and its extensions have been the quiet architecture behind the very decline we are now struggling to comprehend.
Now, in a moment of political backlash and financial scrutiny, those same institutions are asking everyday Americans to stand with them against proposals for increased oversight and higher excise taxes on their endowments. It’s a tough ask. Because the truth is most people haven’t seen that tax-incentivized wealth show up in meaningful ways—not in their neighborhoods, not in their schools, not in their civic life. When Big Philanthropy backed the wrong theory of change and cut itself off from the concerns of working-class Americans, it made a trade-off. And now the cost of that trade is coming due.
The point wasn’t to organize people—it was to acquire them.
No matter how you frame it, we’ve professionalized, optimized, and branded our way into stagnation and retreat. We treated the gift like an input in a machine.
