Editor’s Note:
For decades, foundation and philanthropy funding have been flowing from the Global North to the Global South for projects aimed at promoting labour rights. Lacking resources, labour rights groups, especially those working on labour migration and precarious labour, have welcomed the generous external resources to support their organising and advocacy work. It has also sometimes been treated with suspicion by the authorities, with several countries in Asia implementing or attempting to implement laws to restrict and regulate foreign funding. Within social movements, too, there are long-running concerns about dependency. Today, the funding landscape is changing. Foreign aid, in particular, is being diverted from rights-based projects to military expenditures.
However, we rarely hear from those who work on the side of the foundations. How do they understand their role, and how do they relate to the communities they support? What is useful to do, and what is a waste of time and money? At a recent conference on labour migration in Asia, Marat Yu, upon leaving his position as a project manager at a foundation, shared his reflections on working with migrant labour organisations and communities, on what he thinks the role of funders should be, and on the shifting landscapes of foundation funding.
Asian Labour Review (“ALR”): I was struck by your reflections at the conference, and wanted to follow up with you to elaborate on some of those reflections. You brought up the importance of trust and accountability, but you also problematised them.
Marat Yu (“Marat”): These words – trust and accountability – have been thrown around a lot. When you talk about trust, people mean very different things. Instead of using “trust and accountability” as blanket terms, I find it more meaningful to complicate the narratives and see them as a dynamic process.
As a funder, my intention is to support the labour movement as a partner and ally. Genuine allyship builds on the foundation of trust. Grassroots groups and their members need to know our background and intention. You don’t use a helicopter-like style of intervention or throw in so-called experts to do the work. Once you have overcome the initial threshold of building trust, it becomes more complicated. You gain and accumulate trust gradually by doing something meaningful for the movement.
But trust can also get eroded. Why and what are the symptoms? What are the signals that we can see when trust is being eroded? It is not like that once you enter your supporting ecosystem, it remains unchanged forever. The boundaries expand and contract, and dynamics change. What are the telltale signs that people can see when trust is no longer there, and things fall apart?
Trust also implies gatekeeping. It can be used in a very convenient way when you say, “You don’t have the trust of the community”. But who has the trust of the community? Someone may say, “I have trust in the community, so you have to get past me first”. To me, it is important to interrogate what we mean by trust.
Trust and accountability are quite connected. In the funders’ ecosystem, there are more and more discussions about trust-based philanthropy. At that level, the funders, the nonprofit organisations, and social impact organisations almost always automatically translate this idea into unrestricted funding in the form of core funding support. This has its merits because why should grantees and partners’ accountability only lie upward with the funders? How can we talk less about upward accountability to funders and for funders to let go of certain controls?
How do we assess accountability at both the peer level, such as how you function within the system in relation to your peers? Are you occupying space, or are you ceding space? Even more complicated, yet essential, is, for lack of a better term, the downward accountability, or the accountability to the base, to the masses. That’s not often discussed because, from the funders’ perspective, it’s too far removed.
Whether there’s an accountability system, how the accountability system functions, and grappling with these questions are definitely instrumental to the success of the movement.
ALR: What is your personal experience of building trust with the organisations that you support?
Marat: Well, I don’t set out to build trust. I don’t set a target for myself to gain trust because of my position as the funder. I know that if I need to get somewhere with a group, I need to earn their trust. Sometimes I reflect on whether I’m doing it for my work purposes or if I’m genuinely interested in their lives and work. At first, it is mixed. However, I always find their lives fascinating and inspiring, so I want to know more and listen to them.
For me, it’s about the relationship. We need to establish mutual interest in developing a relationship from the outset. Someone is going to give and someone is going to take, and positionality matters as it influences the direction and fairness of such exchanges. I’m always mindful of what hats I’m wearing when I enter into a relationship. Once we have started a relationship with clarity, we will both have more assurance, and I will have a better sense of how the relationship can evolve.
Support from mainstream society is not a given for migrants, and they need to see you to really feel you, to understand and gauge whether you’re serious or not. There are many leaders in the migrant community, some organise in official capacity and many more organise the community organically; one thing they have in common is that they are smart and intelligent, and they can tell in a few minutes whether this person means business or not, whether you are genuine, because they meet so many people who come and want to do projects. They can tell the difference, so I let them judge whether I am serious or not.
ALR: For the organisers, I think they can see that you genuinely are interested in what they do, in their lives, in their perspectives. You talk about relationships. As with any organising, any kind of work that involves people, a lot of it involves relationships; however, there is also an evident power dynamic due to the funder’s ability to decide which group to support. How do you set the boundaries? How do you navigate that relationship? Who do you think you’re accountable to?
Marat: I could give an answer that will earn me applause: I’m accountable to the community, and I’m accountable to the movement. Yes, but also no, not entirely. Like it or not, as a funder, you do have to be accountable to the philanthropy. I would say ultimately it is about the movement; it’s about the community. But there are trade-offs from time to time. The ideal situation is to bring the funders and the communities together, so that we are accountable to the same goals that are mutually reinforcing. Some funders can do it, whether by examining the governance system or through a learning exchange – there are ways to do it. That’s the aspiration, that’s the goal, but not necessarily the reality.
ALR: I remember you posed the “so what” question. It’s easy just to be comfortable with our current work and current way of doing things. Of course, labour groups often work in some of the harshest political environments and operate with very few resources. They are busy and facing many challenges. So it’s easy to say, “You are doing great work”, but I feel like you want to challenge people to think and reflect more.
Marat: This question has been posed in different ways, but ultimately it is the same question – it is the “so what” question. For a community with resource deficits, including time and money, there are always opportunity costs associated with prioritising one thing over another, or with choosing to do something rather than nothing. What I value a lot is that there are strategists who ask this question. They have astute analysis of the problems and can differentiate between symptoms and root causes (e.g., whether it is an “unethical recruitment” issue or just another label of extraction), and have sound judgment about where to focus efforts or step back.
It may not be good for funders to ask the “so what” question, because it then becomes a Monitoring & Evaluation system that serves the funders. I hope that there can be more strategists in the movement, especially the “non-armchair” ones from the grassroots, who keep asking these questions and offer support, thinking together: what are the goals that we are moving toward? Are they the right goals? Is this the best way to utilise our resources? And what kind of allyship do we need to develop to achieve that?
It’s quite important who’s asking this question as well. I discussed funders and strategists, but what about the community, especially its members? Are they asking the same questions? Maybe some are asking the same questions. Or, they’re not asking it – they don’t surface openly. If, day in and day out, people attend meetings and discuss the same topics without seeing any changes, it is logical that they will have questions: “Why am I doing it?” They may not express this themselves, but they will simply move away. Maybe they will stop attending meetings. It’s quite important for the masses to ask questions. What are the opportunities and mechanisms to help surface these questions?
ALR: Yes, people don’t necessarily raise questions, but they know if something’s not working. If people continue doing things in the same ways without achieving much, they will move away. They may not feel comfortable raising any criticisms openly, but they no longer show up. How do you try to create the kind of culture of asking difficult questions or pushing things?
Marat: Funders are here to enable or support this. It’s not criticising for the sake of criticising. It’s a morally wrong thing just to come in and say, “You’ve done these things wrong”. Then what do you think of these questions? Funders have a vantage point, a bird’s-eye view that allows us to see that there are pockets of excellence here and there are practices that work in a particular kind of context. Partners are energised by their lived reality, but they’re also limited by their exposure.
By surfacing some of the questions, it’s not necessarily about why you’re not doing this, but questioning: What’s the struggle? What’s the frustration? You may have been doing this work for some time already, but you are not seeing any breakthrough. Why? For example, when considering governance systems, you form a committee to select the next leader, but then this committee lacks people with lived experiences. Well, other organisations or networks have gone through a similar process, and it’s possible to achieve the outcome. Why don’t I connect you with so-and-so for a chat? Instead of telling you what to do, it’s important to connect the dots for them and learn from their peers.
The best way is for people to realise their own path. Actually, one of the struggles is that there are too many supporters and too many allies, each with their own versions of success or pathways. I notice that the groups sometimes struggle, such as after this call with a “big brother”, where I go in one direction, and then next week, I have a call with a “big sister”, and I go in another direction. But there’s never space for them to reflect and think. Creating as much space as possible for them to reflect and think is something I strive to do.
ALR: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about slowing things down because there is almost like an epidemic of urgencies. Everything seems urgent—everything we have to respond to now because things are so bad. But when there are so many things that are considered urgent, nothing is urgent because you can’t respond to 10-15 urgent things a day.
Marat: I agree, and people can feel very powerless in such situations. We like to use the term “polycrisis”. I struggle with this term because when do we not have a polycrisis? When a crisis becomes a chronic issue, it becomes an everyday occurrence, and everything becomes urgent. How do you direct actions to resolve that? How to prioritise? We really struggled. I often take a step back and talk to partners from time to time, asking, “How are you doing? Do you work 24 hours a day?” From the point of view of care, when your brain is working 24 hours a day, it would stop functioning, and you wouldn’t make sense anymore. It’s not a very smart thing to do. I don’t believe people can work nonstop effectively for an extended period. Rest is resistance, and funders should resource movement to rest and heal.
ALR: I wanted to ask about how you have changed your perspective over the years in your position. How do you compare your perspectives today versus when you started on the job?
Marat: It’s always important to evolve, to learn and to be open to learning. I would ask, what are the sources from which I can learn? It is especially important to be intentional in reaching out to those who are in the second tiers or third tiers of organisations, or those who don’t usually show up. Even just asking why they’re not here. And can I talk to so-and-so? That brings me new perspectives because they are emerging thoughts. I learned a lot from that.
Of course, I talk to establish leaders. I also valued learning from you guys at Asian Labour Review, because there is not enough theorising of the struggles in this region. We prioritise actions over theory, and it’s so important to learn in a structured way. We can also learn from different kinds of disciplines, from anthropologists, from sociologists, from historians. That’s a way to understand what went well and what didn’t. I’m just naturally curious about what would be a different perspective to understand a situation.
ALR: Yes, reflection and theorising should be integral to the actions, but there remains a division between doing things and talking and thinking about things in the movement.
Marat: As a funder, this kind of reflection and learning is not a very typical thing to fund. It is true that some funding goes into knowledge development, but what exactly do we mean by “knowledge”? How can we identify the next frontiers that will be useful to the movement and from the movement, and how can we fund them? That will be a starting point. It is also important to fund occasions where activists and activist-academics meet in convening circles and dialogues. Since the funders support knowledge development, why not reconsider this approach?
Of course, funders like to fund research and surveys. Look at how many research reports have been done, like surveys or mapping. Let’s just be realistic and be honest. I mean, how many people read a 60- or 100-page report, and the communities are answering the same questions an endless number of times? Come on, what a waste of time.
ALR: Thinking of the big picture of the funding landscape, they are already receiving less and less international funding from the Global North to fund the Global South, and this trend is likely to continue. What’s the alternative? How do people sustain their work financially? How can they reduce their dependency?
Marat: It’s easier said than done. My take on that is, how do we evolve? When we discuss resources and funding, we often refer to money. How do we transition from dependence to interdependence? The mainstream discourse is centred on the global North no longer funding us, and we need to rely on domestic philanthropy. But it’s just shifting the target.
Even the Global North funders are discussing quid pro quo: I’m funding the work that will benefit me. I have some returns on our funding. But the type of returns that people are negotiating is not necessarily what benefits the movement.
We can ask a different question: How do we create more constructive interdependence? Do I need you in a way that will also be beneficial to me? And if we approach negotiations or discussions from that point of view, it will be healthier, because you may receive significant funding from a domestic funder, but it may still be considered charity. It’s just that you may have a more benevolent overlord in this region rather than in other regions. Instead, we need to shift to an interdependence perspective.
