President's Letter: Courage is Contagious

Dear friends,

I took the call late on a chilly evening in the fall of 1988. A young man was on the phone. He’d just tested positive for HIV, and his boyfriend was leaving him. I did my best to be fully present for this man’s fear, anger, and grief. But my response felt crushingly inadequate. I spoke later with a therapist who supported volunteers like me, and I still remember what he said: “We’ll all remember the choices we make now for the rest of our lives.”

For a young gay man at the height of the AIDS crisis, choices had consequences. And I was convinced I’d made the wrong choices, said the wrong things, on that call. “You picked up the phone,” the therapist said. “You made the choice to engage, to help.” What I said on the call was not perfect, but his point was that I was there, bearing witness and showing solidarity. That mattered. That was a beginning.

Simple acts like fielding those calls helped propel a movement that forced a reluctant government to make policy changes that saved millions of lives in the United States and around the world.

ACT UP coined a defining slogan, “Silence = Death.” Twenty years from now, I suspect, we will all be reflecting on the choices we make today. Were we silent, or did we pick up the phone?

I have never felt fear or dread as strongly as I did during the AIDS crisis. Now, I sense those feelings all around me. I have compassion for the terror that led the boyfriend of the young man I counseled to flee. And I understand the choices many people — at all levels of our society — are making today to lay low, to tune out, or to try to hide and make themselves small in hopes of finding safety.

The key lesson I learned in the AIDS crisis, however, is that the antidote to fear is community. People organized because their lives, and the lives of the people they loved, depended on it. As Tim Sweeney, a key leader in the AIDS movement and a hero of mine, once told me: the movement changed the arc of the AIDS crisis and simultaneously laid the groundwork for seismic changes in how LGBTQ+ people were seen and treated in this country. The movement made a way out of no way. That can happen again, as it has so many times throughout American history.

There is a dispiriting tide of fear right now, and I’m disappointed by how few leaders and institutions are stepping up. But my own experience and our shared history teaches us a hopeful lesson: courage is contagious.

In this moment, we each have to pick up the phone.

The call we must answer today is a call of conscience. Taking food and medicine from the poorest people, at home and abroad, to give tax cuts to America’s richest people and corporations is wrong. Targeting people who disagree with you for retribution and weaponizing the awesome power of the federal government to exact revenge is wrong. Separating children from their parents and terrorizing communities and workers is wrong. Reversing the progress that we have made as a country on inclusion through policies that advance racial and gender justice is wrong. Decimating the scientific infrastructure of this country, the system that will train the next generation of researchers, innovators, and experts, is wrong. These are not questions of politics. They are questions of morality, of human decency. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that these moral imperatives are fringe ideas. Millions of people, across many divides — latent majorities — share these values.

At Freedom Together, we stand with those millions of Americans — steadfastly committed to morality and decency, democracy and freedom.

I am inspired, as I was 35 years ago, by all those who are answering the call. Many immigrant organizations report large turnouts at community meetings, trainings, and mobilizations. Government workers are organizing to defend not only themselves, but essential public institutions. Everyday people are organizing to defend the safety net and to ensure that women and trans people have access to critical health care. Young scientists are organizing to ensure that there is a future for the vital work they do at universities. People of faith are showing up and speaking out. Many unions are once again demonstrating why they are the cornerstones of our multiracial democracy. Veterans in social change movements are returning to frontline work, or providing essential coaching on strategy to a new generation. And some elected officials, from governors to attorneys general to mayors, are standing up for the rule of law and for communities facing attacks.

It’s not yet nearly enough. But it is a beginning.

This crisis demands an extraordinary response from philanthropy. At Freedom Together, we’ll have the back of those answering the call. I’m proud that our board decided to spend 10% or more of our endowment — double what the law requires and what most foundations typically spend. We’re moving to provide rapid response grants to communities and organizations under attack. We’re backing groups that are defending democratic norms, as well as supporting safety and security initiatives for organizations under threat. And we’re doubling down on long-term strategies to get at the roots of the democracy crisis.

Standing up for what is right matters. It also matters how we go about the work ahead of us, in the short and long term.

Another lesson I learned from the AIDS movement is the importance of engaging and recruiting people beyond your natural “base.” A great organizer doesn’t limit her work to mobilizing the small number of people around her who already agree. That is a recipe for insularity, marginality, and burnout. Instead, she must undertake the hard work of recruiting people who are currently on the sidelines, who might hold complex or contradictory views on many topics, and offer them pathways to participation in which they can find agency and belonging. That is the path to building a majoritarian constituency for change.

At Freedom Together, one throughline for our short- and long-term work is building a “bigger we” — reaching beyond the choir to expand the number of people who are answering the call.

I had the privilege of joining my colleagues to see some of this work in action in North Carolina recently. We visited Down Home North Carolina, which is organizing in rural communities that are too often ignored. The group shared with us innovations in their organizing model, through which they are building new ways for people to connect socially, find belonging, and have fun together as they build power. We also met up with the Union of Southern Service Workers, which held a convention for worker organizing groups throughout the South. The gathering brought together Black, white, and Latino workers, who found common ground in the stories they shared not only of workplace abuses, but also of the victories they achieved by forging solidarity across lines of difference. These long-term projects to build power with people historically denied it, in a region of the country that is central to the nation’s future, filled me with hope.

Watching the news these days, you might conclude that human beings are driven solely by the desire for domination and grotesque wealth. That may be true for a small minority. But what’s driving people who are answering the call all over the country in response to the current crisis tells a different story, one you don’t hear about enough. We are motivated to find agency, belonging, and respect. When we find those things through organizing together, we are capable of extraordinary acts of courage and caring that change the world.

In solidarity,

Deepak Bhargava
President
Freedom Together Foundation