After Rashad and his team ran the campaign that pushed more than 100 corporations to abandon the American Legislative Exchange Council, the case studies arrived. Funders circulated the write-ups, praised the model, and went looking for people who could reproduce it.
None of them came back to Robinson. “They took the write-ups and went off and funded people to do that work, and never came back to me or Color of Change,” he told the podcast Let’s Hear It. The pattern captures the thing he now spends much of his time trying to correct: philanthropy pays for the visible campaign and starves the machinery that made it possible.
The question Rashad Robinson is putting to philanthropy
The host who interviewed Robinson boiled his message to the nonprofit and foundation world down to one line: are you building power, or just showing up? For a sector fluent in mission statements, impact decks, and awareness metrics, it’s an uncomfortable question. Robinson means it to be.
His point is narrower than a dismissal of visibility. Visibility matters. Funders just keep treating a moment as if it were an outcome. A viral campaign, a well-attended convening, a report that lands press coverage: each can close out a grant cycle without shifting who actually makes the decisions. Robinson’s current advisory work, through Rashad Robinson Advisors, the firm he formed in late 2024, centers on closing that gap. “I have a whole practice of helping movement organizations really think about power, narrative, and culture change,” he told Let’s Hear It.
Why infrastructure beats events
Robinson’s answer is infrastructure, a word he uses in a specific, unglamorous sense. Speaking at AFROTECH in 2024, he pushed the audience past individual acts of participation. “Protection requires infrastructure. That requires us to have vehicles that allow us to build collective power together,” he said. “Infrastructure can be relationships, but infrastructure is organization, money, and resources.”
The framing carries a direct instruction for how money should move. Isolated projects generate outputs. Infrastructure generates the capacity to keep winning after the grant ends. Robinson roots the point in the way accountability actually gets built. Cars are safe because advocates, campaigns, and eventually regulation forced the auto industry to make them safe. Food safety followed the same path. The protection lasted because durable systems created consequences, not because a single moment of pressure did.
He asks funders to follow the money on the other side too. “Behind every single attack on our community, someone or something is profiting,” he said at AFROTECH. “Someone is making money off of it, and someone is gonna do everything they possibly can to uphold it.” Opposition to change is organized and financed. Movements, in his account, need to be resourced with the same seriousness.
The funding problem philanthropy rarely names
Rashad Robinson speaks about foundations from long experience on both sides of the table. He has served on foundation boards, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation, and he built Color of Change partly by convincing donors to take digital organizing seriously. “We spent years trying to persuade funders that black people use the internet,” he told the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
The barriers run deeper than proof of concept. Van Jones, who co-founded Color of Change, put the harder truth on record in the same profile. “The sad, secret truth is that it is hard to raise money as a black male leader, even when you are generating fantastic results.” Robinson kept the organization independent of corporate money for related reasons. Companies would happily deal with Color of Change through a donation or a flattering gala, he said. “We don’t want to be bought off.”
Under the fundraising mechanics sits a principle he has argued for years, aimed squarely at how foundations structure their giving. People experience their lives whole, not in the issue silos that organize grant portfolios, and the forces holding communities back are interconnected. Racist policing depends on a media environment that sustains it. Poverty is held in place by employment, health, and education systems working together. An integrated world, in his phrasing, requires integrated strategies, funded and executed accordingly.
The advisor’s era, by design
Robinson’s move from running one organization to advising many is deliberate. Instead of leading a single institution, he now works across the field, and he has built a team of advisors and strategists with specific expertise in this work under Rashad Robinson Advisors. The book he wrote for this moment, “From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win,” extends the same logic to readers he can’t advise one on one.
The audience he names is telling. The book is pitched to political and social justice leaders, to community members trying to move a school board, and to funders deciding where volunteer energy and donations should go.
What winning looks like to a funder
Ask Robinson to point at success, and he doesn’t name a hashtag or a turnout figure. He points at Minneapolis, where years of coordinated organizing, including the work to elect a reform-minded district attorney, produced the capacity to respond when a crisis hit. “It speaks to the power of infrastructure, of communities working together, of what is possible,” he said of the organizing there.
For a program officer, the lesson is a shift in what gets measured. A campaign’s reach describes presence. Whether a community can still act after the cameras leave describes power. Robinson’s challenge to the people who fund social change is to build evaluation around the second measure, and to treat the slow, unglamorous work of infrastructure, relationships, organization, money, resources, as the thing worth paying for. Showing up is where the work begins. The money shouldn’t stop there.
