My dissertation, which I expect to complete in 2025, is titled, “Dollars and Dissent: Donor Support for Grassroots Organizing and Nonviolent Movements.”

During the most recent decade, more people than ever before around the world used nonviolent collective action to secure rights, achieve justice, and build democracy. This strategy has been twice as effective at attaining these goals than has violent action. Yet, despite this success, from 2011 to 2018, public charities and private foundations gave only three percent of their total human rights funding to support grassroots organizing and social movements. My dissertation has entailed dozens of semi-structured interviews, surveys with donors and grantees, and three in-depth case studies of the American Jewish World Service, Humanity United, and the United States Agency for International Development. It outlines trends in donor support and details how donors’ values, organizational structures, lived experiences, and perceptions of risk affect their decisions about whether, when, where, and how to support for the work of grassroots organizers and nonviolent social movements. The dissertation offers a novel theory of donor decision making and offers actionable recommendations that donors public charities, private foundations, bilateral donors, and multilateral donors can adapt and adopt to their own circumstances.

My committee is comprised of Dr. Alex de Waal (Tufts) as chair, Dr. Marshall Ganz (Harvard), and Dr. Richard Shultz (Tufts).