If you’re a small grassroots group wanting no-strings-attached funding, it is well worth learning from larger charities who often raise huge amounts of money through grassroots community fundraising. Many of them provide resources on their website to support their supporters who help raise funds for them. Here are two:
The article Profits for Justice talks about activists’ dependence on grant funding and how we might generate funds ourselves. It ends “The secret to being as radical as we want to be – and as radical we need to be – is to finance the revolution ourselves”.
The Revolution Will Not be Funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex is a great book that talks about the dangers of relying on grant funding and how organisations raise the funds they need without them.
Fundraising for Social Change, by Kim Klein. A guide to how to build, maintain and expand an individual donor program, this book is often called “the Bible of grassroots fundraising.”