A 23-year-old proved something this weekend that we’ve always known to be true. Philanthropy was never reserved for people with fortunes to give away. It is a voice loud enough to fill a stage. It is talent, used for something bigger than a paycheck. It is a few dollars, given by people who will never be billionaires.
That’s what built Daisy Chain Fields, and that’s what we watched from our phones this weekend, like so many of you did. Olivia Rodrigo built a stage and gave nearly all of it away, to Stevie Nicks, to Sarah McLachlan, to a lineup of women who have been making this kind of noise since before she was born. Ten million dollars became twenty when Melinda French Gates joined in. A multigenerational crowd danced to Chappell Roan and Doechii and left having learned about reproductive rights and labor protection organizations they might not have otherwise encountered.
Daisy Chain Fields trusted its own irresistibility to do the organizing. People came for Garbage and Bikini Kill and stayed for the change they could make together. That’s the note for philanthropy. Make it good. Let the politics ride in on the pleasure.
FreeFrom, one of our grant partners, was there for both. Their work is survivor-led and wider than any single program: cash that reaches someone before a crisis becomes an emergency, savings built until independence turns into a plan, a social enterprise paying survivors a living wage. This is what it looks like to build a world around a person instead of asking her to survive the one that failed her.
Policy alone doesn’t move people. Culture does. It’s where hearts get won and minds get opened, where we learn who we are and who belongs, and it’s culture more than any single bill that decides what’s politically possible on everything from abortion access to climate justice. That belief is why we built our Culture Change Fund, the first collaborative of its kind, organizing gender justice through cultural strategy.
Turn up the music, dance in your living room, and give to the Culture Change Fund this week. This is the whole shape of a daisy chain: each link is invisible until you follow it, and nothing holds without it.
With joy (and a little bit of FOMO),
Stephanie Green, she/her
Chief Strategist, Partnerships, Women’s Foundation California