“I Have to be Optimistic”: Professional Fundraising and the Politics of Hope

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter reflects on the concept of hope as it was constructed through neoliberalism and deployed by the first large cohort of Canadian fundraisers. Beyond the fact that fundraising was a burgeoning career path in the early twenty-first century, fundraising was a “business of hope” in two other senses. First, fundraisers were identified as salespeople, selling the value and virtue of philanthropy for a better future. Second, fundraisers’ optimism was a mode of governance, making philanthropic culture appear desirable as well as inevitable. Fundraisers advised donors to invest hope in the marketplace of charitable institutions even if steeper inequality and eroded democratic institutions followed from the unrelenting, unequal competition in that sector and throughout society.