When the House is on Fire: What the GoFundMe Scandal Reveals About Philanthropy’s Broken Promises

Over the past week, the nonprofit world has been buzzing about GoFundMe’s revelation that it created more than a million nonprofit fundraising pages without permission.

And sure — the outrage is justified. GoFundMe took liberties it shouldn’t have. It profited off the trust and labor of a sector already stretched to the breaking point.

But while many are using this moment to lecture nonprofits about “fixing their follow-up” or “rebuilding donor relationships,” we need to stop and ask: who actually set this house on fire?

Because the real story isn’t about GoFundMe.

It’s about an ecosystem that’s been quietly collapsing under the weight of broken promises and shrinking commitments.

The Quiet Retraction of Equity and Actual Justice

In 2020 and 2021, we heard funders speak boldly about racial equity, reparations, and redistributing power. Money flowed — sometimes for the first time — to Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led organizations that had been excluded for decades.

It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

Fast forward to now.

That wave of investment has receded. Multi-year commitments have been “reevaluated.” Racial equity initiatives have been quietly sunset. And the organizations that anchored entire communities during the pandemic are once again being told to “do more with less.”

These aren’t orgs that failed to “build trust.” These are the ones that built the trust philanthropy couldn’t — showing up for communities when no one else did. And now they’re being left to shoulder the fallout of funder fatigue and public amnesia.

The Myth of Relationship Capital

There’s been a lot of talk about nonprofits “losing their relationship capital.”

 But let’s be clear: small, grassroots organizations — especially those led by people of color — have never lacked relationship capital. They’ve built entire movements on connection, reciprocity, and care.

What they’ve lacked is capital, period.

Philanthropy rewards polish over proximity, metrics over meaning, and scalability over sincerity. So when a BIPOC-led org goes under, it’s not a failure of stewardship — it’s a reflection of a system that never funded them to succeed in the first place.

GoFundMe Didn’t Break Trust — It Exposed It

What GoFundMe did was wrong. But what it really did was expose just how fragile the sector’s infrastructure has become.

When funders withdraw, government contracts tighten, and donors dwindle, organizations turn to whatever platforms will keep them afloat — even ones that exploit their vulnerability.

This isn’t about nonprofits being careless. It’s about philanthropy being careless with its commitments.

A Call to Remember

Before we lecture nonprofits about rebuilding relationships, let’s remember:

They were the ones who held relationship when everyone else left the room.

If we’re going to talk about trust, let’s start with funders, platforms, and institutions that made promises they didn’t keep.

GoFundMe may have sparked the conversation — but the real accountability belongs to those who have the power (and resources) to rebuild an equitable sector and are choosing not to.

In Lak’Ech: I am you, and you are me.

The survival of our organizations is not about efficiency or stewardship — it’s about solidarity, truth, and the will to remember who we said we were when it mattered most.