Is it OK to take 'tainted money'?

There's an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of billionaire philanthropy. On one hand, money from big philanthropic foundations funds some of the most important work in the world. Programs to help vulnerable communities, to protect the environment, to defend human rights. It's a critical lifeline for a lot of nonprofit organizations and organizers. On the other hand, the source of that money is very often extraordinarily wealthy individuals, most of them men, most of them white, who have built fortunes on the very economic systems that generate inequality in the first place. It's a tension that Kavita Nandini Ramdas has navigated her entire career as a prominent feminist activist who has worked both inside and outside some of the world's most influential foundations. She has learned a lot about what it really means and what it costs to speak truth to power, to hold your own funders, your own employers accountable to the values and goals they profess. about what it means to maintain allegiance to your own voice. We recorded this interview prior to the news of Gloria Steinem's death at the age of 92, but this conversation feels like a fitting tribute nonetheless. Here's Kavita Nandani Ramdas. Kavita Nandani Ramdas, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. It's nice to be on.

It's nice to see you. Before we dive too deeply into the substance of your career and these really complex issues that you've been tackling for years as a prominent voice and one who's not afraid to speak truth to power, the perfect podcast guest, I want to start by with the issue of language and the words that we use to describe the topic that we're discussing today. This is a topic where language really seems to matter. Sexual and reproductive health and rights, population health, reproductive justice, words have become kind of their own battleground here. In some cases, very literally, like my direct exposure to some of these issues is in negotiations over UN declarations where you have different parties who are really going at each other to strip certain phrases from UN documents or to include them. I'd just be curious, given that these words mean different things to different people or carry certain political connotations, why do you think language is so central and so contested when we're talking about people's bodies and the choices they get to make about them? What is at stake in these battles over which words to use and not to use? And what, in your view, is the language that best captures what you believe to be worth fighting for?

That's about four questions in one, but I love it. That's how you kick

off a podcast.

That sounds great. I think some things are really just non-negotiable. And I think what I would begin from is, that this is not, as I think some people can make a question about language, an issue of nitpicking or quibbling over dotting your I's and crossing your T's, but rather that it is really central to how you see the dignity and worth of all human beings. And I say that because The male part of our species, the human species, or what has been considered to be the male part of our species, has very rarely undergone the experience that the other half, or