3 Years After George Floyd, Foundations Say They’ve Changed. Many Racial-Justice Nonprofits Disagree.

Until 2020 — the year when George Floyd was murdered, setting off a summer of protests demanding racial justice — civil-rights lawyer Ryan Haygood, CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, had never raised a dime from two of the state’s biggest grant makers, the Geraldine R. Dodge and Robert Wood Johnson foundations.

Nor had the Rev. Charles Boyer, who leads Salvation and Social Justice, a faith-based nonprofit in Trenton, N.J., that organizes Black churches to advocate on issues of criminal justice, health care, and the wealth and income disparities Black Americans face.

That changed greatly after the nation turned its attention to racial inequity. Since then, Robert Wood Johnson and Dodge together have given $2 million to Haygood’s group, making them among the institute’s biggest supporters. They have together given $479,000 to Salvation and Social Justice, which also secured a first-time grant of $423,000 from Arnold Ventures for its work on police accountability.

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Both the two Black-led civil-rights groups can now point to specific accomplishments that were made possible by the influx of dollars, especially in advancing changes in the criminal-justice system.

In 2021, the institute was part of a coalition that secured $8.4 million in state funds to create “restorative justice hubs” in Camden, Newark, Paterson, and Trenton. Among other things, the hubs will offer services for young people returning from incarceration, including treatment for substance abuse.

One of Salvation and Social Justice’s big wins: Last year, New Jersey for the first time required its police officers to be licensed — as doctors and lawyers are — and set rules for decertifying officers who engage in misconduct.

“The summer of 2020 catapulted us to a totally different place,” Boyer says.

Haygood also got first-time grants from companies including Audible, Amazon, and J.P. Morgan. He sent 1,500 hand-written thank-you notes to donors in 2021, up from 200 in prior years.

It wasn’t just New Jersey, of course. Across the United States, foundations and nonprofits took action to confront the problem of racism as never before. Vast sums of money – no one knows how much – flowed to nonprofits that advance racial equity by seeking to make education more accessible, hold police accountable, help people of color build wealth, reduce mass incarceration, improve health equity, and more.

For example, on the same day in August 2020, the Packard Foundation and the Lilly Endowment each announced $100 million efforts. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation raised $125 million through a social bond, with the goal that more than half the money would fund nonprofits led by people of color. The money has been distributed, and the share ended up being more than 80 percent.

(The Lilly Endowment is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)

Among the nonprofits that benefited from the bond offering was the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective, a Los Angeles organization that makes grants, trains organizers, and promotes wellness to people often marginalized by the health-care system, which received $500,000. Data for Black Lives also received a $500,000 award. The Cambridge, Mass., organization supports a network of grassroots racial-justice groups that challenge discriminatory uses of data and algorithms.

New announcements continue. Last month, the Ballmer Group introduced a five-year, $42.5 million effort to support Black-led nonprofits that aim to improve economic mobility, and the Raikes Foundation created a new grant-making program to support organizations that seek to build a robust multiracial democracy in the United States as part of its plan to distribute its entire endowment by 2038.

Some foundations have also sought to help nonprofits do more to diversify their staffs, boards, and the rest of their operations. To pick just one example: The Walmart Foundation is supporting a six-month project that brings together 10 high-profile nonprofits — they include the American Red Cross, FFA (Future Farmers of America), Goodwill Industries, Team Rubicon, the Recycling Partnership, and the World Wildlife Fund — to strengthen their work on racial equity, both internally and externally.

It’s too soon, though, to say how deep the changes have been, whether they will last, or, most important, whether they have made a material difference to Black Americans.

Systemic inequities built up over hundreds of years require patient, persistent efforts to overcome. “It’s not realistic to expect, even with a significant surge in funding, that in three years those gaps will be closed,” says Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, whose surveys have found that most foundation leaders say racial equity has become a more explicit part of their grant making.

A Deflating Drop

The landscape of racial-justice giving looks very different from the nonprofit perspective versus that of grant makers.

Courtesy of the New Jersey Insti

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law brought in about $39 million in individual gifts and foundation grants in 2020, more than three times what it registered in 2019. In 2022 many long-term grant makers renewed grants, but total revenue was down, says Damon Hewitt, the litigation nonprofit’s executive director.

Foundations rose to the occasion during the first two years of the decade, Hewitt says, but now they’re reverting to their normal practice of parceling out smaller grants and protecting their endowments. Grant declines are simply the back end of the wave that rolled through the nonprofit sector in 2020 and 2021, Hewitt says.

“Does it feel deflating? Sure,” Hewitt says. “But does it mark a crisis? It depends on how you plan.”

Rather than use the influx of dollars to send out legions of lawyers across the country, it has spent more of its resources over the past three years hiring people in human resources, communications, and development positions. Hewitt hopes to shore up the nonprofit and help it remain stable — and more effective — for years to come. That means the organization’s lawyers will be able to concentrate on their cases, rather than writing news releases or wrangling with an HR issue.

Looking forward, Hewitt says the committee will use its beefed up development staff to try to reduce its dependence on foundations. While grants have helped in times of crisis, he doesn’t expect the support to transform his nonprofit’s work.

Says Hewitt: “Institutional philanthropy is not the vector that is going to sustain the growth in our budget.”

Even foundations that have made big commitments to racial justice question how much has been achieved. To the degree a consensus has emerged, it’s an unsurprising one: that philanthropy has made progress, but not enough.

The MacArthur Foundation started working to direct more of its grants to nonprofits led by people of color before the racial-justice protests of 2020. The fund calls on employees in all its grant-making areas to ask whether their actions are enhancing “the conditions in which justice can thrive” and consider the disparate effects problems often have on people who are marginalized — whether the issue is mass incarceration or global warming.

Dave White, MacArthur Foundation

Yet when MacArthur President John Palfrey takes stock of what philanthropy has achieved when it comes to racial justice, his assessment is mixed.

“No, I don’t think we have made that much progress, honestly,” he says. “It’s hard to say that we’re meaningfully in a different place than we were three years ago. But hopefully we as a field are smarter and broader-minded and have some better practices.”

Building for the Future

During the summer of 2020, when protesters filled streets nationwide to show their anger at Floyd’s police murder, many racial-justice nonprofits experienced a similar pattern: Money came pouring in from foundations. Some of the grants were from foundations that had never supported racial justice before. It was a fundraiser’s dream come true: Some of the cash was unsolicited and unrestricted. But the bounty started to dry up last year.

The Equal Justice Initiative was already in the spotlight when the nation’s attention turned to racial justice. In late 2019, Just Mercy, a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx, brought the story of the group’s founder Bryan Stevenson’s fight against the death penalty to the big screen.

EJI received a rush of donations in 2020, inflating the group’s total revenues from $35 million in 2019 to $216 million in 2020. Stevenson says the group thought it would attract small donations from people inspired by its mission, but it was surprised by the spike in corporate gifts it received.

What EJI did anticipate was that donations would probably drop, as indeed they did in 2021, to $133 million in total revenues. Individual contributions fell off, and “we probably had $30 million in corporate donations that we never saw again,” he said. That’s why the Montgomery, Ala., nonprofit put the bulk of the new funding into a museum project, which would not require renewed financing year after year.

In 2018, it had opened the 10,000-square-foot, highly praised Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration as well as the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which were overwhelmed by demand. The organization dreamed of building a space that would be five times larger but didn’t have the money.

“But then with these funds that came in, we just went ahead and went for it.”

In 2021, EJI moved the Legacy Museum to a 49,000-square-foot space, and in 2022, converted the old museum into meeting rooms and inaugurated the outdoor Legacy Plaza, next to the new museum. Another site, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, still in the works, is slated to open at the end of the year.

While much smaller than EJI, African Communities Together shared a similar mind-set: invest for the future.

Conrado Muluc, African Communities Together

The immigrant rights group saw a surge in support in 2020. But not all of it was in response to the calls for racial justice that reverberated that summer, says Amaha Kassa, the group’s executive director. Part of the growth was organic: African Communities Together was simply at a stage in its life cycle where it began to get on the radar of foundations. The nonprofit had been around for seven years, and it had successfully established a more representative count of African immigrants in the lead up to the 2020 Census.

Some foundations gave only once after 2020. Others, Kassa says, pulled back from immigration because they sensed the issue was unlikely to gain traction in a divided Congress.

Still, African Communities Together’s budget has more than quadrupled since 2018, hitting $4 million last year. Kassa says he has been cautious about adding new employees and rolling out new campaigns. Like Hewitt, he didn’t want to grow too fast.

“Organizations that assumed that this funding was long term, renewable, or sustainable funding and made program and staffing decisions based on that are going to find themselves in a bad way,” he says.

Often foundations will give an initial grant, Kassa says, thinking grassroots organizers will magically use the new money to achieve results. Few go beyond that first check and help nonprofits get serious about how they collect data and measure their work. By applying rigor to defining their impact, Kassa says, Black-led nonprofits can become more effective — and parlay those results into successful fundraising appeals and become part of foundations’ core programs rather than receive money as part of a rushed, ad hoc response.

To that end, Kassa is using a $500,000 grant from the Power Fund, a $10 million pool of money gathered by the Robin Hood Foundation, to purchase necessary technology and hire a director of impact.

“That sort of investment is rare when it comes to Black-led organizations,” Kassa says.

An Uneven Swell

One way to measure how the money foundations provided the racial-equity movement has made a difference is to keep tabs organization by organization. An extra staffer here, a bump in salary there have helped nonprofits keep from burning out, says Lori Villarosa, executive director of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. It’s also allowed them to fine-tune their work.

“I’ve seen more sophistication,” she says. “I’ve seen groups that have been able to really step up their game.”

But, Villarosa says, it’s tough to get a handle on just how effective a more flush movement has been because racial-justice organizations have been holding off more aggressive attacks from the far right.

That’s been the case with the Advancement Project, which used a surge in cash in 2020 to create a development team and devise a plan to attract corporate donations. The new money and interest in the role of the police following George Floyd’s murder fueled a campaign Advancement Project CEO Judith Browne Dianis helped organize, #PoliceFreeSchools, that persuaded roughly three dozen school districts to enact policies to keep cops out of schools.

Courtesy of The Lighthouse Black Girl Projects

Since hitting a high-water mark in 2020, total revenues for the Advancement Project have dropped 72 percent, with foundation grants accounting for a huge share of the decline. Dianis says the drop-off in individual and corporate donors isn’t unexpected. But when the backlash to the “defund” the police movement came, many racial-justice leaders counted on progressive foundations to dig deeper.

Foundations were fickle, Dianis says, both because they feared being aligned with a movement calling for fewer police and because of persistent distrust and the belief among white leaders that Black-led organizations are not up to the task.

“It wasn’t just the backlash from the right,” she says. “The left was also starting to wobble.”

The reduction in funds isn’t catastrophic, Dianis says. But it has shortened the Advancement Project’s planning horizon. Instead of plotting a far-reaching strategy, Dianis hopes to stop districts from reneging on their pledges to remove police officers from schools – Alexandria, Va., and Denver have already backtracked. And instead of riding a huge wave of funds, the organization is back to the position most nonprofits have existed in for years – scraping to raise money to ensure they can do their work beyond a few budget cycles.

“It’s not that we’re folding or laying off people or anything like that,” she says. “But you can’t be as big and bold as you need to meet the moment we are in.”

Experts also say that the swell of racial-justice giving in 2020 didn’t reach all shores.

While some nonprofits received windfalls, others have yet to get the attention — or money — they deserve, says Maheen Kaleem, vice president of operations for Grantmakers for Girls of Color, a pooled fund launched in 2015 that has supported 370 organizations with $25 million in grants. Grantmakers for Girls of Color has received financing from MacKenzie Scott, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Oak Foundation, Fondation Chanel, and the Skoll Foundation.

Bill O’Leary, The Washington Post, Getty Images

“We know that the most marginalized entities are not ever the ones that are going to access those big pots of money,” she says. “So when we’re looking at Black trans organizations, for example, they’re not going to access the same level of funding as a massive institution like the NAACP is.”

Natalie Collier is founder of the Lighthouse Black Girl Projects, a nonprofit in Jackson, Miss., that runs leadership-development programs. Collier says that while revenue has increased steadily the last few years, she has had to fight for every penny of her approximately $1.8 million budget.

“I work more now to raise money than I ever have,” Collier says. “And it comes in the form of a lot more funders and smaller checks.”

Squeezing money from a foundation is practically a lost cause for Tiera Rainey, executive director of the Tucson Bail Fund; her organization runs largely on individual donations. The bail fund is so small that she wouldn’t expect anyone outside of Tucson to know about it.

Much of the conversation about supporting Black-led organizations is laced with suspicion, she says, explaining that the question many people ask about philanthropy and the racial reckoning is “What have Black people done with the money?” That’s the wrong question, Rainey says. “I guarantee you, the vast majority of us did not actually get the money.”

‘You Just Find a Way’

There’s a sense of resignation when nonprofit leaders and the people who advise them talk about the future of racial-justice giving.

The era of foundations increasing their support is over, says C’Ardiss Gardner Gleser, founder of the Black Ivy consulting group and member of the Andrus Family Fund’s Board of Directors. With the ups and downs in the stock market, foundations are already telling grantees they’re going to cut back next year. “There’s this feeling of almost fatigue, like, ‘Oh, I thought we did that, didn’t we? Didn’t we do the racial-equity, racial-justice piece?’”

Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative doesn’t think funding will return to the heights of 2020 anytime soon.

“I don’t like to say that any of our projects or programs are at risk because I just genuinely believe that important work has to get done,” he says. “You just find a way to get it done even if the amount of revenue is dropping based on the absence of some donors.”

Foundations are more optimistic. Grant makers that have interrogated how they operate and how race and equity intersect with the causes they support say the changes they’ve instituted will make a difference for years to come.

Courtesy of the Advancement Project

Grants run out but when people understand racism better, they become committed to solving the problem — and that is sustainable change, says Charmaine Mercer, a former program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation who became the fund’s first chief of equity and culture.

(Hewlett is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)

Some of Hewlett’s new racial-justice grants support advocacy organizations like Color of Change, Ekō (formerly SumOfUs), and Re:Power, which offers an 18-week school for community organizers. Others fund research to strengthen knowledge across the field of racial justice.

While the grant making is visible, Mercer says, her biggest accomplishment last year was laying a foundation for progress on racial justice inside Hewlett. Every department now needs to develop a plan to deepen its work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Any staff member who wants to learn more about race and equity can sign up for one-on-one coaching; about a third of the foundation’s 120 people have done so. Even before 2020 — and unlike most foundations — Hewlett tracks and reports on its staff and grantee demographics; last year’s survey found that 60 percent of the foundation’s senior staff and 57 percent of the entire staff self-identified as a person of color.

Mercer and her colleagues on the culture, race, and equity team, along with senior staff, are exploring ways to integrate the racial-justice work across Hewlett’s entire grant-making portfolio.

“In an ideal world,” she says, “we go out of business.”