On Juneteenth this year, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker tweeted a video of himself ringing the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, noting in the accompanying caption that the “momentous week” had started with the grant maker issuing a $1 billion social bond to help nonprofits during the pandemic. “Unprecedented times — and hopefully a sign of the change that’s to come,” he wrote.
A fine sentiment, but it’s fair to ask: What exactly will that change look like for Walker and other philanthropic leaders? This should be a straightforward question, but it is not. The initial response from big philanthropy to the historic racial-justice uprisings this summer was beleaguered and tepid. So much so that Justice Funders, an organization of grant makers, issued a public letter imploring philanthropy to step up and do more to support Black-led organizing.
As for the $1 billion social bond approach, is it really a sign of change? While payout rates will increase, it’s clear that Walker and other foundation leaders are currently not interested in increasing grant making above the federally required 5 percent of their multibillion-dollar endowments. Instead, they continue to hang on to their “twice-stolen wealth,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a City University of New York professor, puts it: stolen once by industries that profited from underpaid or unpaid, predominantly Black and brown labor and/or exploitation of the environment, and a second time through charitable tax deductions that place this wealth in philanthropic endowments that are privately managed by mostly white trustees.
So, what can creatures of capitalism do to support movements for racial, economic, and social justice? They could start by pledging not to repeat the mistakes of the past — specifically private philanthropy’s practice of using its influence to shape the agendas of vulnerable civil-rights organizations. History is rife with examples of what one of us, Megan Ming Francis, dubbed “movement capture.”
This pattern played out, for instance, in the historic California Farmworkers Movement of the 1960s, which sought to replace a racially stratified and abusive agricultural industry with mutual-aid institutions and cooperative agriculture. Relying on monthly dues from fieldworkers, movement founders initially took a firm stance against outside funding. That changed when leader Cesar Chavez grew concerned that philanthropic giving to moderate farmworker groups could be used to water down the movement’s agenda.
In response, Chavez began to court foundations. The resulting funding agreements, most notably with Ford and the Field Foundation, ultimately led to a retreat away from farmworker organizing to a focus on nonprofit service groups that provided educational programs for farmworker families. Consumed by administrative work and other movement challenges, Chavez accepted a foundation-approved translation of farmworker organizing that explicitly rejected any pressure on the “economic sphere” — in other words, against big agriculture or for collective farmworker ownership.
Shaping the NAACP Agenda
This approach to social control was not invented in the 1960s. One of the most celebrated examples of liberal philanthropy is the American Fund for Public Service’s support of the NAACP’s school-desegregation campaign, which paved the way for the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Conventional wisdom has it that the interests of the AFPS (known as the Garland Fund) and the NAACP converged around the issue of segregated schools in the south, leading the fund to provide seed money for the litigation effort. The story even has a fairytale ending: the collapse of legalized Jim Crow education laws.
Unfortunately, this well-packaged narrative hides a more complicated one: the shifting of the NAACP’s civil-rights agenda between 1923 and 1930. At the time, racial violence — not education — was the priority issue for the NAACP, which believed the protection of Black lives from state and vigilante white violence was the fundamental civil-rights struggle of the 20th century. However, money had dwindled, and the NAACP could barely keep the lights on. Enter the American Fund for Public Service, a progressive foundation with a board of directors composed of white radicals. The NAACP’s leadership attempted to redirect the money to the issue of racial violence but with little success and begrudgingly chose to move forward with the AFPS grant. The result was a shift in the larger civil-rights movement away from direct action on racial violence to litigation on education.
And that takes us back to the present. The safety of Black lives is at long last the galvanizing civil- rights issue it was meant to be decades ago. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives developed a detailed policy platform with a clear message: “We demand investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people.” In 2020, it stated that message even more starkly: “The Time Has Come to Defund the Police.”
Undermining Justice
But once again, big philanthropy is acting in ways that undermine radical movements for justice. Instead of answering the call of some of the most marginalized groups in our society, many in philanthropy have cozied up to the corporations that have made life miserable for so many. For example, they have gaslighted us with new social bonds underwritten by Wells Fargo Securities, used valuable political capital to advocate for corporate accountability instead of directly supporting the demand to defund the police, and issued numerous solidarity statements with no actual action behind them. Even now, more than three months after the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, grant makers are reluctant to fund Black-led grass-roots movements.
Far from feeling like the crescendo of decades of funding social-justice organizations, this summer’s protests have exposed a gilded philanthropy wholly out of step with the causes it purports to support and lacking in imagination about how to cede power and support Black-led movements. Foundation leaders are of course more cognizant today of the influence they wield. Instead of directly using the power of the purse to shift activist agendas, they have embraced a more obscured form of soft power.
Many leading criminal-justice grant makers, such as Arnold Ventures, Koch, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, favor “reform” efforts. They have not captured the agenda of specific organizations within the Movement for Black Lives, but their efforts have effectively legitimized a system of policing and incarceration that activists have long argued is irredeemable. Furthermore, many of these efforts, such as an Audacious Project grant to advance an overhaul of policing or the celebrated campaign to #CloseRikers (and then spend more than $8 billion to build four new jails), further enlarged the system by pouring more money into policing and prisons.
In funding a new cadre of reformers, big philanthropy has consistently undermined a central tenant of the Movement for Black Lives, forcing activists to expend resources combating not just the unjust criminal-justice system but also well-funded organizations with reformist goals. This tension most recently played out in Campaign Zero’s reformist #8CantWait campaign and the resulting #8toAbolition campaign, which sought to switch the focus from defunding the police to revamping police departments.
Don’t Rely on Consensus
As big foundations continue to call for change, and promise to back it up with their dollars, we need to make sure they don’t respond to the moment by supporting palliative programs.
Paul Ylvisaker, a central figure in Ford Foundation’s grant making in the 1960s, once advised foundation staff to “search for consensus in approach and resolution. Consensus is an institutional imperative in our times, simply to minimize the friction generated by institutions moving through a crowding social and political environment.”
This was poor advice for philanthropy back then — and it remains poor advice today. Instead, foundation leaders need to allocate funds to the groups working on the ground to build new forms of safety, care, and self-determination — and they need to trust that those organizations know how to get the job done.
This article is adapted from a longer article that originally appeared in HistPhil.