The day after Thanksgiving, the historic Sixth & I synagogue in Washington, D.C., was the target of anti-Semitic graffiti — an act of vandalism that the organization’s rabbis said “fit into a painful nationwide pattern of rising anti-Jewish crime.”
Events like this have become far too common and are part of a rapidly building pattern of political violence and hate crimes in our country.
Organizations that track hate crime numbers report startling trends. The Arab American Institute reports 250,000 hate crimes each year, on average, in the United States. The FBI’s most recent annual hate crime report, published last month, found physical assaults and violence spiking to 61 percent of hate crimes last year, on the heels of three years of annual increases in the total number of incidents.
This data is no surprise for people who face the consequences of hyperpartisan hostility, hate, structural racism, misogyny, and violence every day.
But what if philanthropy could interrupt these patterns and create “protective strategies” in our communities and in our interactions?
That’s a key goal of the Democracy Fund, which has committed nearly $10 million in resilience-building efforts, including $3.5 million specifically in support of Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and immigrants and refugees in the United States. Resilient communities can rebound from societal fissures without sinking deeper into cycles of hate or violence. They can heal damage and care for themselves, and they can engage on an equal footing in our democracy.
For example, we support a group of Tennessee Muslims as they seek to build partnerships with recently returned veterans. Other grants support immigrants and refugees as they pursue their rights in courts. The work our grantees lead is aimed at advancing a more inclusive vision of American belonging. We do that with the goal of building the kind of resilience that doesn’t just protect the most vulnerable; it makes targeted communities and the fabric of our whole society healthier.
Learn From the Past
But for all our grant making to strengthen our democracy so that it is more healthy, resilient, and diverse, our efforts alone can’t undo ways political violence is damaging our democracy, which we memorialize in names like Oak Creek. Charleston. Charlottesville. Pittsburgh. Sacramento. El Paso.
We need to learn from hate attacks of the past, in our own country and elsewhere, what works to heal societies and support people most likely to be targeted by hate attacks today.
That’s why this week, New America and Over Zero, supported by our Just and Inclusive Society project released a new issue brief, Building U.S. Resilience to Political Violence: A (Globally Informed) Framework for Analysis and Action. The brief offers insights and lessons learned from social science and international peace building to help all of us in philanthropy better understand what efforts we can support that will bolster U.S. resilience in the face of escalated risks for political violence.
Building resilience requires a lot of players, all working together to prevent new cycles of violence from erupting and keeping old tensions from worsening.
For example, during Northern Ireland’s 30 years of violence known as the Troubles, grant makers and other entities like the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland carefully appointed boards and leaders that reflected the society’s divisions. They started by identifying shared social needs across divides and empowering people to work together on mental health and socioeconomic concerns. The trust they built allowed them — grant-making entities and civil-society groups — to play a diverse set of roles in getting to a peace agreement and sustaining it afterward — from advising negotiators to establishing “restorative justice” processes to work with former perpetrators of violence who returned from prison and became key voices for peace.
The coalition of efforts that built the American antilynching movement at the end of the 19th century offers profound lessons today. African-American journalist Ida B. Wells pioneered in-depth reporting and public-information campaigns to counter the false narratives used to justify lynching. Building on this work, organizations such as the NAACP and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation mobilized blacks and whites across regional and racial lines — building on shared identities such as membership in particular religious denominations or women’s clubs (such as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching). The long-term work of black women, in particular, laid the groundwork for the work that diminished violence in communities where it was active and shifted the societal norms that had made lynching common.
Resilience for the Future
Today as well, investing in community resilience will prevent some violence from occurring and, when it does occur, can support communities in healing. To be sure, it is important for philanthropy to continue to help communities after a tragedy, such as supporting demonstrations and vigils, compiling accurate hate crime data, and pushing for prosecutions of perpetrators. However, too often, that is all that happens, in part because grant makers, donors, and others give generously right after a tragic event, but don’t mobilize long-term giving efforts that empower communities.
But we in philanthropy can change our ways and put more money into the work that needs to be done before a catastrophe strikes. We should ask such questions as: Are our grants reinforcing stereotypes on each side of a polarized divide? Are we making grants that encourage others to speak for the most vulnerable, rather than enabling them to speak for themselves? And are we making it our goal to build strong leaders and relationships so that people trust one another and can work together more effectively?
As grant makers, we’ve also realized that it’s essential to look more closely at what’s happening on the front lines after a politically motivated incident, to understand what opportunities exist to fund resilience-building efforts for the future. We’ve supported individuals who were targeted with death threats to train other leaders how to continue in the face of attacks. And we’ve supported networks where the survivors of terror attacks in Boston and Oak Creek — two places where strong communities helped prevent one tragedy from begetting others — give advice in real time to people across the country when tragedy strikes their hometowns.
Fostering resilience takes time, and that is often in short supply in philanthropy. But we know resiliency works. This work is not just a short-term solution, but rather has the potential to be the breakthrough shift in culture and norms that this country needs. And the time to adopt it is now.
Tom Glaisyer is managing director of program at Democracy Fund, where Nadia Firozvi is associate director of the Just and Inclusive Society Project.