Can Philanthropy Save Democracy?

The Northwest Health Foundation has a full plate. It makes grants to education and health programs in Oregon and Washington State, advocates for people with disabilities, and tackles other issues to advance its mission.

But it recently decided to add another priority: It will spend $5 million over five years to boost turnout at the polls and help people, particularly minorities, get more involved in policy debates. That’s a significant sum for a fund with $55 million in assets, and a sign of how important it thinks it is to get more Americans to vote and show where they stand on a range of national and local public-policy issues.

“Health is far more than health care,” says Jesse Beason, the foundation’s president. “The primary drivers of health are giant issues like education, economic opportunity, and racism.”

In other words, helping democracy work better, especially for the poor and disenfranchised, isn’t mission creep for Northwest Health; it’s mission critical.

A growing number of grant makers are reaching the same conclusion and diving into work to strengthen democracy for the first time or expanding existing efforts.

Foundation support nationwide for democracy projects jumped 34 percent in 2017, to $553 million, according to Candid, which tracks grant-maker activity. Those are the most recent figures available, but all signs suggest that spending is on the rise.

The heightened philanthropic interest in bolstering work on democracy has no political or ideological boundaries. Donors backing democracy efforts through their foundations range from George Soros to Charles Koch.

Consensus on Some Issues

To be sure, there is relatively little agreement on causes and cures, or even what types of grant making advance democracy. But a consensus is taking shape that philanthropy has an important role to play in restoring more constructive dialogue among the nation’s citizens and making sure the fundamentals of the great American experiment, especially free and fair voting, are protected. The only real question is whether philanthropy has enough firepower to make a difference.

Joe Goldman, president of the Democracy Fund, which supports a wide assortment of democracy efforts, has become a drum major of sorts for the cause.

He believes philanthropy must act to reverse what he and others see as a weakening of important American institutions. With varying degrees of success, he’s been making his plea to ultrawealthy donors and to foundation CEOs to invest in the cause.

While many big donors and foundations have traditionally been wary of anything with even a whiff of politics and want to avoid any perception that they are taking sides, Goldman says that’s changing.

“Historically it was perfectly appropriate for some funders to say, ‘Look, my role is technocratic. My role is to stay out of politics,’ ” he says. “But there are points in time when the threats are such that we all need to stand up for our values. Our democracy has gone through many challenging periods, but we are definitely in a crisis point. People recognize we are in a bad spot.”

A lot rides on the outcome, he says.

“Whether you care about the environment, housing, or the national debt, these issues are all fundamentally affected by the degree to which our political system is healthy and functioning,” says Goldman.

Voter Apathy

Goldman’s Democracy Fund was started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has led by example for other donors. Since establishing the Democracy Fund in 2014, Omidyar has more than tripled its annual grant-making budget, to $50 million.

Like Goldman and Omidyar, Ian Bassin is among those who felt that the contentiousness of the 2016 election cycle highlighted a need for a strong philanthropic response to something new and worrisome going on in America.

Bassin was among a group of outgoing lawyers in President Obama’s White House who watched aghast as presidential candidate Donald Trump denigrated the media and suggested that the election results might be illegitimate if he didn’t win.

The country, they feared, was sliding into authoritarianism, and a big part of the electorate didn’t seem to care. A recent World Values Survey was particularly alarming: Less than one-third of Americans born in the 1980s thought it was “essential” to live in a democracy.

Bassin and his colleagues decided to start a nonprofit to fight executive overreach and inform the public about the separation of powers. A colleague connected Bassin to the Women Donors Network, a group of philanthropists with a track record of giving to social-justice causes, and messages among members started flying.

Before Trump’s inauguration, members of the group provided Bassin’s circle of lawyers, formally established as Protect Democracy, a $400,000 grant. Other donors joined, including prominent liberal donor Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Seth Klarman, a GOP megadonor from Massachusetts who gave through his family foundation.

Protect Democracy’s annual budget has since grown to $10 million.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for the Chronicle

‘Dangerous Times’

The support Protect Democracy received exceeded Bassin’s expectations, and it came largely because of introductions made by Goldman and the Democracy Fund.

But Bassin worries that foundations have gotten used to the current state of politics and will lose interest. And there is disagreement about where philanthropy ought to be placing its bets. Some are getting involved in nuts-and-bolts issues, like gerrymandering. Others, like Bassin, say the most pressing need is to fight in the courts against White House power grabs.

“A lot of work has gone into things like gerrymandering, voting rights, and campaign finance,” he says. “There hasn’t been nearly as much time thinking about how we make sure that our fundamental system of checks and balances is strong and able to withstand modern autocratic movements. We need to make sure we’re spending resources there as well.”

The Women Donors Network, for one, is digging into the hard work of safeguarding the bedrock principles of democracy. The Protect Democracy gifts from its members helped reshape the donor circle. The network carved out democracy as a priority, giving it a staff member to coordinate work and an annual grant-making budget of $700,000.

“Right now we are in more dangerous times than we have ever been before,” says Donna Hall, the network’s president. “The focus on protecting the rule of law and the basic tenets of democracy hasn’t really been there before. We cannot lose momentum in protecting these start-up organizations.”

Philanthropic Gains

Whether they were coaxed by Goldman or got interested on their own, the roster of donors and philanthropic affinity groups that support democracy has expanded in recent years. Some are new to the field while others are upping their previous commitments in areas like support for local journalism.

A few of the biggest players who have recently made new or expanded commitments include:

The Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust, which has made democracy a cornerstone of its work, devoting $12 million to it this year, and Quadrivium, a foundation started by Kathryn and James Murdoch, the son of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch.

The membership of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, a network of donors and foundations committed to strengthening democracy, doubled to 70 over the last three years; responding to donor interest this summer, the group gathered a $300,000 pooled fund to help religious organizations bridge political divides.

The Philanthropy Roundtable started a program on civic education in January. The network, which largely consists of conservative donors, released a guide on groups that work on programs to teach the rights and responsibilities of citizenship this summer. So, too, did the University of Pennsylvania Center for High Impact Philanthropy, with the help of a grant from the Democracy Fund.

The Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and other democracy mainstays have poured more money into efforts to strengthen democracy, especially to nonprofits working to ensure a full count in the 2020 census. Ford’s democracy budget is about $25 million a year. In May, Ford committed an additional $5 million to efforts to ensure an accurate count. Carnegie expects to make $7 million in grants to support voting rights and related issues during its current fiscal year, up from $5.2 million last year, and has directed a total of about $3 million to census efforts in the past several years.

Charles Koch, who typically supports Republican candidates for political office, gives mainly to groups focused on maintaining journalistic freedom, boosting civic education, and doing research on civil discourse through his foundation. The foundation has also supported research into what causes political division through its “courageous collaboratives” program and has brought people together from different points on the ideological spectrum through support of nonprofits like Narrative 4.

George Soros, through his Open Society Foundations, provides support for independent journalism, efforts to get people more involved in the political process, and the fight against voter suppression. In September, the grant maker joined with Ford and others to hold an event called “Realizing Democracy,” which gathered community organizers, foundation officials, academics, and artists to consider ways to increase the clout marginalized groups have in the political debate.

Erika Nizborski for the Center for Popular Democracy

Meager Grants

Despite the influx of cash, some nonprofits say donors are ignoring important needs.

The Verified Voting Foundation, established in 2003, educates states on how to run secure elections and conduct post-election audits. On Election Day, its staff serves on a hotline where voters and election officials can report problems. The nonprofit’s president, Marian Schneider, says foundations have been more receptive to the issue since 2016, but the grants have been slow to follow. For the current fiscal year, the nonprofit’s budget is $1.8 million, more than three-quarters of which comes from individual donations.

“A lot of program officers really get it,” she says. “The challenge seems to be fitting it into their portfolio without displacing some of the other causes that need attention.”

Verified Voting’s donors include the Threshold and Deer Creek foundations and the Wallace Global Fund. This summer, the Women’s Donor Network joined in with a $100,000 grant.

Giving to Boost Reputations

Another election-security nonprofit, Defending Digital Democracy, has had similar problems gaining traction since it started looking for donors in 2017. It has received less than $1 million from the Democracy Fund and the Hewlett Foundation combined. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

“Most of the funding opportunities came from big tech firms who were willing to give significant amounts of money but who wanted to use their donations for marketing to try and gain some halo effect, to improve their reputations,” says director Eric Rosenbach, a cybersecurity expert who served as chief of staff to Defense Secretary Ash Carter during the Obama administration. Early on, the group accepted a grant from Facebook, something Rosenbach says he regrets. The paucity of funding for nonprofit election security is alarming, Rosenbach says, because the federal government hasn’t directed enough money to support local jurisdictions.

In 2018, Congress approved $328 million to help keep the ballot secure, but an additional $600 million stalled in the Senate.

Omidyar and Goldman are lobbying to push the follow-up funds over the finish line on Capitol Hill through Democracy Fund Voice, a lobbying organization associated with Democracy Fund.

While waiting for Congress to do more, Defending Digital Democracy is gearing up to do what it can to protect the 2020 elections. The organization is running “tabletop” exercises in which election officials practice responding to simulated Russian election hacks and other cyberintrusions. They’ve also prepared playbooks for election administrators to use to combat propaganda, communicate cyberattacks to the press, and identify vulnerabilities in the voting system.

To help lead the group, which is housed at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Rosenbach tapped Robby Mook, a Democratic campaign operative who led Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and Matt Rhoades, a GOP political veteran who led Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign for the White House. They created a separate nonprofit, Defending Digital Campaigns, which this spring got the go-ahead to provide cybersecurity plans to federal campaigns without running afoul of campaign-finance regulations.

Strengthening Journalism to Boost Democracy

Caroll Taveras/Guardian/eyevine/Redux

Donors and foundations have been providing millions of dollars to advance journalism over the past decade as the growth of the internet has made it increasingly difficult for many news outlets to survive.

That mission has taken on new urgency for many grant makers that see their financial support for journalism as a vital component of their expanding efforts to help democracy function better.

Here are some of the main players in those efforts:

• The Knight Foundation in February made a $300 million commitment to help local news outlets beef up their coverage. The foundation’s goal is to deepen trust readers and viewers have in their local news providers, leading to a more informed electorate. The program includes $50 million that will be directed to research the impact technology is having on democracy.
• The Hewlett Foundation supplemented its Madison Initiative, a $150 million effort to help Congress function, with a two-year, $10 million commitment to study the spread of propaganda and disinformation on social media. Of that, $5 million had not been previously committed. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
• The MacArthur Foundation in 2017 increased its giving to grantees that use the media to help inform the electorate. It was a switch from its previous strategy, which sought to get rid of money in politics and beef up election security. This year, the foundation plans to spend $25 million on the new approach.
• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, has given at least $100 million to fund journalism, according to a spokeswoman, including the News Integrity Initiative, a group housed at the City University of New York that works to improve news literacy and quash the spread of misinformation. More recently, his gifts have included $5 million to the Internet Observatory at Stanford University, which aims to stop the spread of online propaganda in real time.“In the past, I thought that fact-checking was going to be a large part of the solution,” Newmark says. “It’s still important, but we need to help media and social media avoid being part of the problem. We can prevent bad actors from weaponizing their platforms.”

New Frontiers

Like the Northwest Health Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah is a small grant maker that recently decided to venture beyond its normal boundaries — in this case, promoting Jewish culture and values — to get involved in democracy work.

Alarmed by the Russian interference in the election and behavior from then-candidate Trump that veered from standard political conduct, the foundation dug into its endowment to direct $450,000, or 27 percent of its grant-making budget last year, to groups like MitzVote, a campus get-out-the-vote drive run by Hillel, and Resetting the Table, a nonprofit that facilitates discussions between people with different backgrounds and ideologies.

The foundation also introduced a $150,000 prize (supported by the Democracy Fund and an anonymous donor) to groups that apply the Jewish tradition to projects that support an engaged public.

“Our investment is both philosophical and existential,” says Aaron Dorfman, president of Lippman Kanfer. “American Jews have focused for a long time on what I would call parochial issues, like anti-Semitism, Israel, Jewish community, and Jewish continuity. The existential importance of a healthy American democracy isn’t self-evident to the American Jewish community.”

For Dorfman and others, like Sara Kay, executive director of the Spitzer Trust, fending off a Russian hack or succeeding in a peaceful change in administrations isn’t the true gauge of success. Democracy, they say, needs constant care and maintenance.

“The problems with our democracy will outlive any particular elected official,” Kay says. “We need to look long and hard at what damage has been done and what we need to do to rebuild.”