Foundation CEOs Must Muster Their Money, Voice, and Courage to Fight Trump

Errata Carmona, for The Chronicle

Most of America’s big foundations probably did not do much planning for the election of Donald Trump. Like so many other institutions in America, they have had to scramble in recent weeks to adjust to the new political reality.

But it has become increasingly clear that grant makers must take courageous steps in responding to the most profound challenge to American democracy since the Civil War.

The outlines of the battles ahead are easy to see; just look at the cabinet nominees. Almost all are corporate chieftains, generals, and ideologues committed to dismantling laws and regulations on civil rights, labor, and the environment. Very few have significant understanding of or ties to the nonprofit world.

The next few years will pose severe tests for all of us. People of color, immigrants, and so many others are being targeted and will suffer in untold ways. Those who have privilege — and foundations are at the top of that list — must step up not only with their money but with their voices. And when the Trump administration and its allies come at foundations — which they will do to any institution rising to the moment — foundations must fight back. If there was ever a time to spend financial and moral capital, it is now.

A few days after the election, nonprofit activist Vu Le argued in these pages that the Trump victory should spur long-overdue changes in the way that many foundations do business. Among other things, he renewed the perennial call for more general and multiyear support. I strongly support that agenda, but I would go further: Philanthropy, particularly big foundations, cannot be complicit in the normalization of Donald Trump and what he stands for.

I fear they will be, because foundations are, for the most part, congenitally disinclined to controversy and hypersensitive to any appearance of partisanship or even ideology. I expect many foundation leaders will seek ways to work with Mr. Trump where they can and confine their response to the crisis his election has wrought to palliative measures.

But every cause grant makers support will be under siege by the Trump administration, from the social safety net to abortion access to human rights. I don’t presume to tell foundations what their priorities should be, because the pluralism of philanthropy is one of its greatest strengths. Nonetheless, whatever their charitable mission, I believe all foundations need to rethink the way they use their assets.

Spend More

The most obvious asset foundations have is money. A few are following the example of the Atlantic Philanthropies (where I previously served as chief executive), which announced its final grants last week. Such groups are spending all of their endowments in a set period so they can direct greater and more concentrated resources on social problems. The venerable Edna McConnell Clark Foundation just joined this list, announcing that it will distribute all its assets, about $1 billion, to nonprofits in the next decade.

Spending an endowment fast is not for everyone, though every foundation should from time to time seriously consider the option. But spending more than the federally required 5 percent of assets every year is an approach all grant makers should adopt. The unequal growth in the economy that has left too many people behind has made winners of many foundations. Saving money for a rainy day is an understandable approach in normal times, but not when a tsunami is fast approaching.

Foundations need to help nonprofits defend immigrant families from deportation. They need to lobby against the creation of a Muslim registry that will violate fundamental constitutional principles, and to push back on any new restrictions on voting rights. If any of these ideas succeed in doing more than winning election votes, we lose moral integrity and erode the structures of our democracy in a way that will be very hard to repair.

Speaking of money: The renewed assaults on organized labor at the state as well as the federal level are important, too — not only because labor is vital to the financial security of working people, but because labor has been a significant partner in financing social-justice groups. When that funding disappears, foundations will have to pick up the slack. Solidarity with labor at this time involves philanthropic self-interest as well as societal interest.

Speak Up

A second asset with which foundations are too sparing is their voice. When this generation’s version of the Japanese-American internment or the McCarthy witch hunt arrives and societal leaders are called upon to take a stand, will foundation heads and trustees be in that number?

I would like to think so. But an experience we had at the Open Society Foundations in 2001, when I was a senior leader there, gives me pause. At the height of hysteria following the September 11 attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft questioned the patriotism of anyone who took issue with the Patriot Act, which many of us saw as a dangerous incursion on civil liberties.

The leadership and board of the Open Society Foundations decided to buy a full-page ad in The New York Times stating simply that no matter one’s position on the Patriot Act, dissent is in the best traditions of patriotism, not its opposite. We approached a long list of foundation and university presidents to join us in signing the statement.

Almost no one agreed to do it, so we ended up running the ad ourselves, with just our own names. When moments like that arise in the next four years, I hope timidity doesn’t win the day again. Far too much is at stake.

Fight for Facts

A third way foundations can contribute is to use their strong capability to assemble knowledge and support others who produce independent research and data. It’s a safer course than strong advocacy and big spending, but more crucial than ever at a time when facts are seen as increasingly irrelevant to public debate and longstanding norms in journalism are being overridden in the quest for ratings and clicks. Foundations can invest more deeply in examining these disturbing trends and supporting the kind of independent media inquiry that will be critical to understanding what we are dealing with and surviving it.

If foundations rise to these challenges, they will become targets themselves of a notoriously thin-skinned leader with not only an overactive Twitter finger but control of the Internal Revenue Service, the intelligence agencies, and the Justice Department. Supporting endangered communities and basic democratic norms and institutions isn’t partisan; it’s quite the opposite, and many principled conservatives and Republicans will be in the middle of these fights as well. But it is likely to be seen that way by the Trump administration.

It will take courage and collective action — two things that have not always been strong suits of organized philanthropy — to withstand the pressures that are coming. Foundations may pay a price, to be sure, but they must never forget that the steepest cost, if we fail, will be to democracy itself.

Gara LaMarche heads the Democracy Alliance. He was previously chief executive of Atlantic Philanthropies and a vice president at the Open Society Institute.