Private foundations, including some that have never supported immigration issues before, have dedicated millions of dollars in quick-turnaround grants to provide legal and health services for immigrant families caught up in the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies.
Some of the newcomer philanthropies cited a visceral opposition to the Trump administration’s application of immigration policy — which has resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border — for moving beyond their normal grant-making guidelines.
The Barr Foundation is one such grant maker. Two years ago it rededicated itself to programs that support the arts, climate-change response, and education. But earlier this month it strayed far from those priorities when it announced $500,000 in grants to three immigration efforts: the Four Freedoms Fund’s rapid-response fund on family separation; the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights; and the National Domestic Workers Alliance for its leadership in the End Family Separation campaign. The philanthropy’s founders, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, also committed $500,000 of their own money.
The family-separation policy showed a “lack of humanity” that is “antithetical” to Barr’s values, said Jim Canales, the foundation’s president.
“We felt a responsibility to step up, even though it took us far beyond the scope of the work Barr traditionally engages in,” he said.
Reuniting Families
The Irvine Foundation announced $1 million in grants to nonprofits working on family separation. While the foundation this year earmarked $6 million to support immigrants’ rights in California, the extra money will go specifically toward reuniting families and advocating against removing children from their parents.
“Separating children from their families is wrong and represents America at its worst,” wrote Don Howard, the foundation’s president, in a blog post. Irvine said that at least eight other California foundations had committed a total of $2 million to the effort.
The situation also prompted a quick response from the MacArthur Foundation, which in 2016 exited the field of immigration, where it had been a mainstay for decades. The grant maker is poised to make a set of emergency grants largely to support immigrants detained in the Chicago area.
The grants will come from the foundation’s Chicago program area, which last year disbursed $1.2 million in emergency grants to groups that were affected by changes in immigration policy, including the travel-ban executive order that blocked arrivals from certain majority-Muslim countries.
A final decision has not been made on the current emergency response, but “we’re hoping to make a larger contribution this time,” said Tara Magner, the director of MacArthur’s Chicago programs.
‘Why We Exist’
Foundations that have a long history of working on immigration have also dialed up grant making in response to the images of children in detention facilities. “This is at the center of why we exist,” says La June Montgomery Tabron, president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, explaining why she shuttled $750,000 from her own discretionary grant-making budget to groups working on border issues.
Another grant maker that has figured prominently is the Ford Foundation, which said it will spend about $1.25 million in direct response to the family-separation crisis. The New York foundation will use the money to pad commitments made to current grantees and to support the Families Belong Together campaign. Ford is also making a $1 million commitment to the Immigration Litigation Fund, a pooled fund managed by Borealis Philanthropy.
Sharing Advice
Foundations that have developed rapid-response grants to help immigrants and asylum seekers have sought help from other grant makers already active on the issue. Kellogg and Ford have provided advice, as have intermediary groups like Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees, Borealis Philanthropy, and NEO Philanthropy — which manages the Four Freedoms Fund’s rapid-response fund. Including Barr’s recent grant, the Four Freedoms Fund had raised nearly $1.2 million in response to family separations.
Scott Moyer, president of the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, looked for outside help The New York grant maker focuses its support on groups that work to reduce chronic violence and promote health care in community and correctional settings.
When the impact of the family separations became clear, Moyer decided to tap a rapid-response fund the foundation had set aside for emergencies that didn’t require the board to gather for formal approval. Still, Moyer sought board sign-off over email, and he relied on information from the Four Freedoms Fund.
“We’re a fairly small staff of three. We don’t have the capacity to go out there and do a landscape analysis of organizations” working on the issue, he said.
Similarly, the Barr Foundation found itself eager to chip in, but it lacked direct experience. The Boston grant maker hired a consultant with expertise in immigration and coordinated its work with Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, a network of donors.
The grants, Canales said, are a one-time deal. Like Langeloth, Barr isn’t planning to develop a new line of grant making on immigration. Foundations that work to solve problems over long periods can’t get distracted by every crisis, Canales said.
“We have to be cautious about being flavor-of-the-month institutions,” he said. “But we have to be attentive when there are emerging needs.”
Long-Term Commitment
Most donors and foundations that have come calling on Ford for advice have wanted to make a one-shot grant to alleviate the crisis faced by immigrant families, according to Mayra Peters-Quintero, a senior program officer at the legacy foundation, although some have shown an interest in getting involved over the long haul.
“They’re coming in for the first time and already saying they don’t just want to fund a campaign but they want to integrate this into their long-term funding,” she said. Peters-Quintero declined to name specific foundations.
The Robin Hood Foundation’s Veyom Bahl also hopes the crisis will spark multiyear support for immigration. That’s what has happened since 2014 when the anti-poverty organization first made grants to create the Immigrant Children Advocates’ Relief Effort, a collaboration of New York legal service providers and Terra Firma, a partnership that addresses child refugees’ physical and emotional trauma.
Both efforts, now regularly supported by Robin Hood and other nonprofits as well as New York City, were created in the wake of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy, which protected some undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Bahl, who manages the fund’s survival portfolio, says that even though some families have been reunited, the crisis is far from over. There are still about 300 children who have been relocated to New York without their families.
Bahl estimates that the legal and health needs of those children will cost up to $3 million, depending on how long they are detained. Robin Hood’s board will meet later this month to discuss whether it will provide additional support. In the meantime, the nonprofit hosted 40 other donors in its offices last week to brief them on the needs of relocated children in the city and discuss how they can help.
Bahl is confident he’ll find many partners in the effort, including long-term support from grant makers that have never cut a check for immigration.
Said Bahl: “Every crisis illuminates a systemic issue that even the most thoughtful and strategic foundation can find a way into.”
