A group of grant makers including the Ford and Open Society foundations has pooled $5 million in a fund that seeks to quickly help people harmed by the coronavirus pandemic and offer long-term changes to a global economic system they view as broken.
The Response and Vision Fund was created by a group of foundation leaders called Funders Organized for Rights in the Global Economy, or Forge. The group has been meeting for more than a year to share views on how to help protect vulnerable populations, including women, workers, migrants, and members of racial and ethnic minorities, from the harm caused by poverty, human-rights violations, and the effects of climate change.
As Covid-19 began to spread, the group saw that members of those groups were being hit especially hard by the disease and its economic repercussions.
“People are really suffering from issues of economic exclusion and inequality for decades,” says Laine Romero-Alston, team manager at the Open Society Foundations. “But in many ways, Covid-19 really tore the Band-Aid off and exposed that.”
Along with Ford and Open Society, other contributors to the Fund include Humanity United, Laudes Foundation, True Costs Initiative, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Omidyar Network, and Wallace Global Fund. The Fund is hosted by Fundación Avina and SAGE Fund. While the $5 million the group has gathered is small compared with the scope of the problems they’d like to address, Forge members hope that other foundations will join in, and they anticipate that the lessons learned by the collaboration will shape their efforts beyond the fund.
As its name suggests, grants from the fund will go both to immediate relief efforts, to the “response,” and to building a longer-term “vision” for structural economic change. While the effort is worldwide, the fund plans to pay special attention to the global south.
The first grants will be announced in July. The fund plans to support efforts to increase the political might of groups led by members of marginalized populations, including indigenous people, peasant farmers, and the urban poor. The fund will also seek to hold corporations accountable for the treatment of workers, hold businesses accountable for how they use any government support they receive related to the pandemic, and shape how future stimulus packages are crafted.
The new fund is part of an ongoing effort by philanthropy to change the free-market system. Efforts in the United States include a series of new grants by Ford, the Hewlett Foundation, Open Society, the Omidyar Network, and others to reshape capitalism, reduce wealth inequality, and give workers more power. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Some businesses seem to be paying attention. In August, 181 leaders of large corporations signed a statement circulated by Business Roundtable that said companies should work to the benefit of employees, local economies, and the environment, in addition to serving the interest of shareholders.
The onset of Covid-19 has prompted many multinational companies to signal a willingness to enact changes that benefit broader society, says Valeria Scorza, executive director of Avina Americas. Philanthropy, she says, must apply pressure to ensure they make good on any promises.
“There is a window of opportunity,” she says. “We have to make sure that their commitments about shared values are not only onpaper.”
Using Their Expertise
Forge’s members have different areas of expertise. The True Costs Initiative focuses on corporate accountability. Reducing the disparate impact of climate change is the Laudes Foundation’s core mission.
Covid-19 “unmasked a trifecta,” says Conniel Malek, director of the True Costs Initiative, explaining that it exposed public health, climate, and economic crises all at once. The Forge members, she says, will try to bring different strengths together to solve those knotty problems. To drive change at the global scale, Malek says, the fund will have to directly support groups led by people who have been left out or exploited by the global economy.
“The diversity of experience, expertise, background, and funding strategies is actually a richness,” she says. “It brings color to something that I think could be too monochromatic. We’re forcing ourselves to work together and to collaborate in a way that can be tricky, but it’s going to be meaningful in the end.”
Through Forge, contributors to the fund will have access to the insights members gain about grants made across a breadth of disciplines, says Sarita Gupta, director of the Ford Foundation’s Future of Work(ers) program.
“We need to break out of our silos in order advance a philanthropic voice on the systemic change that’s needed,” she says. “Forge and this pooled fund are ways to continue to shape each other’s understanding and open each other’s perspectives more.”
