From Political Fighter to Philanthropy Leader

In Pursuit Of

For many years, Evan Feinberg worked to advance conservative politics, sometimes playing hardball.

You can find his bylines on tough-talking Heritage Foundation policy briefs. As a Senate staffer, he wrote legislation for Tea Party favorite Tom Coburn and libertarian champion Rand Paul. He ran for Congress in 2012 as a Reagan Republican calling for eliminating three Cabinet-level agencies. “Evan has extensive experience fighting in the trenches of the conservative movement,” declared his campaign website.

Liberal comedian Stephen Colbert once mocked him for his campaign against President Obama’s health-care law.

Today, Feinberg has left politics for a kinder, gentler vocation: philanthropy. At 34, he’s the leader of Stand Together, a nonprofit that funds and trains community groups providing services to people in need. Though the organization is just two-and-a-half years old, Feinberg believes it has an “opportunity to change the trajectory of our country.”

He adds: “Where problems divide people, solutions unite.”

This is a big shift for a veteran of political brawls. It’s also a significant new focus for Stand Together’s backers: the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and a group of wealthy donors he leads, known as the Seminar Network. Stand Together is the network’s first coordinated effort at direct-service antipoverty work.

Charles Koch is one of the richest men in America, worth $51 billion, according to Forbes. He and his brother David are chiefly known as key engineers of modern conservatism. The two built their wealth through Koch Industries, a vast multinational corporation. The brothers and the Seminar Network have poured hundreds of millions into political campaigns, advocacy groups, and research entities that champion free-market and libertarian ideas. (David Koch has stepped aside from the family business and political groups due to health problems, the company announced in June.)

Stand Together, however, does not do politics. This year, it plans to spend $40 million on training and support for local organizations — it calls the leaders of the groups it works with “social entrepreneurs” — that tackle poverty and other problems with new ideas that largely promote self-sufficiency and people helping others overcome barriers.

Such philanthropy appears to be a natural extension of the network’s political views — namely, that communities and individuals can do more to fight poverty than government. But Stand Together faces critics and skeptics. Some observers believe the group is intended to blunt attacks of Koch political efforts to cut government safety-net programs.

The Koch network’s launch of direct-service work raises a broader question for any nonprofit seeking funding: Does your benefactor’s political activism matter?

Building a Movement

At a gathering in early May near Dallas for nonprofits that Stand Together supports, Feinberg works the stage. He’s mic’d up and wears a dark blue blazer and button-down shirt, no tie. He seems like the prototypical earnest nonprofit leader giving a TED Talk.

Feinberg, who grew up near Pittsburgh and graduated from Grove City College, a Christian institution in Western Pennsylvania, is boyish-looking. He starts with some aw-shucks humor. He says he didn’t prepare a speech, so he asked people at the conference what he should say. One offered his mother’s advice for public speaking: “Just say smart things.”

Chrysalis

Feinberg says: “I can’t do that,” to some laughs.

He moves quickly to a discussion of Stand Together’s vision, sounding more serious. He talks about his organization’s aim to build “a movement of social entrepreneurs” and lays out what that movement needs.

Stand Together, he says, wants the groups in the room to expand. It also wants to find more social entrepreneurs. The groups themselves must encourage the people they serve to give back and help others transform their lives.

Finally, Stand Together nonprofits need to serve as catalysts, spreading their stories and inspiring people to believe that individuals can change their lives and their communities.

In practice, movement-building for Stand Together nonprofit leaders starts with the “catalyst program,” where they learn business skills through Koch Industries’ Market-Based Management philosophy, which Charles Koch credits with his business’s success. The goal: help organizations think through strategic decisions — like how to bring about and manage growth. “We try to get them to think like a business would even though they are a nonprofit,” says Lauren McCann, executive vice president of Stand Together.

The six-month program includes in-person sessions and phone calls with Stand Together staff, plus “summits” with peers. Stand Together helps the nonprofits assemble professional videos and marketing content, and participants develop Ted Talk-style presentations about their work.

From Addiction to Debt

Some 86 groups have at least started the program. Each addresses one or more of what Stand Together believes are the causes of cyclical poverty: chronic unemployment, family breakdown, addiction and trauma, personal debt, and educational failure.

Consistent with its philosophy, and with traditional conservative approaches to poverty, Stand Together promotes self-sufficiency, though it also believes there are things that hold people back. Feinberg, for instance, says the criminal-justice system “has institutional racism endemic in it.” Stand Together selects nonprofits focused on helping people take charge of their lives, learn critical life or work skills, and overcome external barriers. The groups have a range of missions, among them: providing mentors to underprivileged youths, helping the homeless find employment, assisting ex-felons and convicts to get back on their feet, and teaching job skills and financial literacy.

Stand Together says its organizations must have strong, dynamic leaders who want to expand. The roster of groups includes several that have been featured on CNN’s Heroes program; one, Family Independence Initiative, was founded by Mauricio Lim Miller, a celebrated nonprofit leader. At least a few are associated with conservative politics or ideas. ACE Scholarships, which helps low-income students pay for private K-12 schools, is a favorite of school-choice proponents, for instance.

Each organization gets $25,000. Stand Together has made bigger commitments to about a dozen charities — which it refers to as “venture partners” — and connects them with potential donors in the Seminar Network.

Feinberg hopes Stand Together, through the work of its many organizations, will inspire Americans at large to act in their communities, like a mass infection of good will: “We want [Americans] to act in a way that is consistent with the ideas of Stand Together, even when they don’t realize that that’s what they’re doing.”

Battling Obamacare

A few years ago, when he was deep into political battles, Feinberg’s work didn’t bring people together. The group he led, Generation Opportunity, part of a network of nonprofits connected to the Kochs, focuses on engaging young people in causes in line with libertarian and conservative thinking. Around 2013, it launched an offensive against the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health-care law.

Its campaign aimed to persuade young people not to sign up for insurance through state exchanges set up under the law. Feinberg told one newspaper: “We’re happy to watch the law crumble under its own weight by young people making good decisions.”

One online ad Generation Opportunity produced got play on major cable-news stations. In it, a menacing Uncle Sam figure pops out during a young women’s visit to a gynecologist’s office. She screams. The ad’s tagline: “Don’t let government play doctor. Opt out of Obamacare.”

Robert Bostick

How did Feinberg move from such divisive political work to philanthropy? He explains it this way: At Generation Opportunity, he came to believe that many millennials, while interested in changing the world, eschewed advocacy and policy work. Feinberg also became inspired by Generation Opportunity’s advocacy on changing the criminal-justice system to reduce prison populations, which the Kochs have worked on in bipartisan fashion. Feinberg concluded he wanted to do work that helped people directly, he says.

Around the same time, according to Feinberg, leaders of the Koch network began talking about starting an organization outside of politics focused on aiding communities.

Individually, the Kochs and their network support causes that aim to help people, Feinberg notes. This new organization, however, would pool funds from network members and seek out the best new solutions to social problems.

Brian Hooks, co-chair of the Seminar Network, says the group has always worked to remove barriers that keep people from prospering. “When we started to ask ourselves what were the additional gaps, where are the other barriers that are really holding people back, it became very clear that as a network we needed to focus on the role that communities play in helping people to improve their lives.”

Hooks says Feinberg was selected to lead the group in part because he is a smart, dedicated, and humble leader. Feinberg also has a “big heart,” Hooks says. He notes that in 2016 Feinberg and his wife, Sarah, welcomed an Afghani refugee family to live in a condo they own. The family still lives there.

A PR Stunt?

Koch critics suggest Stand Together is more about burnishing the Kochs’ image than fighting poverty. Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, which investigated the Kochs’ political influence, argued in a 2016 New Yorker article that the brothers have launched major criminal-justice efforts and publicized other philanthropy in recent years as part of a rebranding effort.

Stand Together seems to be part of this, says Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University professor who’s studied the Koch network’s political and nonprofit operations.

“It’s the perfect alignment,” he says. “It helps them improve their image, it’s consistent with their ideology, it’s consistent with their broader political perspective.”

Some direct their skepticism at Stand Together’s leader. “Feinberg is a tested Koch operative with a track record of using misleading front groups to bolster corporate power,” says Ralph Wilson, co-founder of UnKoch My Campus, a liberal activist organization that views the Kochs as corrupt business titans who want to reduce the size of government to lower their taxes. “His selection and the backing of the Koch network show that Stand Together” is part of a “philanthropic smokescreen.”

Stand Together is not a public-relations stunt, Feinberg counters. Of course, if it does its work well, it will naturally change perceptions of the Kochs and their network. People might “see that this network is really about driving social change, about helping people to improve their lives, about eliminating injustices, and really building new coalitions with folks that might not agree on some of the things the network does on politics but share the same vision for driving change.”

But if Stand Together were purely about the Koch network’s image, he says, it wouldn’t invest so much money and energy to build an organization that now has 37 employees. “If we were trying to do some big PR play, we would just cut really big checks to large organizations and be done with it.”

He adds: “I wouldn’t be here if this were a PR play. I’m giving my life to this work because I believe in the power of social entrepreneurship and the ability of people to transform their lives.”

Groups that work with Stand Together see it as a sincere partner. Chrysalis, a Los Angeles nonprofit that helps the homeless and impoverished obtain job skills and employment, has received funding and other help from the group since 2016, including a mid-six-figure donation this year, according to its president, Mark Loranger.

Loranger, who describes himself as “on the progressive side,” says he was at first wary of the Koch connection. “Certainly, it gave me reason to pause.” But he found Stand Together’s goals in line with Chrysalis’s. He says he’s never felt pressure to change the group’s direction: “This is a relationship built on trust.”

Loranger met Charles Koch and believes the billionaire’s interest in Chrysalis is sincere. Others in the Koch network also have expressed excitement about Loranger’s work. “If their goal was to gin up headlines and make it a PR play, they could be doing a lot more, and they’re not,” he says. “So it is genuine.”

His experience with Stand Together, he adds, suggests that the media’s portrait of people is not always nuanced. “It has opened my eyes to the way I see the world.”

Other nonprofits considering working with Stand Together should speak with their staff to see if their missions gel, he says. “I would encourage them to have that conversation and not reject the conversation because of a perception of the source of the funds. I think that would be a mistake.”

Before working with Stand Together, the Family Independence Initiative spoke with catalyst organizations, says Jesús Gerena, chief executive of the nonprofit, which provides financial assistance and guidance to help low-income families set goals for improving their lives. The Family Independence Initiative believes “paternalistic” approaches to social services hurt the poor. Still, “the safety net needs to be protected,” Gerena says.

Catalyst groups assured Family Independence officials that Stand Together was not involved in Seminar Network political efforts — which made Gerena’s organization feel comfortable. “We see them as distinct,” says Gerena of the network’s political spending and its backing of Stand Together.

Grantees’ Dilemma

The Kochs’ political efforts, however, may lead some charities to balk at taking their money. Through their advocacy, the Kochs and the Seminar Network donors seek to cut safety-net programs meant to aid the poor. Many nonprofits are funded through those programs and believe the services provided are critical.

The Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity — a political-advocacy group also backed by donors in the Seminar Network — advocated for bills signed into law this year to restructure welfare in the state. Among the changes to benefits, the new law imposes tougher work requirements for some recipients of food stamps, also known as federal SNAP benefits.

Wisconsin nonprofits that work with the poor vigorously opposed the bills, arguing that the measures would leave many without food and dependent on charity. “We’re basically asking churches to take money from the collection plate to buy food to supply their food pantries,” says Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force, an advocacy organization.

Asked about the Wisconsin welfare bills, Feinberg says Stand Together and Americans for Prosperity are simply helping people in different ways. Americans for Prosperity seeks to address government policies that hold people back, he says, while Stand Together is focused on aiding communities that are the solution to poverty.

“We’ve watched the failed vision of top-down solutions, whether they come from policy makers, government bureaucrats, experts in foundations or the academy,” he says. “Top-down solutions to the problems of poverty are not working.”

Chiara Cordelli, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, says organizations that believe in government services must ask themselves: Would a partnership with Stand Together help the Kochs’ political agenda by making the network more palatable to the public? If the answer is yes, they should reject partnerships if they can find funding and training elsewhere, Cordelli argues. Nonprofits have a duty to form alliances that do not compromise the long-term goal of “bringing about more just political institutions that can reduce persistent social needs and inequalities,” she said in an email message.

At least one catalyst group is routinely held up as evidence that government support isn’t the answer. The Joseph Project was launched by a Milwaukee church with help from Rob Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin. The National Review, a conservative political magazine, profiled the group and its training and job-placement efforts as evidence that community organizations, not government, can lift people out of poverty. “When we outsource our compassion to the federal government, it hasn’t worked,” Johnson told the magazine.

A Household Name

Feinberg says Stand Together will continue to grow. “Among our Seminar partners, there’s a really clear understanding and buy-in around the strategy of what we’re doing,” he says.

In March, Stand Together moved from temporary space at the Charles Koch Foundation into an office large enough to accommodate 75 employees — almost double what it has now. It’s still in the same building in Arlington, Va., where many other Koch-connected nonprofits are based, including Americans for Prosperity and Generation Opportunity.

Feinberg says he hopes eventually to make household names of Stand Together and some its partners. For now, he says, he wants more speaking engagements that help position the group as one making an impact on society.

There’s no going back to politics for him, he says, which he notes can be alienating and slow moving. With Stand Together, he says, he’s found his life’s calling. “I’d rather spend my career bringing people together than dividing people.”