‘Fund Us Like You Want Us to Win’

No one can doubt the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s commitment to racial equity. Back in 2007, Kellogg’s trustees pledged to become “an effective anti-racist organization.” They created ambitious programs to promote racial healing. They put LaJune Montgomery Tabron in charge, making her the first Black (and first woman) to lead the grant maker, and they got serious about diversity. Today, six of nine Kellogg trustees are people of color, as is 45 percent of the staff.

With assets of $7.8 billion and an annual grant-making budget of more than $220 million, Kellogg has long stood behind some of America’s most venerable civil-rights organizations. Nine nonprofits, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, have been designated as “racial equity anchor institutions” and rewarded with $144 million in unrestricted funds over the past decade. Kellogg spent another $75 million on a project called America Healing and $35 million more on community-based Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation programs that are intended to unearth racist beliefs, bring people together, and eliminate discriminatory laws and policies.
What Kellogg has not done — at least not on a commensurate scale — is to support social movements led by the new generation of activists, like the community organizers affiliated with Black Lives Matter. One example: Borealis Philanthropy, a nonprofit that raises money from foundations and gives it to community organizations, created a Black-Led Movement Fund in 2014 after the uprisings in Ferguson, Mo. While Kellogg funded other work by Borealis, including an effort to promote racial equity within philanthropy that was granted $14 million, it gave just $200,000 to the Black-Led Movement Fund.

Critics say that’s a problem — even as they acknowledge that Kellogg has devoted more attention to racial inequities than all but a few of its peers. These critics, mostly on the left, say that America’s big foundations, taken together, have not done nearly enough to fund social movements that generate the political pressure needed to drive deep and lasting social change.

Community organizers are the ground troops in the fight for racial justice, yet they are often overlooked by institutional philanthropy, these critics say. The death of Rep. John Lewis was only the most recent reminder that powerful leaders often emerge from the rank-and-file of social movements.

“You need righteous agitators,” says Lateefah Simon, a lifelong advocate for racial justice who is president of the Akonadi Foundation, a family foundation in Oakland, Calif., that gives out about $3.5 million a year. “Systems don’t change themselves.”

The North Star Fund, an operating foundation in New York that has supported community organizing for 40 years, is one of a few foundations to have done so consistently. “Philanthropy so underfunded social movements for so long,” says Jennifer Ching, the fund’s executive director. “It’s the most significant failure of the sector.”

“If this is not the moment for us as a sector to pivot as quickly as possible, and follow the lead of thousands and thousands of people on the street, then I think we can no longer utilize the language of social justice as part of our missions,” Ching says.

‘Foundations Know the NAACP’

This critique has taken on new urgency with the Covid-19 epidemic, which hit Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans disproportionately hard, and with the protests that brought tens of millions of Americans into the streets to demand justice for the killings of Black people by police. It raises a couple of questions.

First, is the critique fair? Have foundations, in fact, neglected social movements?

Second, is this changing, at last? After all, richly endowed private foundations have in recent months pledged to donate more than $5 billion to organizations to oppose racism.

These are tricky questions, if only because there’s no agreement about what it means to support social movements and how much funding is enough. Funding for racial equity is not the same thing as supporting grass-roots movements for racial justice.

Nat Chioke Williams, executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, which focuses on community organizing, says: “Foundations know the NAACP. They know the ACLU. They know EJI [the Equal Justice Initiative]. All of those are great groups. They should be supported. But the community groups doing hard work on the ground are often not seen.”

Among community organizers and their advocates, there’s a rough consensus about which foundations have been the biggest supporters of social movements. They cite Ford, Open Society, and NoVo, as well as the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, among the biggest foundations; Kellogg, to a lesser extent, and newcomer Heising-Simons; and a larger number of midsize grant makers such as Akonadi, Cummings, Hill-Snowdon, Marguerite Casey, Mary Reynolds Babcock, and the Public Welfare Foundation. The Solidaire Network and Resource Generation, which are networks of individuals and small family foundations, have been steadfast supporters of grass-roots power.

PAUL MORIGI/AP IMAGES FOR THE JUSTICE ROUNDTABLE

Supporting social movements “has been part of Open Society’s DNA since its inception,” says Patrick Gaspard, Open Society’s president. “If you go back and look at George Soros’s earliest philanthropy, there’s always been an appreciation for the historic role that social movements play, the fluidity that they need to have, and their inability to have the kind of bureaucratic scaffolding that traditional philanthropy often expects.”

Gaspard, who was himself an organizer on behalf of Haitian refugees during his college days, says the organizations that make up the network of Black Lives Matter have put racial issues on the national agenda in a way not seen in decades: “We applaud the tactics of these new groups that are bold, that are provocative, that aren’t burdened by bureaucracy. It’s incumbent on us in philanthropy to rise to meet the moment.”
Since 2008, Open Society has committed $222 million to racial equity, well behind Ford, which has committed $639 million, and Kellogg, which has committed $513 million, according to Candid, which collects data on philanthropy. (Candid does not track funding for social movements.) Philanthropic funding to advance racial equity has grown during the last decade, but less than 10 percent went to grass-roots organizing, Candid’s data indicates.

Other studies, including a recent report from Echoing Green and Bridgespan, have found that community-based groups, particularly those led by people of color, are underfunded and trusted less by grant makers when compared with nonprofits led by whites. Many foundation leaders agree.

“We don’t fund the kinds of people who don’t sound like us, who didn’t go to the educational institutions we went to,” says Crystal Hayling, the executive director of the Libra Foundation, a family foundation based in San Francisco. (A Black woman, Hayling has degrees from Yale and Stanford.) Typically, grant makers support top-down solutions that “tinker with the existing system and make it slightly more bearable,” she says. “We need to be doing a lot more funding of the people who are dramatically imagining something better.”

What Philanthropy Has Accomplished

In this series, the Chronicle takes a deep dive into the results of big philanthropic efforts to discover what has worked, what has failed, and what donors can learn. Read more:

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‘Outer Edge of the Possible’

Radical social movements operate “on the outer edge of the possible and, almost by definition, predate philanthropic support,” says Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance and former president of Atlantic Philanthropies. “Black Lives Matter really grew, almost without a penny from mainstream philanthropy.”

Consider the work of Borealis, the philanthropy organization that supports social-justice causes. Since it debuted in 2014 with grants from the Ford and Arcus Foundations to launch a fund for LGBTQ leaders and their organizations, Borealis has given away more than $62 million, mostly to support marginalized people. More than three-quarters of that has come from just five foundations: Ford ($27.7 million), Kellogg ($15 million, nearly all of it to support programs to improve philanthropy), Open Society ($5.6 million), Wellspring ($6.8 million), and NoVo ($2.2 million).

Two funds created by Borealis, its Black-Led Movements Fund and the Communities Transforming Policing Fund, support groups led by “young, Black, queer, trans, feminist, immigrant, and undocumented leaders who are embracing grass-roots organizing as a core strategy,” Borealis says. Together those funds have granted movement organizations about $11 million, more than half from Open Society ($5.6 million), with other money coming from Ford, Wellspring, and Cummings.

Raising money for those two funds has been challenging, says Maya Thornell-Sandifor, Borealis’s director of racial-equity initiatives. Some foundations wrongly assume that activist groups engage in politics or lobbying. Other grant makers shy away because they mistakenly believe that the groups are not well established enough to merit funding.

Even Ford, Borealis’s biggest donor, which helped to start the Black-Led Movements, grew uncomfortable after a time. Ford made a one-time donation of $1,344,338 to the fund in 2015 and pledged “long-term support to the Movement for Black Lives.” But Ford never gave more, reportedly because the Movement for Black Lives platform described Israel as an “apartheid state” that, with the United States, was complicit in “genocide.”

This was an example, critics say, of establishment philanthropy’s discomfort with radical politics. Asked for comment, a Ford spokeswoman said, “In subsequent years, Ford made millions in direct grants to individual organizations within the movement rather than contribute to the pooled fund.”

Jennifer Ching of the North Star Fund experienced similar struggles after North Star created the Let Us Breathe Fund following the 2014 death of Eric Garner at the hands of the New York City police. Its goal was to build “a Black-led organizing infrastructure in the city,” which badly needed funding. The response from institutional philanthropy was tepid. NoVo contributed $300,000 to the Let Us Breathe Fund, and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation donated $100,000. No other donors did as much until recent months.

Of course, nowhere is it decreed that foundations must support grass-roots movement, or racial equity for that matter. Michael Hartmann, a former executive at the Bradley Foundation and co-editor of the Giving Review, worries that “there’s a little bit of groupthink in the rush to support Black Lives Matter.”

Hartmann, a conservative, agrees that philanthropy “should err on the side of supporting grass-roots, community movements that are closest to the problems.” But grant makers should take the time to look at a range of community groups, including those that are faith based or promote personal responsibility. “Patience has been required in almost every philanthropic success,” Hartmann says. “‘Keep your eyes on the prize’ was an admonition to be patient.”

Time for Introspection

Many foundations find their own unique ways to oppose racial injustice. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the largest philanthropic supporter of the arts, will spend $5.25 million on books for prison libraries. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is stepping up its funding to strengthen democracy.

The MacArthur Foundation is not known for supporting movements, but it has spent $221 million since 2013 on criminal justice, with a focus on reducing mass incarceration and local jails. In its home city of Chicago, MacArthur has given $570,000 to BYP100, an organization of Black activists, ages 18 to 35, that is part of the Black Lives Matter movement and has since gone national.

Grants to MacArthur fellows have supported a veritable who’s who of the thinkers and activists who lead today’s racial-justice movement: writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and leaders including sujatha baliga, the Rev. William Barber, Ai-Jen Poo, Lateefah Simon, Bryan Stevenson, and Robert L. Woodson.

“We’ve supported the creative individuals who get movements going,” says John Palfrey, MacArthur’s president. “Every foundation has to pick its lane.”

Palfrey, who has led MacArthur for just a year, welcomes those who say foundations have been too slow, bureaucratic, and conservative to invest in movements.

“The criticism is not only fair but appropriate,” he says. “If philanthropy were not having a time of serious introspection right now, it would be a terrible mistake.”

Promoting Racial Healing

W.K. KELLOGG FOUNDATION

Tabron of Kellogg is less inclined to engage in self-criticism. She says the foundation’s support for long-established civil-rights groups laid the groundwork for today’s activists. Civil rights “is a movement we have been a part of for a very long time,” she says. “I believe everything we have done has worked.”

Kellogg also has supported the Center for Popular Democracy, Community Change, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (with more than $3.5 million), and United for Respect, all of which organize low-income people or support those who do.

But Kellogg’s investments of $110 million in its American Healing and Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation programs have so far failed to generate tangible results. The ongoing work is “creating opportunities for racial healing, building relationships, and creating plans and strategies for action,” Kellogg says, but the foundation could not point to any new laws or policies that emerged from that work.

Young Activists Fuel Change

By contrast, Black Lives Matter protests this summer led to new laws, policies, or pledges to redirect police budgets to human services in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Confederate monuments have been removed by governments or toppled by protestors across the South. The NFL committed to spend $250 million over 10 years to combat systemic racism, and the Washington football team shed its name.

Youthful energy was key. “Every successful social movement in the U.S. has had a strong youth- and student-led wing — whether civil rights, women’s rights, antiwar, peace and justice, conservation and environment, environmental and climate justice,” says Bob Bullard, a professor, writer, and founder of the environmental-justice movement.

Maria Torres-Springer, vice president for U.S. programs at Ford, says the foundation’s grantees have been at the forefront of many of this past summer’s changes. She cited, among others, the Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis, which is led by queer Black feminist organizers, and the Community Coalition in Los Angeles, a 30-year-old organization founded by Karen Bass, who’s now chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Neither group got funding from more cautious grant makers like Kellogg.

Torres-Springer says that Ford’s funding for racial-justice work flows to three categories of nonprofits: community-based organizations; groups that provide legal, policy, or data support, like Law for Black Lives and Data for Black Lives; and organizations that focus on arts or storytelling, like the Center for Cultural Power.

“Our work is supporting their collective power to change the systems that have too long oppressed Black and brown people in this country,” Torres-Springer says. Long before the protests made headlines came “all of that long, painstaking work of organizing, base building, coalition building, digital organizing, mutual aid networks, bail funds, etc. That long-term, patient investment, we hope, creates an environment where, when moments like this emerge — as tragic as they are — organizations focused on social justice can seize them.”

NORTH STAR FUND

Unprecedented Donations

Perhaps most importantly, Black Lives Matter and the protests have inspired (or perhaps provoked) this summer’s flood of individual and institutional giving.

The commitments coming from big foundations are unprecedented. They include the California Endowment’s 10-year, $225 million pledge of support for Black-led organizing, activism, and advocacy in California; Open Society’s $150 million in grants promised to Black-led justice organizations, part of a $220 million investment in Black communities; the Hewlett Foundation’s new 10-year, $168 million racial-justice initiative; the Packard Foundation’s five-year $100 million pledge, beginning with a grant to Solidaire’s Black Liberation Pooled Fund, and the Meyer Memorial Trust’s five-year, $25 million initiative to provide support for Black-led groups.

Candid reports that, altogether, more than 200 grant makers have promised $5 billion in grants for racial equity since the death of George Floyd in late May. That’s more than foundations granted for racial equity in the previous 11 years.

Is it enough?

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is co-director of the legendary Highlander Center for Research and Education in New Market, Tenn., a school that taught organizing to labor leaders in the 1930s and civil-rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. Henderson helped write the platform for the Movement for Black Lives, and, as a board member of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, she knows philanthropy.

“A pledge, a commitment, is beautiful,” she says, but she’s withholding judgment about whether philanthropy has fundamentally changed. There are moral and practical arguments, she says, for foundations to go even further.

Morally, the needs of people at the bottom who are literally dying from Covid-19, and its economic fallout, are vast; those with access to riches should step up simply because “it is the right thing to do in terms of reparations or repair.”

If that argument falls flat, she says, this summer — not to mention the long history of protest movements — should have made clear to anyone paying attention that organizing from the bottom up is the most effective and efficient way to drive change.

“The white-dominated nonprofit-industrial complex” has done very little to improve the lives of Black people,” she says. “We need to fund the people who are making transformative changes possible. Fund us like you want us to win.”