For Crystal Hayling, executive director of the Libra Foundation in San Francisco, the issue of racial justice is deeply personal.
Her father, Robert Hayling, was an Air Force veteran, a dentist, and a prominent civil-rights leader in St. Augustine, Fla. While monitoring a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1963, he was severely beaten. Months later, carloads of Klansmen fired shots into his house, killing his dog and narrowly missing his wife — who was then pregnant with Crystal.
The family subsequently moved to Cocoa Beach, a town 130 miles away, to start over. Crystal Hayling says they were “refugees from that particular brand of terror.”
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For Crystal Hayling, executive director of the Libra Foundation in San Francisco, the issue of racial justice is deeply personal.
Her father, Robert Hayling, was an Air Force veteran, a dentist, and a prominent civil-rights leader in St. Augustine, Fla. While monitoring a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1963, he was severely beaten. Months later, carloads of Klansmen fired shots into his house, killing his dog and narrowly missing his wife — who was then pregnant with Crystal.
The family subsequently moved to Cocoa Beach, a town 130 miles away, to start over. Crystal Hayling says they were “refugees from that particular brand of terror.”
When the murder of George Floyd in 2020 set off a national outpouring of grief, anger, and demands for change, Hayling saw an opportunity. She created an entity called the Democracy Frontlines Fund and persuaded a dozen grant makers, most of them family foundations, to donate $3 million each for a minimum of three years. The donors gave up not just money but control over how it would be spent, part of an approach sometimes called trust-based philanthropy.
“Founding the Democracy Frontlines Fund was both a gesture of hopefulness and also of despair,” says Hayling. “Philanthropy has a hard time staying focused on justice.”
Three years after its founding, the Democracy Frontlines Fund is going strong. It has distributed $36 million to a slate of 10 Black-led intermediaries, including the Movement for Black Lives, which in turn give the money to Black-led community organizations. It is one of many so-called pooled funds formed in 2020 in response to the demands for racial justice as well as the coronavirus pandemic. All seek grants from foundations or individuals, aggregate them into a pool, and give the money away.
Other pooled funds include the California Black Freedom Fund, which is housed at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and has awarded about $34.3 million to 95 Black power-building groups in California. Grantmakers for Girls of Color, which says it focuses on “girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth of color,” has raised and regranted about $25 million to about 370 organizations since its launch. The Southern Power Fund has moved $16 million to more than 375 organizations in the U.S. South and Puerto Rico.
As a rule, these funds eschew traditional charities. Food banks, homeless shelters, health clinics, inner-city schools, and historically Black colleges and universities need not apply, even if they serve people who are often marginalized. “The protest over George Floyd’s murder was not about funding HBCUs,” says Nat Chioke Williams, executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, which focuses on community organizing and has given to the Southern Power Fund.
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Instead, these pooled funds aim to drive fundamental change by building Black nonprofits’ public-policy muscle. They fund Black-led organizations that organize to change policies in areas such as criminal justice, housing, health care, and the environment. Grantees hold elected officials accountable and become “the bedrock of how change is made,” says Marc Philpart, executive director of the California Freedom Fund.
Many of these groups have been neglected by conventional donors. Some are very small and not yet chartered as nonprofits. Others focus on electoral politics by, for example, registering voters in Democratic strongholds.
“Many foundations were fearful of funding Black organizations,” Hayling says. “But when we do it together, when we do it with curiosity and an open, learning mind, we have found it to be incredibly powerful.”
No Restrictions, Little Paperwork
These pooled funds also set themselves apart by how they give. They nearly always give money with no restrictions for several years and eliminate most if not all of the paperwork that other donors demand from nonprofits.
Jean Melesaine, Libra Foundation
Foundation leader Crystal Hayling started the Democracy Frontlines Fund, a group of 12 philanthropies that are making racial-justice grants together. Here, she talks to Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, during a Democracy Frontlines trip to Montgomery, Ala.
The Southern Power Fund, for example, contrasts itself to “traditional funding streams that are steeped in white-supremacy culture and have slow, burdensome proposal and reporting requirements.”
“We were able to take [traditional] philanthropy out of the decision-making seat,” says Ash-Lee Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Research & Education Center, one of the organizations that help give away the money. “We were able to give to the roughest, toughest folks who were doing some of the most radical work. We gave the money with no strings, so much so that people didn’t believe it was real.”
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Democracy Frontlines Fund, too, says it wants to “disrupt traditional philanthropy.” The fund moves money from some of the wealthiest white families in America to Black frontline activists. Donors include members of the Pritzker family of Hyatt Hotel fame; venture capitalist Michael Moritz; Walmart heir James Walton, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams; former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt; the Sobrato family; and the Hewlett and Packard foundations.
This can make for strange bedfellows. Writing about San Francisco’s drug and homeless crises in the Financial Times, Moritz called for more “visible policing” and noted that the city is “short of 645 officers.” By contrast, BYP100, a national organization of young Black organizers, and the Movement for Black Lives, both of which are funded by the Democracy Frontlines Fund, say they want to “Defund the Police.”
These pooled funds have their critics. Some object to the focus on Black-led groups. “Good work can come from organizations that are led by Black people, Hispanic people, and people who don’t come from marginalized groups,” says Patrice Onwuka, director of the Center for Economic Opportunity at the Independent Women’s Forum.
Bridges or Gatekeepers?
Others see pros and cons with these racial-justice funding efforts. “The advantage is the folks running a number of these funds do have closer, deeper relationships with the movement organizations,” says Lori Villarosa, executive director of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equality. “The challenge becomes if they aren’t ensuring that the relationship between the organizations on the ground and the larger funders is growing.”
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The question is “whether they’re a bridge builder or a gatekeeper,” she says.
Hayling absolutely wants to connect elite funders and community activists. She’s hoping to influence her peers in philanthropy to develop a deeper understanding of racial inequity in America — the kind of understanding that came to her the hard way.
Jean Melesaine, Libra Foundation
Democracy Frontlines Fund grant makers traveled to Montgomery last year to learn about the unfinished work of the civil-rights movement
Last fall, donors to the Democracy Frontlines Fund traveled with her to Montgomery, Ala., to visit the Equal Justice Initiative, meet with community leaders, share insights and connections, and learn about the civil-rights movement and its unfinished work. “It was a really powerful experience,” says Charmaine Mercer, chief of equity and culture at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She was moved by building new relationships and feeling surrounded by colleagues who were committed to deep change.
“It’s about building a community of learning,” Hayling says. “These are spaces where it’s OK to ask tough questions and engage with each other.”
Such conversations, she says, are continuing even though they feel less urgent than they did during the summer of 2020.
“The ripples are quite wide,” Hayling says. “My question is, is the change very deep?”
Alex Daniels and Sono Motoyama contributed to this article.