At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 800 grant makers signed a pledge to loosen or eliminate grant restrictions. Calls for unrestricted giving grew as the global health crisis converged with a national racial reckoning. Philanthropists, critics argued, should no longer dictate how nonprofits, especially those led by people of color, spend their funds. Instead, foundations should give freely to those who know best how to achieve equity and justice in their communities.
The result was an upswing in unrestricted giving — a trend that for now at least appears to be continuing. As the head of an organization that has seen firsthand the difference unrestricted funding can make, especially in promoting racial justice, I urge foundations to embrace it as a permanent giving strategy — not just a response to crisis.
Over the past eight years, unrestricted giving has allowed the Vera Institute of Justice, the nonprofit I lead, to invest in new ideas, respond quickly and effectively to those we serve, add staff, and expand our organizational capacity — all with an eye toward increasing equity.
Unrestricted funding and general support are relatively new for Vera during its 60-year history. In 2013, when I became the first person of color to run the organization, we had about $100,000 in unrestricted support and more than 100 restricted-funding sources, including from government agencies and foundations. Almost 95 percent of our philanthropic revenue was restricted. Our hands were tied by grants that funded narrowly defined projects with precise time frames or supported specific research studies and reports.
Killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown
Since our grants specified how we were supposed to use funds, responding to unexpected needs as they arose was nearly impossible. Following the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, this lack of spending freedom meant we couldn’t shift our work with the necessary speed and effectiveness to address police brutality and systemic racism in law enforcement. Almost all our resources were tied up by donors’ other intentions — not the crisis of American policing and its impact on Black people.
So, we embarked on a deliberate strategy to encourage philanthropies to give us the liberty to chart our own course. Since then, unrestricted investments from Blue Meridian Partners, the Ballmer Group, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Tow Foundation have allowed us to confront systemic racism on our own terms. This past fiscal year, more than 59 percent of our philanthropic contributions were unrestricted — a more than sixfold increase since 2013.
These investments allowed us to quickly develop projects such as the Safety and Fairness for Everyone, or SAFE Initiative, which aims to ensure that all immigrants facing detention and deportation have access to a lawyer. We launched SAFE in 2017 as the Trump administration was removing deportation protections — so we had little time to waste. Unrestricted funds let us respond far quicker than we could fundraise and provide urgently needed support to those threatened with deportation who don’t have the right to a public defender.
With unrestricted resources, we’ve also invested in partnerships with leaders who live and work in our low-income and immigrant target communities. For instance, we worked with a group of formerly incarcerated people to launch Restoring Promise, an effort to create housing units for young adults in prison. We also expanded our work with prosecutors to focus on eliminating racial disparities in charging and sentencing, and we collaborated with community-based organizations in the nine sites where the program operates. In this way, the increased flexibility has helped us expand who has a voice in our work, increased accountability, and resulted in bolder ideas.
Training on Race and Equity
Our internal commitment to equity has also been bolstered by general support funding. All staff members now participate in race, equity, and inclusion training; more resources are devoted to building staff diversity, and we carried out a plan to ensure every unit of Vera embodies our larger commitment to fighting racism and building equity.
We have seen other nonprofits make similar leaps in their program offerings and internal operations after receiving unrestricted grants. The group Recess, which runs arts programs with and for people affected by the criminal legal system, introduced a universal starting salary for all employees this year — something that would have been impossible without general operating support. Unrestricted funding has also enabled Recess to respond swiftly to participants’ needs. For instance, it created an emergency fund to assist youths participating in its programs who experience food or housing insecurity or have outstanding legal costs because of prior contact with the criminal legal system.
The New York City Anti-Violence Project, which provides counseling and legal services to LGBTQ and HIV-affected survivors of violence, used part of a $1.75 million unrestricted grant from Jack Dorsey to update its hotline, including adding text capabilities so that callers receive faster responses. Grant makers almost never provide restricted funds for operational investments like these, but they are critical to grantees’ work.
The ability to be creative, nimble, and responsive is possible only with unrestricted funding. The pandemic led to an increase in unrestricted giving, but foundations need to make it a permanent and primary part of their giving strategy. Without it, organizations like mine will forever scramble to live up to our missions — and justice and equity will too often remain out of reach for those we serve.
