Shortly after Donald Trump declared victory in the 2016 presidential race, the head of the Arcus Foundation, Kevin Jennings, dispatched his staff to call and meet face-to-face with grantees to get their take on the nation’s new political reality.
The staff got an earful, particularly from grantees at LGBT civil-rights groups, who were especially concerned about the number of hate crimes against transgender people in the weeks after the election.
The Trump victory caught Arcus and other progressive foundations flat-footed. Expecting a Democrat in the White House for at least four more years, they now face a Republican-controlled White House and Congress they deem hostile to some of their major priorities, including climate change, health care, and social justice.
So what to do?
Some foundation leaders have taken immediate measures, such as freezing discretionary grant-making budgets so they can hold money in reserve in case grantees need to shift their tactics. But many foundations aren’t planning sweeping changes. The strategies they’ve designed during the past few years, they say, are well suited to a major leadership changeover in Washington.
At Arcus, Mr., Jennings instructed his staff to give grantees wide latitude and allow them to shift budgets to attend to emerging crises. He’s also expedited a midcourse review of the foundation’s 10-year strategy. Instead of finalizing plans at the end of the year, Arcus will take stock of its efforts in June.
Beyond that, Mr. Jennings doesn’t plan a major overhaul of the foundation’s approach.
“We’re not going to run around like a chicken with its head cut off and forget all the work we’ve been doing,” he says. “We’re not going to just drop it overnight because of one election result.”
Recalling an Earlier Transition
Progressive foundation leaders had a visceral reaction to the Trump victory.
Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation wrote in a blog post that Mr. Trump’s views on climate change were staggeringly irresponsible.
La June Montgomery Tabron, president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation wrote on the foundation’s website, “What has me broken, what is nagging in my heart, are the stories of children across our country crying with fear and anxiety.”
Mr. Kramer placed Hewlett’s special-projects budget and other discretionary funds on hold this year. Normally they are provisionally earmarked a year in advance. In total, the money Hewlett has at the ready tops $14 million. Over the next year, he believes many foundations will shift money in and out of different priority areas to respond to policy challenges.
“Any organization that relies on foundation funding has got to be really nervous,” he says.
For Ms. Tabron and other foundation leaders, the change in administration is reminiscent of the hand-off from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan in 1981. Mr. Reagan pushed the responsibility of a lot of federally delivered social services to the states. In response, Kellogg turned its attention to state and local efforts and worked to include a wider assortment of community members in decision making.
That work continues today, with the foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation effort. In it, the foundation supports communities that document racial injustices, bring people from different backgrounds together to share their experiences, make amends for past wrongs, and design strategies to make cities, counties, and regions more equitable.
Ms. Tabron views the racial-healing work as something that can bring a divided country together in the months following Mr. Trump’s inauguration. She has invited the Obama administration and the Trump transition team to honor a day of healing on January 17.
“We are feeling very prepared as we continue this work,” she says. “This is just another point in the evolution of how we connect with communities. It doesn’t require a pivot from us.”
Adaptable Strategies
Changes made over the past year at the MacArthur and Ford foundations have prepared them to respond to political changes, their leaders say.
In 2015, MacArthur President Julia Stasch instituted what she calls a “design-build” method of support. Rather than assembling an overarching strategy and designating funds to support it over a period of years, MacArthur designs and funds different focus areas simultaneously. Without having to adhere to a master plan, Ms. Stasch says, MacArthur can quickly shift how it allocates funds.
“We have the mind-set, the world view, and the processes in place to be responsive, and even sometimes be ahead of the curve when the political climate changes,” Ms. Stasch says.
Ms. Stasch and her staff are on the watch for any changes that could require a foundation response — a definitive move away from the Paris climate accords, for instance. While it is possible that MacArthur will direct more cash to groups that directly push for policy, Ms. Stasch says she will hold off on starting a fund dedicated to advocacy. Big policy changes are in the works for climate change, criminal justice, and nuclear weapons, three of MacArthur’s “big bets,” but she’s taking a wait-and-see approach to the incoming administration.
“Once people are in power and are fully burdened by the knowledge that their own policy preferences and decisions will affect the lives and livelihoods of millions, it may have a sobering effect,” she says.
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, the nation’s second largest private foundation with more than $12 billion in assets, says he believes he may find allies in the incoming administration.
“We certainly have signals that raise concern, but time will tell,” he says.
Mr. Walker said a shift in strategy made over the past 18 months has the foundation well positioned for the leadership change sweeping Washington. By increasing general operating support to its grantees and narrowing its focus to work on reducing inequalities domestically and internationally, Mr. Walker believes Ford can remain a critical supporter of social-justice movements.
Leadership Crisis
Not everyone thinks that staying the course is the correct response. Foundation chiefs could give people who feel disappointed in the election results a “sense of direction,” says Stanley Katz, a professor of public policy at Princeton University. Faced with an incoming Congress that wants to slash federal spending on social programs and cabinet appointees who have opposed many progressive priorities, foundation chiefs could beef up their advocacy efforts, pump up funding to grass-roots organizations, and take on a more public-facing role, Mr. Katz says. So far, he says, the response has fallen short.
“We are in a leadership crisis,” Mr. Katz says.
But if foundation chiefs take a pre-emptive strike against the Trump administration even before Mr. Trump has been sworn in, they risk being targeted as others have been who have criticized the real-estate and gambling mogul, says foundation expert Joel Fleishman, a professor at Duke University Law School.
Foundations would be smart to focus on long-term efforts and attempt to build consensus rather than storming the barricades during every policy scrape, he argues.
“The gut reaction of a lot of people engaged on the left is to fight the Trump administration,” he says. “That may be satisfying to one’s sense of hurt and disappointment, but that’s not exactly a productive solution.”
‘Our Moment to Shine’
To be sure, some grant makers, particularly community foundations, are ready to get more involved in the political hurly-burly. Although community foundations receive support from donors from across the political spectrum, that won’t stop some of them from getting more involved if they feel their work is threatened.
Earlier this year, as the presidential campaign heated up and attacks on immigrant communities got more brutal, the Seattle Foundation developed what it named the Vibrant Democracy Initiative. It committed $2.5 million during five years to the effort, which will promote civic participation among immigrants in the Seattle area.
Tony Mestres, the foundation’s president, says the grant maker is not pursuing new strategies postelection, but its work, including the democracy effort, will now be done with an “exclamation point” of new urgency. In early December, he met in Washington with other community-foundation leaders to share ideas for a combined push on tax issues common to foundations and to perceived threats on social policy. Community foundations, he and other leaders note, do not face the same restrictions on lobbying placed on private foundations.
Says Mr. Mestres: “This is our moment to shine.”
Emmett Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, said many of the divides laid bare by the election can only be sutured at the community level. Local and regional foundations can help. But Mr. Carson stressed that it is far from clear exactly how Mr. Trump, who has already modified or reversed statements made on the campaign trail, will govern.
He said it is possible some of the foundation’s efforts, like implementing the common-core education standards, protecting the poor against payday lenders, and supporting immigrants who were brought to the country as young children, could be placed in jeopardy under the Trump administration. Silicon Valley Community Foundation is in the process of revamping its grant-making strategy. When the plan is introduced in October, it will likely take into account strategy shifts dictated by the changing political climate. But right now, Mr. Carson says, it is too early to know how those policy debates will play out. Both Congress and the administration will weigh in, and states will have a large say in certain policy choices, he says.
He compares the presidential transition period to Paul Revere’s ride during the Revolutionary War.
“We’re trying to figure out if it is ‘one, if by land, or two, if by sea,’ " he says, referring to the secret signal used by Mr. Revere to alert patriots about the route taken by the British to advance on Concord.
It would be imprudent to start taking action before the incoming administration, agrees Hewlett’s Mr. Kramer, especially because there may be shared policy objectives between progressive foundations and the Trump White House.
Do those include Hewlett’s main priorities?
Mr. Kramer pauses and chuckles.
“Not in our areas,” he says. “Climate’s looking bad. Women’s reproductive health is really looking bad.”
In the week after the election, Mr. Kramer gathered his staff for a pep talk, saying “We can’t control the obstacles the world throws up in our way. We thought we had some clear sailing in a few areas, and now there are some obstacles that will make the work harder.”
