Soros’s Open Society Returns More Focus to Fight Authoritarianism Around the Globe

Open Society Foundations, the sprawling $20 billion philanthropy of George Soros, will dedicate tens of millions of additional dollars to its international network of offices as part of a strategy shift designed to reinvigorate the organization’s response to spreading authoritarianism and threats to human-rights worldwide.

In making the transition, the foundation plans to eliminate or absorb into other grant-making programs its freestanding efforts, such as those that provide scholarships to students in countries with limited academic freedom and grants designed to protect refugees and migrant workers from exploitation. The precise shape of the changes are still under deliberation and cuts have not been made final.

As a result, Open Society expects to cut about 200 jobs from its work force of about 1,680 people. If enough employees don’t accept a voluntary severance package, the foundation will lay workers off, says Mark Malloch-Brown, an international human-rights veteran and Open Society Foundations board member who took over as president when the philanthropy’s former leader Patrick Gaspard announced his departure in December.

Grantees in programs that will be cut will receive transitional help so they don’t face an abrupt loss in funding.

Stefanie Loos, Redux for the Open Society Foundations

Malloch-Brown, who has held a series of leadership roles in the British government and at the United Nations, portrayed the changes as a return to the focus on human rights that was a founding principle of Soros’s philanthropy. By moving more money to organizations based nationally or regionally, the approach is a staple of Soros’s earlier days as a philanthropist: giving authority to people at the local level over how grants will be most effective.

Compared with other foundations with an international footprint, Open Society already has a deep global presence. About two-thirds of its grant making goes to support work outside of the United States, whether it is directly supporting one of its 45 national or regional offices or programs cutting across several countries run by its main office. Malloch-Brown wants the foundation to be truly worldwide.

“I still think we’re an American foundation with an international network,” he says. “And I want us to move that next step to being a global foundation.”

Malloch-Brown says the changes re-emphasize the decentralized approach long favored by Soros that animated his early philanthropy during the days of the Iron Curtain. Following the fall of communism, many champions of liberal democracy were “peacetime generals,” Malloch-Brown says.

“The world was going our way. Human rights and democracy were expanding,” he says. " What we’ve seen over the last decade is that our values are under siege.”

By increasing its support of people directly struggling to break the grip of anti-democratic rule, Malloch-Brown says the grant maker can take a more aggressive approach and assist people putting their lives directly at risk by speaking out against corrupt regimes.

Says Malloch-Brown: “We’re in a war here.”

Trusting Local Leaders

By providing about $400 million, an increase of roughly $75 million to the 45 units that undertake work affecting 120 countries , Malloch-Brown says the foundation can support leaders who are based in places that enable them to respond quickly to threats and make informed decisions about where resources are needed.

In describing in the New York Review of Books a decade ago what he’d like his philanthropic legacy to be, Soros, who is now 90, wrote that the United States has an established group of organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, to hold elected officials accountable. Many other countries lack a civil-society bulwark against authoritarian tendencies, he wrote, and leaders in those places must be entrusted with money and the ability to make their own decisions.

“We must avoid a centralized structure at all cost,” he wrote. “At present most of the innovative ideas come from within the networks we have sponsored, not from the top.”

In the early days of the foundation, Soros used to comment about how much he preferred speaking to leaders in Hungary directly engaged in the pitched battle to defeat communism over experts who worked at philanthropic institutions experts in New York, says Emily Tamkin, author of The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society.

Tamkin says the transition at the foundation " sounds like a return to form.”

But in some ways, Open Society Foundations is taking some cues from other established philanthropies in a way that it hasn’t in the past.

Fabrice Coffrini, AFP, Getty Images

Malloch-Brown declined to provide set goals, but he says the foundation will be offering more multiyear grants. And as more money is directed internationally, the central offices of the foundation will streamline its 50 grant-making entities and concentrate on larger dollar “big bets,” which will be decided at a later date.

The foundation decided to make those changes, in part, after consultation with outside advisers, including the Bridgespan Group — a move Malloch-Brown says was new for the philanthropy, which has long considered itself an outlier among U.S. foundations and preferred in large part to keep its own counsel.

Other efforts to focus large sums of cash on single issues include the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change program, which has twice devoted $100 million to nonprofits working on single issues, and its spin-off, Lever for Change. Recent “big bets” include Blue Meridian Partners, a donor group that has amassed commitments totally $2.5 billion to direct to alleviating poverty, and the Audacious Project, a donor collaborative that seeks to help nonprofits with promising ideas reach a larger population with the help of multimillion-dollar grants. Both Lever for Change and the Audacious Project receive help from the Bridgespan Group to run their grant making.

Gara LaMarche, who oversaw U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute, which was later renamed Open Society Foundations, says historically Open Society has made various attempts to strike the right balance between its global, or thematic, operations and the work of its network of individual national and regional offices. The reorganization, he says, sends a signal that the foundation trusts the views of the people closest to the problems being confronted.

The use of consultants and evaluating its work against its foundation peers is largely new, LaMarche says. The foundation has historically promoted a culture of “exceptionalism” that in some cases looked down on the work of other philanthropies. LaMarche says he hopes Open Society learns from other grant makers but does not turn its back on the kind of exceptionalism that has allowed it to take risks.

On the Chopping Block

Open Society is the second largest U.S. grant maker behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It has budgeted $1.6 billion in spending this year.

Open Society will consolidate grant-making programs in what it calls its “global” office (as opposed to its international network of organizations) so that its globalemployees can make larger grants to complement the work of international staff, says Binaifer Nowrojee, Open Society’s vice president for organizational transformation.

“We cannot afford to be in so many multiple different separate pieces of work that are siloed,” Nowrojee says. “So we’re making some hard choices to pare back some work, to consolidate some work.”

The foundation’s scholarship program, which supports 300 academics annually, is likely to be eliminated.

Other efforts will be either trimmed or included as an aspect of grant making by the foundation’s international network, including the foundation’s work in public health.

Open Society’s Economic Justice Program and its International Migration Initiative, both of which Malloch-Brown says have begun to engage in work beyond their original mission, are going to be cut or absorbed into other areas of the foundation. He says other grant making, including support for efforts to change the rules governing corporations or to prepare people for the future of work, have creeped beyond the foundation’s mandate.

Concerns From Foundation’s Labor Union

Open Society’s staff belongs to the Communications Workers of America union. The union issued a statement today saying it had agreed with the goal of giving more autonomy to Open Society’s offices but that it is concerned the effort is mainly about curbing the union’s power.

“The lack of transparency and fact-finding conversations also create a cloud of doubt, and sometimes it seems that anti-union considerations are at the heart of their decision.”

It also said it was concerned that Open Society is “choosing to upend the organization in a way that could disrupt the livelihoods of staff and partners in the middle of an unprecedented crisis in global health, the job market, and equity.” It added: “All of this while, OSF has not been hurt financially by the pandemic.”

In response to the union statement, Malloch-Brown said “the suggestion that our global restructuring is somehow motivated by ‘anti-union considerations’ is absurd.”

Open Society, Malloch-Brown said, is “committed to providing supportive packages and transition assistance to our employees, appropriate to the challenges of the moment, and we will responsibly exit fields and honor our financial commitments to organizations or individuals in the cycle ahead.” But he added: “The crises in global health and equity make it even more critical that we deliver on our mission at this time. The proposed changes aim to increase our impact by bringing more focus, integration, and scale to our work.”

Open Society workers have not been shy in the past about voicing their displeasure with how the foundation operates. When Open Society announced an initial $130 million response to the pandemic, a group of over 100 employees told foundation leaders that the new fund was too focused on the United States and allowed decision making to be concentrated by a group of leaders rather than being informed by staff members spread internationally.

A big lesson from that experience, Nowrojee says, is that Open Society needed to have flexible funds at the ready so it could respond without dipping into money that had already been budgeted for grantees. As part of the reorganization, Open Society will create a $100 million reserve fund for its international offices which the foundation expects to grow several times over in the next several year.

“We don’t know what’s coming around the corner,” Nowrojee says, “so we’re going to have a larger reserve fund from which we can pivot quickly.”

Embracing Risk Taking

When Patrick Gaspard departed Open Society to take part in the Biden transition, Malloch-Brown, a knight of the British Empire who has known Soros for decades, took over.

Malloch-Brown, 67, says he would like to stay on the job at least four years. He says he feels entrusted with restoring the “founding commitment” to human rights and nimbleness and risk taking that Soros imbibed into the philanthropy.

“You’re not going to do that with one coat of paint,” he says.

He characterized the reorganization as something that was largely created by Gaspard. He says he was in a good position to carry the plan through because he was intimately familiar with the organization through his service on the board. Bringing in an outsider who would probably begin the process all over again was too much to ask for a staff that was already “very strung out” both by the extended process of redesigning the foundation’s strategy and by the demands of working during the pandemic.

Soros, Malloch-Brown says, is still very much involved in Open Society. But he says Alexander Soros, the eldest son of the financier from his second marriage, who serves deputy chairman of Open Society is intimately involved with the decision-making process there.

Says Malloch-Brown: “He is the key link between his father and the future.”