Nearly 10 years after receiving a $1 million MacArthur “genius” award for institutions, a tiny human rights center has transformed itself and its work, offering lessons on how grant makers can help organizations become sustainable and how nonprofits can create a rare financial cushion.
The Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley placed most of the MacArthur money into an endowment and then used the prestige of the grant to persuade other funders to offer support, most notably a recent $3 million grant from the philanthropist Maja Kristin. Now it aims to build a $15 million endowment, an ambitious goal in a field that draws relatively little philanthropic support.
The MacArthur grant also enabled the organization to launch a new project — a training lab for students to conduct digital investigations of alleged violence and human rights abuses using internet images, social media, and geolocation data, among other new and evolving tools. Almost a decade after receiving the grant, the Human Rights Center, with a staff of 15 and an annual budget of just over $3.5 million, has helped transform the research process for some of the globe’s most hard to document war crimes and human rights abuses.
Led by a handful of professors who have trained hundreds of students, the center has helped investigate the murders of Indigenous people defending their land rights in the Brazilian Amazon and uncovered government repression of protests in Chile. Students and professors have worked together to expose sexual violence and other threats to women and migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border and conducted forensic research, using DNA analysis, to reconnect families separated by conflict. The center’s students also provided data culled from Facebook comments, images, and videos for a 2018 Reuters investigation, “Myanmar Burning,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Such an ambitious effort seemed improbable before the MacArthur grant, said Alexa Koenig, a co-faculty director at the center.
“After we won the award, we were trying to think about how do we best leverage this moment and this opportunity,” Koenig said, “and create an experiential learning program that would act as a bridge between academia and the broader communities around us.”
The center has been building a lot of bridges. It partnered with investigations teams at Human Rights Watch, the New York Times, Reuters, and PBS, among others. And in 2022, the center collaborated with the United Nations to develop the first international guidelines on how to use social media and online content to support human rights violation probes.
Careful Decision Making
One million dollars over four years is a relatively small grant for an organization with a mission “to pursue justice through science, technology, and law.” The Human Rights Center could have spent it all quickly but decided to put 90 percent of the money into an endowment and 10 percent into a spending account for expenses not covered by funders.
The Quest for Fiscal Stability
“A knee-jerk board or director might get starry-eyed with a seven-figure gift and immediately expand their programming or staff,” said Mark Hager, a professor emeritus of nonprofit leadership and management at Arizona State University. Instead, the center appears to have taken a pragmatic approach when applying the dollars, he said.
By giving the award, MacArthur wanted to help the Human Rights Center create an endowment and also raise awareness and additional support for its work, spokesperson Kristen Mack said. That has meant faculty and staff did not need to constantly scramble to find donations, as had been the case since the center opened in 1994.
“Having a consistent funding source from this endowment allows a measure of stability, which is a rare gift in the NGO world,” said Alan Iijima, the center’s development manager.
The Human Rights Center also followed another MacArthur Foundation recommendation — to work with UC Berkeley’s chancellor and law school dean to leverage the genius award for further fundraising. The center is part of Berkeley’s law school.
Since the genius award, the key funders have included Microsoft, the Oak Foundation, and Open Society Foundations. The MacArthur Foundation has been among its biggest and longest supporters, providing a total of $5.2 million in grant funding since 1999. About $3.6 million was given before the award and another $600,000 after.
Revenue from contracts and grants, endowment income, and individual donations, among other sources, increased from $1.2 million for fiscal year 2015-16 (the year after the genius award) to more than $3 million for fiscal year 2022-23. Large funding has included a $1.3 million grant from the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women last year for its work helping Bay Area youths at risk of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation and $3 million from the sex crimes lawyer and philanthropist Maja Kristin to help support work related to women and girls.
The outcome of the MacArthur grant shows what can happen when funders make a sustained commitment to funding human rights work, especially investigations, said Alexandra Toma, executive director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, an organization of grant makers.
Investigations take time, and wins from the funding often aren’t apparent until years later, she said.
“The main thing we can learn from this case is that funders should not be squeamish about giving large and ideally unrestricted gifts,” she said. “The needs are immense. Innovation is there, waiting to be unlocked with the right resources.”
The donations that the Human Rights Center has received since the MacArthur grant show the reputational benefits of receiving a no-strings-attached gift from a major donor, Hager said.
“That’s a nice reflection on both parties, something I wish we saw more of from grant-making foundations,” he said. “It suggests a healthy attitude from MacArthur about their relationship with grantees and how they should be treated.”
Although MacArthur discontinued its award for “creative and effective” institutions in 2016 after distributing 102 grants totaling $67 million, it has continued to fund human rights work globally.
Meanwhile, other major human rights funders are shifting their strategies. Open Society Foundations restructured its grant making this year by ending some relationships with grantees, laying off staff, and shuttering some of its global offices. And Wellspring Philanthropic Fund recently announced plans to wind down its grant making by 2028. These changes have created uncertainty about the future of philanthropically supported human rights work.
Training the Next Generation
The Human Rights Center has trained hundreds of students over the past decade from a range of disciplines including law, journalism, and the sciences. Student collaborations ensure the Human Rights Center stays fresh and incorporates the latest technologies, such as A.I., with which students tend to have familiarity and facility.
For many of the students, the technology-focused criminology training is an opportunity to combine seemingly disparate interests. Bhalpriya Kaur Sandhu was a second-year molecular and cell biology major when she heard about the center through a human rights and history class.
During her semester-long training course at the Investigations Lab, Sandhu learned to mine videos posted on Instagram and other platforms for information about alleged war crimes and human rights violations. She also learned to use geolocation tools to identify mobile devices and to determine whether uploaded images and videos were deepfakes and how to archive digital images, she said.
Graduates of HRC’s digital investigations program have gone on to work for some of the world’s pre-eminent investigative organizations, such as Bellingcat, an international collective based in the Netherlands that recently used geolocation data to uncover mass graves in Burkina Faso.
After Sandhu completed her initial training, she joined a research team called the Digital Verification Corps. There she was assigned to investigate allegations of government security forces’ violence against Iranian protesters in the aftermath of the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish Iranian woman who died while in police custody. HRC confirmed that approximately 120 people were partially or fully blinded after being shot by security forces using guns with plastic pellets. Many of the injured were students, and most were under age 30.
Working on the project and watching videos of young people in another part of the world being brutalized was shocking, Sandu said.
“A lot of the videos were taken outside of universities. A lot of those universities looked very similar to Berkeley, she said. “Just knowing that we were able to contribute in some way gave me a sense of pride.”
Looking ahead to the next few years, Sandhu said that with all that’s she’s learned about human rights work she’s no longer sure if she will stay on a narrow bioscience track. She said she’d like to go to law school and pursue a career that combines law, human rights, and science. “That would be ideal for me.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy. Open Society Foundations is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.