As the 2020 election ramped up, donations from individuals and foundation grants poured into the organizations I lead — the New Georgia Project and its affiliate, the New Georgia Project Action Fund — resulting in an 11-fold increase in revenue over 2019. But since then, funding has dropped to one-third of what we raised last year, forcing us to cut the number of organizers on our staff from 1,100 during the state’s Senate run-off election in January to just 200 today.
What do these cuts mean in practice? There’s a saying in my circle: If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. Staying ready for us means having the people on the ground to keep voters engaged year round and our agenda moving forward. With donations down, our ability to stay ready is significantly impaired.
That maxim rings particularly true in the wake of last week’s election results in Virginia, where conservative Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor. Such results put the issues we care about in danger, including reproductive justice, Medicaid expansion, and voting rights, and underscore the need to engage voters early and often on issues that matter to them — not just during major elections.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election cycle, philanthropic organizations, political leaders, and large corporations showered praise on our organization and other Black women-led groups. With good reason. Since its founding in 2013, the New Georgia Project has registered more than half a million voters by targeting the historically excluded groups that make up what we call the New American Majority — people of color, 18 to 29-year-olds, and unmarried women.
The results couldn’t be clearer: In 2020 and 2021, our efforts to register voters and increase turnout changed the face of national politics, resulting in the election of two Democratic Senators and a victory for Joe Biden in our state.
But our work doesn’t stop when national elections end. Those victories took years of knocking on doors, making phone calls, and talking directly to thousands of people about the issues that affect their daily lives.
Voting Rights
We cannot afford to take our foot off the gas now. Everything is at stake, including the right to vote as Georgia and other states pass legislation designed to make it harder for our multi-racial, multi-generational voter coalition to cast ballots. Philanthropy needs to step up with more than supportive words at a time when such legislation threatens to undo the progress groups like ours have made to address voting inequities.
I’ve been encouraged during the past year and a half to hear more grant makers proclaim that Black lives do matter and that Black people in the South do have political power. But it is one thing to decry the injustices of systemic racism. It is another thing to reduce or eliminate the barriers to funding, invest in our work over the long term, and join us in the fight we have led for years.
Building power in communities of color that were historically excluded and ignored is not an every-two-year business — it’s an every year, every month, everyday reality. We are seeking to create a permanent infrastructure to organize voters and permanently transform people’s lives.
With Congressional elections less than a year away, the New Georgia Project, like so many grassroots organizations, needs the continued support of our philanthropic partners — many of whom only pay attention to us during high-profile national and state campaigns. Such funding patterns leave us tethered to a boom-and-bust investment cycle that makes it harder to galvanize voters and win elections. Our approach to organizing revolves around solving problems and improving lives in local communities. There are 159 counties in Georgia, and we need to be present in all of them to keep voters engaged.
Imagine what we could have accomplished during the 2018 midterm elections if we had the funding to open more field offices, hire and train organizers from the communities where we work, and develop robust outreach and communications operations to engage constituents year round. We could have accelerated Georgia’s much-delayed role as a battleground state and gained greater traction on all of the issues that matter to the communities we represent, including voting rights, boosting the minimum wage, expanding health care, and fighting for environmental justice.
During municipal elections this year, we spent resources analyzing the Georgia voter suppression bill passed in March. We gauged the impact of the bill during the election by tracking early voting trends and the rate of absentee ballot rejections, deploying voter protection teams across seven counties, and piloting programs to ensure long lines wouldn’t depress overall turnout.
All of this took valuable resources that could have gone to hiring more organizers to reach isolated communities or to provide free, wheelchair accessible rides in an additional eight counties. With consistent funding through all election cycles, we would not have to make these tradeoffs. When statewide elections are decided by less than12,000 votes, which was Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia, any gaps in support can make an enormous difference.
Why Stable Funding Matters
Consistent funding for grassroots organizations is not only necessary to hold ground — it’s the right thing to do. Investing in Black-led organizations, especially in the South, is one way to right the wrongs of a racist, violent history that forces groups like ours to keep fighting for basic freedoms.
Research shows that nonprofits led by Black women receive less money from philanthropy than those led by white women or Black men, and that nonprofits led by people of color generally win much less grant money with more strings attached. This creates a form of philanthropic redlining, which is especially evident in the South where centuries of disinvestment, neglect, systemic racism, and social injustice continue to undermine opportunities and rights for Black and brown people. Black women have been at the heart of these fights and leaders in their communities, but are continually underfunded.
Some philanthropic organizations have made big strides toward more equitable funding through multi-year unrestricted investments in grassroots, Black-led organizations. They are reducing or eliminating reporting requirements and launching community-led participatory grant making strategies, which cede decision-making power over who gets funding to the communities foundations are looking to support. But many others still lag far behind, insisting on maintaining arduous, secretive, and competitive grant processes that keep their philanthropic dollars locked up behind the gates of the wealthy and disbursed on the whims of mostly white gatekeepers.
Progress takes time. We have successfully built community power for years, despite working within a state whose leadership wants to silence us. We stay ready, every year, to not only hold our ground, but to create the Georgia — and the country — we know is possible.
But we could do so much more if philanthropy wouldn’t tune us out when important national elections are over. Here’s my plea to grant makers: keep speaking out for greater equity, but please match those words with sustained funding beyond headline-grabbing election cycles.