In April, a pro-Palestinian encampment created overnight at Columbia University set off a cascade of impassioned student protests. A month later, police had arrested over 2,900 campus demonstrators who had seized university buildings, crowdfunded tens of thousands of dollars for legal fees, and walked out of commencement ceremonies, while demanding their university divest from companies deemed complicit in Israel’s war in Gaza.
As the campus protests have swelled in size and intensity, so too have the questions, conspiracies, and conjectures about the funding behind them, with many feeding into longstanding right-wing talking points about billionaire George Soros and other left-wing donors.
But data and testimony provided by movement leaders show that the student protests have not been largely funded or significantly shaped by any single donor or philanthropic organization. Although many pro-Palestinian groups participating in the protests — and pro-Israel groups more broadly — have received some funding from foundations or large donors, such as the Tides and Open Society Foundations, organizers maintain that a rapidly growing and decentralized network of young activists has propelled the protests forward.
“We live in a society that routinely and paternalistically underestimates young people,” says Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan specializing in student activism. “Yet every progressive change that we’ve seen in the country comes at the behest and the labor of young people because they know that they are inheriting a society and want it to be different than the one their parents had.”
Amid the war in Gaza, younger Americans have been significantly more critical of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians in Gaza than their parents have, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center. Among adults under 30, nearly half said Israel’s conduct in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack has been unacceptable, while only 29 percent of adults over 50 said the same. A third of young people said they sympathized primarily with Palestinians, compared with less than 10 percent of adults over 65.
Those sympathies have played out on campus, where no singular organization has taken the lead on pro-Palestinian protests. In fact, many encampments involved informal coalitions of students from a wide range of backgrounds and political perspectives, says Davis. At Columbia, a coalition of 120 student groups called Columbia University Apartheid Divest has coordinated protests on campus. At the University of Michigan, 81 student organizations have worked together to scrape up supplies, with little evident assistance from big donors.
“The encampments didn’t need a lot of money,” says Davis, noting that many students bought tents, made signs, and purchased materials with money coming from their own pockets. Many students and alumni also engaged in mutual aid related to on-campus protests, he says. Several GoFundMe bail funds for students who were arrested were able to raise over $20,000, including one for the University of Michigan, while other students donated books or purchased food.
At Columbia, crowdfunding has raised more than enough to cover any nominal fees associated with student protests, says Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s sociology department and an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
“The funding that we have comes from social media and mutual aid,” says Ben-Menachem, who put out a call on Twitter to raise funds via Venmo after mass arrests at Columbia’s encampment in April. The campaign quickly raised more than enough to cover students’ legal fees.
The Power of Small Donations
Among organizations supporting the protests is Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group whose student members have helped organize Passover Seders and Shabbat dinners in campus encampments across the country.
While the group has received significant support from several philanthropic organizations and high-profile donors — including just over $60,000 from the Tides Foundation, $210,000 from the Kaphan Foundation, $75,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and $225,000 from Open Society Foundations in 2022 — much of its funding comes from smaller individual donations.
“Our most common contribution is $15,” says Ari Solomon, director of development at Jewish Voice for Peace. “The overwhelming majority of our budget is fundraised every single year from tens of thousands of individual people.”
In a typical year, around 85 percent of the organization’s roughly $4 million budget comes from individual donors whose average-sized contribution is $60, with the remainder coming from philanthropic groups, says Solomon.
In recent months, the number of dues-paying Jewish Voice for Peace members — who contribute at least $3 per month or $18 per year — has doubled to 32,000 people. So have the organization’s donation levels from both small and institutional supporters. Solomon says this rise reflects a surge of activism from people angered over Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 35,000 people since October 7, in retribution for Hamas’ surprise assault, which killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel.
“Over the past year in particular, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people become activated and mobilized into the struggle for Palestinian freedom,” says Solomon.
Unprecedented Engagement
That level of heightened engagement, particularly among young people, has not been unique to Jewish Voice for Peace. Many Americans have had a strong emotional — and philanthropic — response to the violence in the region and its ripple effects on workplaces, social media feeds, and college campuses in the United States.
In the past academic year alone, 180,000 students participated in events and activities hosted by Hillel International, an all-time high for the century-old Jewish student organization, according to Hillel CEO Adam Lehman.
Amid unprecedented tensions on campus and a significant increase in antisemitic incidents, many Jewish students sought refuge and community through the organization, says Lehman, even as they’ve navigated differences of opinion over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. While Hillel does not charge membership fees, the unfolding protests on campus have contributed to major growth in the organization’s fundraising campaigns, which topped $100 million over the past year, says Lehman. He has occasionally heard from donors who boosted their donations to their local Hillel branch by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in response to campus activism and heightened antisemitism.
“On the one hand, we have never seen such extreme challenges for Jewish students on campus,” says Lehman. On the other, “many students have used the challenges of this period to double down on learning about their Jewish identities and leaning into student leadership” so that they can “contribute to a more positive campus environment.”
Funding Grassroots
For critics of the protests, “the real answer is scary, which is that there’s a true genuine grassroots movement of people who are upset about what’s happening in Gaza,” says Dan Shannon, chief partnerships officer at the Tides Foundation, which funds social justice organizations.
Earlier this month, an article in Politico went viral after suggesting that prominent Democratic donors were covertly funneling money toward student protesters through the Tides Foundation’s support for some pro-Palestinian groups, amounting to roughly $100,000 of its $800 million annual grant portfolio in 2022.
Tides has also received flack for its support of the pro-Palestinian groups Palestine Legal and the Adalah Justice Project through fiscal sponsorships, a system that can reduce the administrative legwork for small grassroots groups, but at the expense of funding transparency.
In reality, says Shannon, such critiques obscure the true funding mechanisms and popular support for the constellation of pro-Palestinian nonprofits and student groups behind the protest movement, many of which have received an influx of small donations and volunteers over the past seven months.
“There’s a desire to believe there must be something else going on, someone behind the scenes pulling the strings,” he says. “I think that’s an easier and neater answer, but it isn’t true: These organizations have a wide range of supporters, financially and otherwise.”
