Keep up with everything happening in The Commons by signing up for the Chronicle’s Philanthropy Today newsletter or our weekly Commons LinkedIn newsletter.
On Election Day, Democracy Fund president Joe Goldman volunteered at a local polling station, returning home late to results that promised new challenges for the philanthropic movement to strengthen democracy. His organization and many others had been preparing months for the possibility of a Trump win and what they expect will be authoritarian moves at the White House. Now came the time to act.
Goldman joined Chronicle of Philanthropy CEO Stacy Palmer for our Commons in Conversation series and a wide-ranging discussion about what’s next — how funders can best support grassroots groups, the potential for a more ideologically diverse coalition, and what to expect in the days ahead.
Funders, Goldman said, need to dispense with their usual slow-boiling strategy shifts and support the hundreds of advocacy, legal, and policy organizations that he described as “a bulwark.”
“Our grantees are out there on the front lines, and they need our support now,” he said. “And philanthropy needs to be ready to pivot with them.”
Watch the discussion on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s YouTube channel or on LinkedIn with free registration. Below is a lightly edited A.I.-generated interview transcript.
An Election Success
STACY PALMER: Welcome to the Commons in conversation. We’re so happy to have you here today, and I am delighted to introduce you to our guest, Joe Goldman, who as many of you know has been incredibly active in democracy funding. He runs the Democracy Fund. But just as important, he has spent a lot of time working in the field to make sure that more grant makers are thinking about effective ways that they can work to strengthen our democracy.
So I couldn’t think of anybody better to talk to after Election Day than Joe, because he has this broad view of the entire field, not just from the grantmaking side, but he’s extremely effective in talking to grantees and understanding what’s happening on the front lines. So we’ll bring you some of that today, although I want most of this conversation to be focused about what’s happening next.
I do want to take a minute to look backwards because philanthropists have invested a lot in making sure that elections run smoothly. And what we saw on Election Day was a sign of philanthropic investments at work to great effect, at least as far as I could tell. And Joe, I know you were actually working at a polling place as a volunteer, but also you have that bird’s eye view of what was happening across the country.
What did philanthropy’s investments do to make a difference in this election cycle and how smoothly everything ran on Tuesday?
JOE GOLDMAN: Sure. First, I wanted to say it’s really great to be here. I’m really excited to be part of this conversation. It’s an important conversation for philanthropy to be having. Look, over the last several years, philanthropy has really stepped up to the challenge of how to ensure that we are on a path towards a more inclusive, multiracial democracy. And part of that work is ensuring that we have free, fair and representative elections that produce a peaceful outcome that’s in the best interests of the American public. And we saw across this election cycle folks working on everything from combating myths and disinformation to supporting a more well-run election system for defending voting rights and supporting more diverse electorate turnout.
And, at the end of the day, this actually was a reasonably well-run election under tremendously difficult circumstances. And I think we can be grateful to hundreds and hundreds of nonprofit organizations that played a role in helping to ensure that was the case.
Paying Attention to Grantees
STACY: It’s impossible to know this, but if philanthropy hadn’t done all of that work and the nonprofits you talked about, what do you think would have happened?
JOE: We are recording this conversation literally one week after Election Day. A lot of folks are very quick to come up with analyses of exactly what happened before we actually have very good data on literally what transpired. Literally, at the moment that we are having this conversation, we don’t actually know the outcome of a whole bunch of congressional races at this point, let alone what the actual turnout data was.
So I want to be careful about how quick we jump to conclusions. It’s really healthy for us to want to learn from the experience and understand what worked and what didn’t. But it doesn’t do any of us any good to jump to snap conclusions that really are just kind of advancing predictions that we’ve taken in the past before we know things.
What I’ll say is that philanthropy stood up in a different way in this election cycle than in the past. One of the roles that we have at Democracy Fund and took really seriously going into this election cycle was paying attention to what grantees told us in the past was important and what they needed from us to be effective.
And one of the things that we’ve been hearing for years and years is that they receive grant-making money way too late in the election cycle. And that makes it hard to plan, to hire, and to be effective. And so we ran this campaign called All in by April that tried to create an expectation within philanthropy that being a responsible grant maker meant getting your dollars out earlier in the cycle.
And by the evaluation we ran, we were able to track more than $150 million that made it out to grantees earlier than it would have otherwise. What difference does that make? That means that groups were out knocking on doors earlier in the cycle than they otherwise would have. It means that they were able to plan in partnership with election administrators to try to figure out, “What are we going to do if there’s a bomb threat at our polling place?” “What do we do if there’s a violent act against our coworkers?” Being able to plan and prepare for those things — we can’t at this point say exactly what the impact was. But it makes a difference. And we know it from all the data we collect that we end up having a more free, fair, and representative election because of the work our grantees did.
A Lesson for All Grant Makers
STACY: I think that’s such an important lesson really for all kinds of grant making. Just listening to what gets in the way, having those dollars committed earlier than usual makes a tremendous difference. It doesn’t necessarily always mean more money, but it means giving money in the ways that grantees really need it.
I’m curious, what are you hearing from grantees now? With the caution that we are only a week in, what are you hearing about the things that they think they’re going to need in the days and weeks ahead?
JOE: On one hand, I think everybody feels proud of the work that they’ve done. Grantees have really gone all-out this election cycle, and there are a lot of ways that their work really paid off. And, you know, folks are tired and scared and really struggling with what it means to be looking forward and knowing that we have a new administration coming into office that has made some pretty authoritarian commitments.
Whether it is because folks are worried about attacks on LGBTQ communities or attacks on immigrants or threats to the independence of our federal civil service or the independence of our Justice Department. You know, there’s a lot of reasons that people feel pretty worried right now. And I think those worries are amplified because nonprofits know that traditionally coming out of a major election cycle, funding usually drops.
We tend to see this boom-and-bust cycle of election giving. And, coming out of the All by April campaign that we ran, we’re now launching a new campaign that we’re calling Election Day Every Day where we’re asking donors to commit to their grantees that, you know, we’ve got their back. Every grant maker that I know is feeling exhausted right now — every grant maker that’s worked on democracy and the election process.
And I guess my message to my peers is: If you think you’re tired, just imagine what folks who’ve been out on the front lines are feeling. They need to know that we’ve got their back, that we are going to support them. And that means, you know, we are going to provide bridge grants where we need to to make sure that we’re doing kind of short term funding to fill in the gaps of Q1 next year.
It means we’re thinking about what their safety and security needs are when they’re out there on the front lines. It means that we’re giving them multiyear grants in order to make sure that they can actually plan for the future. That’s the kind of support that this community needs to be able to provide to our grantees. We’ve already got more than 70 philanthropic organizations that have signed on to the campaign, and we hope there’ll be many more.
And we think it’s a really important commitment that we as donors can make to our grantees.
A Deeper, Broader Coalition
STACY: Are there specific things at Democracy Fund that you’ve already decided to do?
JOE: Obviously, democracy is what we do. So we remain absolutely committed to the field that we’ve been working in. We do think that we’re heading into a new environment because of the outcome of this election and so much of how the world around us has changed. And so for us, we think there are at least three really important priorities that the philanthropic community needs to take seriously, given how our world has changed.
The first is we really need to step up to defend those communities and organizations that are going to be under threat in the new world that we’re facing. Again, that means LGBT communities, it means immigrant communities, it means Arab and American Muslim communities. These communities are really going to be facing significant pressure from the new administration, and the philanthropic community needs to stand behind them. And we also need to pay attention to the safety and security threats that any front line organization is facing the current political climate.
The second priority for us is: We really need to commit to stand up to abuses of power that are coming from government, whether it is, again, attacks on civil service or attacks on basic human dignity. This is a moment where the field of organizations that serve as government watchdogs, that operate through the courts and through policy advocacy in order to stand up to abuse of power — those groups have been planning for this moment, and they need our support.
And third, we think it’s really important in this moment to build a stronger, deeper, broader pro-democracy coalition that’s able to stand up to authoritarian threats. So we want to really invest in organizing to bring more people into this work. And we want to build broader ideological coalitions that may disagree on all sorts of things, but agree that we need to protect our democracy at this moment.
2024 vs. 2016
STACY: What are some of the things that you see that are different from 2016 when it was a shock to many people that some of these things were happening and there wasn’t as much preparation as there is today? What are some of the lessons that you think have been learned that you’re seeing being put into effect and that we need to continue to think more about?
JOE: Compared to 2017, the field is both larger and far more prepared for the kinds of lessons that we’re facing in the coming months. We’ve been supporting dozens and dozens of grantees that have been doing scenario planning over the past six to 12 months imagining the different kinds of scenarios that we might be facing in 2025 and helping plan for them.
The biggest difference from where we’ve been in the past is that groups have been planning for this moment. And that is true at the state level. There are new partnerships between governors and states attorneys and local mayors that are supported by various nonprofit organizations and serve as a bulwark against authoritarian abuses of power.
And there are remarkable partnerships that have gone on in Washington where more than 250 legal and policy organizations have been involved in plans to be ready for this moment. So that’s the biggest difference that people have been planning and preparing for this moment. I think my lesson from the experience back in 2017 is that when the political climate changes quickly and we’re suddenly facing real authoritarian threats to core democratic concerns that most of us care about, philanthropy needs to be able to pivot and adjust to the new reality quickly as quickly as our grantees are.
It’s not enough for us to recognize that the climate has changed, and we’re now going to go through this strategy process, and 6 to twelve months from now, we’re going to have a new grantmaker program that will be ready to support our grantees. Our grantees are out there on the front lines, and they need our support now. And philanthropy needs to be ready to pivot with them.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to take a pause and take data in and learn from about how the world has changed around us and have some humility that we don’t have all the answers. Because we clearly, obviously, don’t. But we need to figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time.
We need to be able to learn and develop deeper, thicker analyses about how we contributed to problems and how we need to operate in different ways while supporting grantees that are standing up right now in really difficult circumstances.
STACY: I think that “both and” is super important to realize that both things can be happening and that’s not always philanthropy’s greatest strength, but urging more of that. I’m very glad to hear you say that. I know that this field has grown a lot, but it’s still a relatively small share of all philanthropic giving. Can you give us a sense of that? I know you’ve been studying this— how much money goes into these things, what share is it, and what would you like to see in the next decade?
JOE: The data about philanthropic giving in the democracy space is a bit shaky. Nobody has a definitive take on exactly how much resource there is and how it’s changed year to year. But we did do research on this question last year. Our best understanding is that the field has grown by about 50 percent in the last four to six years, which is great.
There are a tremendous number of donors who have entered this space out of a deep concern and commitment to core democratic values. And they’ve made remarkable contributions. But at the end of the day, we are still less than 1% of overall philanthropic giving. And if you accept the premise that anything that philanthropy cares about is impacted by the degree to which our democracy actually functions, then it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that philanthropy isn’t making a greater commitment to these issues.
Now, we need to figure out how to use the resources that currently are going in to the space more effectively. And that’s something that we can keep on working on. But we need to find ways to bring more donors in space in order to get where we need to go.
‘We Need to Show Courage’
STACY: Aside from competing with all of the many other needs that philanthropists are getting pitched on, especially at this moment, are you concerned that some donors might want to hold back a little bit because they see some of the threats that have come against funders and others that were involved in various efforts that questioned the incoming Trump administration?
JOE: There’s been a lot of conversation about this question in philanthropic circles over the last several months, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot more. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And certainly we’ve heard both from the incoming administration as well as some members of Congress a real interest in clamping down on the robust nature of philanthropy and a robust civil society that can challenge abuses of power that come out of government and other power centers.
What we know from history and from looking at other countries is that the worst thing to do is to back away and to start kind of self-censoring before threats even start coming at you. Because what that does is it creates a doom loop of anticipatorial obedience, in which a few leaders start backing away from core commitments to protect the civil rights of a targeted community or to back away from supporting robust civic engagement in public life because they’re afraid that they’re going to get regulated, they’re going to get scrutinized. And then other donors see that those folks are backing away and that just creates this negative loop.
What we need to do is create the opposite. We need to show courage. We need to show that we’re willing to stand up for our core values and commitments and inspire others to join us and show that when we act together, when there is some level of solidarity among our peers across the donor community but more importantly with our grantees, that’s when we win. That’s when we’re able to push back. If you think back to 2017, there was that airport’s moment, when people saw that refugees were being threatened. And people went out and gathered at the airport in order to put themselves in harm’s way in order to protect others.
And when those moments happen, that creates a sense of both solidarity and courage that enables us to win in another fight and to prevent other abuses. And that’s the kind of dynamic that we need to create on a whole range of fronts. But we need to find a way to act quickly. We need to find a way to act with courage. And we need to find a way to make sure that the short-term choices that we’re making about how to respond to the environment that we’re in are aimed at building power over the long term — durable power that allows us to get off of this hamster wheel that we found ourselves on over the last decade that we desperately need to find a way out of.
STACY: It’s such an important message, and I’m going to just ask you one last question, because I know I’m going to want to have you back. So six months from now, what are going to be looking at that might help guide us? Are there one or two things that you’re especially looking at as we know more?
JOE: It’s a great question. I think there are two things. The first is: I want to understand what courage has looked like and where we’ve been successful in helping to fortify and bolster those who have taken heat in order to stand up for their values. I want to learn from those experiences.
But bigger picture, I want to get out of the conversation about how an election outcome could have been shaped by a couple of percent more or less of this population or that. How the fact that this podcast was featured instead of that podcast and the like. Those are the things that I’m hearing a lot of hot takes about, and they are ignoring the reality. We are all so concerned about the fragility of our democracy right now, and if the only way to defend our democracy is by just barely winning a 50-50 election, by just barely defeating a legislative attempt to quash people’s civil rights, we’re in a really bad shape. And we need to find a way to dramatically expand the coalition of individuals and organizations that are committed to our democracy that allow for robust victory on behalf of a healthier political system and not just kind of getting by, by the skin of our teeth. The conversations I’m interested in having are really digging into, with real humility, like: What are the things that donors are doing that are contributing to the problem? What are the ways that we can find a bigger “we” that can stand on behalf of our democracy. And again, how we can put ourselves on a different path that ensures that the pro-democracy coalition has real durable power to support transformational change.
STACY: This is such a good note to end on. Thank you so much for taking time when it’s super busy, because I know that one of the things you’re doing is moving urgently to get grants not just to your grantees but to encourage others to give. We will come back and try to explore some of those questions. Thank you for all the leadership you’ve given in the field and for your time today.
Joe Goldman, thank you very much for joining The Commons in Conversation.
The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, JPB Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. See more about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
