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For the better part of a decade — and in some cases, even longer — philanthropy has worked to strengthen democracy. And bring Americans together across divides. And cure the country’s loneliness epidemic, build civic health, and help marginalized communities find their place in the economic and social fabric.
The result is a profusion of groups and programs whose names can blend together. There’s Hidden Common Ground, Common Ground USA, and the Common Ground Committee.
The more than 500 efforts to close divides include BridgeUSA, the Bridging Movement Alignment Council, and the Bridging Divides Initiative.
The nation’s governors, meanwhile, are sponsors of the Disagree Better program, not to be confused with the Better Arguments Project.
What’s been missing is analysis of this movement overall — its funding, its key players, its challenges and opportunities. Groups are pursuing everything from election reform in Washington to community building in small-town Mississippi, and there’s little to connect what can seem like diffuse and disjointed strands.
“It’s very hard to understand what’s happening in this field,” says Mike Berkowitz, who leads the Democracy Funders Network, a group of more than 350 donors.
That could be changing, however, with several new efforts that analyze the work of philanthropy and nonprofits nationally as well as parts of the country where work and investment are needed.
Here’s who’s behind these efforts and what they aim to do.
Tracking the Money
The Democracy Funders Network recently introduced a new data platform with a first-of-its-kind accounting of the funders and nonprofits focused on election reform, bridge-building, fostering belonging, and other work toward a healthy democracy. Democracy Hub features data on more than 4,000 nonprofits and some 25,000 funders. It was built with Impala, a tech and data company for grant makers, nonprofits, and others in the social-impact world.
“We want to show people how to think about the sector and how to navigate it in a smart and intelligent way,” says Shahar Brukner, Impala co-founder and CEO.
Candid retired its public database analyzing institutional funding aimed at strengthening democracy earlier this year. The network’s effort is much more robust, drawing on the IRS data for both grant makers and nonprofits to include data from donor-advised funds and individual donors. It’s also more fine-grained, offering users the ability to sort both the top funders and biggest nonprofits in each of nine types of work.
The site makes it easy to analyze the revenue and assets of charities on the receiving end. “If we want donors to understand what is happening in the field, the most important thing is for us to understand what’s happening” among the groups doing the work, Berkowitz says.
The database also serves a match-making role to help an exploding number of practitioners and funders find each other, says Kristin Hansen, executive director of the Civic Health Project, who advised on the project. “The majority of people doing democracy work have just come into it in the last several years. A new grassroots democracy practitioner typically knows nothing about philanthropy, knows no one in philanthropy, and doesn’t even know what the different categories of philanthropy are.”
One downside: Donations from DAFs are listed in aggregate, which means individual funders are obscured.
Some tidbits from the data:
- Foundations, fiscal sponsors, donor-advised funds, and other grant makers spent $9.7 billion on democracy efforts in 2022, nearly twice the total from 2018.
- The Ford Foundation is the largest funder, having made grants totaling $1.2 billion from 2018 to 2022.
- The average grant size over the five years was $133,000. The median size was $15,000.
Connecting the Dots of Activity
The National Civic League debuts this week its America’s Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Project, which aims to map groups across the country that promote democracy and democratic practices. Its database includes election and advocacy organizations but also neighborhood civic centers, local news outlets, national service organizations, think tanks, and more.
“We’ve got all different sorts of people in all sorts of places — rural, urban, from the left, from the right — doing things that are about strengthening democracy,” says Matt Leighninger, director of the organization’s Center for Democracy Innovation. “They may not even use the word ‘democracy.’”
“Our goal is to make visible all the organizations doing the different kinds of democracy work so they can amplify each other’s work, collaborate more, and potentially merge in some instances,” says Carolyn Lukensmeyer, co-leader of the league’s Healthy Democracy Project and a former CEO of the National Institute for Civil Discourse.
Local groups sometimes don’t know organizations doing complementary work just across the city, Lukensmeyer adds. A local organization fighting gerrymandering of political districts may never even hear of a group focused on closing political divides. “Just linking those different categories of democracy work in the same community can in fact lead to stronger impact.”
Connecting the dots also will help grant makers — particularly place-based donors — see opportunities, Lukensmeyer says. “It is definitely one of the goals to actually increase funding to the field at large.”
The project launches with data from just a few states but plans to add 10 states every two weeks.
What Communities Need Help?
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute noted that the study of weakening civic life typically focuses on how to motivate individual Americans to engage in their communities and politics. The scholars chose instead to look at the supply side of the equation: How plentiful are the opportunities for people to engage in civic life?
The result, launched last year, is a map of civic opportunity to help funders identify where to invest to revive democracy at the grassroots level. The tool is not open to the public, but grant makers tapping it include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Trust for Civic Life, a new funder collaborative focused on rural America.
The country’s divides are reflected in the research. White, wealthy communities typically have more chance to engage than communities of color or poorer areas.
Rural areas tend to lag their urban counterparts. The disparity “is a lot greater than we expected,” says institute scholar Milan de Vries. “It’s pretty stark.”
Agora assembled the map through a big-data analysis of IRS data on nonprofits and the digital footprint of groups. The biggest providers of civic opportunity, it found, are religious organizations and social-fraternal organizations such as Rotary and ethnic clubs. But the mix includes increasing numbers of arts organizations, youth groups, and hobby programs like running groups. “The nature of civic life is shifting,” de Vries says.
‘A 360-Degree View’
The Council on Foundations committed in its strategic plan three years ago to help members find common ground from which they can build broader, more diverse coalitions. In April, it focused its four-day conference on addressing toxic polarization and solutions — the first time it devoted its annual meeting to a single topic.
Now it has released the first of three reports exploring the range and funding of such work, based on a survey of 133 foundations and interviews with 43 philanthropy and nonprofit leaders. It examines grant making, approaches to navigating divides, and the opportunities and challenges of the work.
The scan of work in the field pointed to projects to advance pluralism, counter extremism and authoritarianism, build social cohesion, and more. “There is real value in the 360-degree view this report provides,” said Uma Viswanathan, executive director of New Pluralists, a pooled funder group that partnered with the council on the report. “Funders doing this work are not alone, and now they have strong data to back up their investments.
The report also aimed to establish a shared set of definitions of key terms. “There’s a lot of terminology getting thrown around and most of the time, it creates confusion,” says Kristen Scott Kennedy, the report’s author and chief of staff at the council. “Words like ‘social cohesion’ and ‘pluralism’ and ‘bridging’ all have distinct definitions and distinct meanings. And sometimes we’re using them synonymously.”
Some takeaways:
- Eighty-five percent of survey respondents reported funding projects to connect Americans across differences in the past 10 years. Nearly 62 supported six or more efforts.
- The South and small, rural communities saw the least investment. Significantly more funding was directed to national groups and efforts.
- The median project timeline was two years, though some were funded for more than a decade.
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