Hi everyone, this week is my birthday, when I’m officially a year older. But joke’s on the universe, since I’ve always looked ten years older than my biological age! If you’d like to help me celebrate, please donate $44 (or whatever you can afford) to nonprofits serving transgender people and advancing trans rights, such as the Trans Continental Pipe and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.
Also, at the advice of our colleague Thaddeus Squire in his article “Four Ways the Nonprofit Sector Can Tell the Trump Administration to F**k Off,” I’m forming a religion, Vuism, to fight injustice, since religious organizations have almost zero oversight in this country and can take tax-deductible donations. Part of Vuism is the observance of Vumas on March 12, which requires all nonprofit professionals take the day off, eat hummus, and use the Oxford Comma to send one another good wishes.
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Over the past few days, you may have noticed the uptick in conversations regarding foundations’ increasing their payout rate during this sharknado shitstorm of fascism, cruelty, and ignorance (Marked by things like people protesting and destroying posters at a neuroscience conference in Orlando because scientists were talking about “diversity of efferent firing in the cochlea” and these MAGAts’ hate-infused brains thought it was about DEI and started foaming at the mouth).
I am glad the conversation is happening. According to research, US foundations’ cumulative assets have grown 15 times over the past 35 years, including an astounding 46% during the pandemic. There’s now 1.53Trillion US dollars hoarded by private foundations, and it’s still growing (unless the market crashes or something). If foundations increase their payout on average from 5% to 6%, experts estimate it would free up an additional 15 to 20 billion dollars each year. Think of the good that would do when the federal government and oligarchs continue to attack marginalized communities, revoke civil liberties, and work to dismantle nonprofits.
However, I’m afraid left-leaning funders (and many influential nonprofit leaders) still do not have an accurate analysis of what happened that got us to this horrible point in history and what’s needed to set things right. Over the past several decades, conservative forces, backed by right-wing funders, had a clear, long-term strategy to shift society to align with conservative values. I like to cite Sally Covington’s report, commissioned by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.”
The whole 58-page report is illuminating, but here’s a quote that summarizes how conservatives have been so successful:
“Proclaiming their movement to be a war of ideas, conservatives began to mobilize resources for battle in the 1960s. They built new institutional bastions; recruited, trained and equipped their intellectual warriors; forged new weapons as cable television, the Internet, and other communications technologies evolved; and threw their full resources into policy and political battles.”
While all their strategies have been extremely effective, the one where they “threw their full resources into policy and political battles” is what left-leaning funders have failed spectacularly to counter. Or even consider countering. While left-leaning funders mostly avoided funding politics (or, really, anything remotely even seeming political, such as advocacy), viewing it as beneath them, conservative funders went full-steam into supporting right-wing candidates and judges at all levels, backing gerrymandering, funding efforts to pass voter suppression laws, setting up political think tanks, and doing other things many in left-leaning philanthropy would consider “distasteful.”
An example of how astoundingly effective conservative funders have been in the political arena is the Federalist Society, a powerful organization that has worked for several decades to shape the judiciary system. It’s funded by conservative foundations like the Charles Koch Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundation, and Mercer Family Foundation, along with dark money groups like DonorsTrust. Its key leader is Leonard Leo. According to this article, Leo and his organization “helped [Trump] appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.” (The Federalist Society was also instrumental in the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito).
The Covington Report was published nearly 30 years ago, and the Federal Society was founded in 1982. Since then, conservative funders and donors, seeing how effective their strategies have been, doubled down on them. Three years ago, as the article above mentioned, billionaire Barre Seid donated $1.6 billion dollars—the largest donation to a political group in US history—to a new organization run by Leonard Leo, to continue shaping the judiciary until it’s entirely right-wing. This $1.6B, focused on seating conservative judges, will have ripple effects that will cost our sector multiple times more to address.
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Read full article here.
