A small portion of the billions spent surrounding the November elections will go to nonprofits working to increase voter participation and voting access across the country. And typically, those funds arrive in counties and cities just before Election Day.
This year, a coalition of funders tried to change that dynamic to give organizations knocking on doors, running Election Day hotlines or challenging voting restrictions in court some time to plan and hire staff several months in advance. The non-profit Democracy Fund, created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, launched the All by April campaign earlier this year. And as the month ends on Tuesday, about 170 foundations, consultants and individual donors have signed on to the agreement.
“We wanted to change the culture of philanthropy,” said Joe Goldman, president of the Democracy Fund. “Creating a kind of underlying assumption that being an effective and responsible philanthropist means not waiting to give during an election year.”
The campaign asked funders to make every effort to award grants by the end of April or to take other measures, such as bringing forward disbursement dates and providing general support to grantees, rather than funding a specific project or set of activities.
“We know that our own grantmaking timelines and practices are at the heart of the challenge. So this year, we’re doing something about it. We commit to making commitments sooner and moving funds sooner,” the commitment letter says.
The nonprofit Tides Foundation — which funds organizations like Florida Rising, a member-supported nonprofit that seeks to build political power in historically marginalized communities — signed the pledge. Florida Rising addresses local issues, such as campaigning to extend the time a person facing eviction has to find new housing, said Andrea Cristina Mercado, its executive director.
“One of the big challenges we’ve had here in Florida and that other states face is boom-and-bust financing, where people invest in these sandcastles that are built specifically around an election,” and then they get washed away immediately. after the election. the polls are closed, Mercado said.
She said philanthropic funders have reduced support in the third-largest state as they view Florida’s policies and politicians as less competitive in national or statewide races.
“As Florida fell off the battlefield map, it put at risk the infrastructure we all worked hard to build,” Mercado said.
Tides, which is a public charity, has created a fund to consistently support grassroots organizations trying to increase voter turnout, countering the deluge of funding in election years and the drought in others. They recently received a $10 million donation from MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and author, for their Healthcare Democracy Fund. They will retain at least some of those dollars to distribute after this year’s elections, said Peter Martin, director Tides executive.
Tides also has a big appetite for allocating funding to nonprofits that can do more direct policy work, including around ballot measures, for example. This includes 501(c)(4) organizations, which are organized under a section of the tax code so they can lobby for specific legislation but still accept charitable dollars.
“We embrace complexity and really try to think about how our c3 money can have the biggest impact in a fully permissioned way,” Martin said. In general, tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, sometimes referred to as 501(c)(3) organizations in reference to their status in the tax code, cannot support the specific political campaigns of any party or candidate.
Tides’ work will focus on more than a dozen states that the foundation says have growing populations of young people and people of color who face barriers to voting — including Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Goldman, of the Democracy Fund, said he hopes this year’s campaign will help encourage funders to support these community groups more consistently after the election as well.
“We are here to serve these nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that are doing heroic work, and we need to be there for them when they need support. That’s why we exist,” Goldman said of philanthropic funders.
In 2020, the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center reached a similar conclusion. As it developed its contentious work around democracy and voting access, Margaret Huang, its president and CEO, said she noticed that community organizations were working to build political constituencies around these very issues.
“It’s not just a legal fight, but actually a political fight where communities are involved and have a say in what’s really important to them,” she said.
The SPLC board decided to commit $100 million over ten years to building the capacity of these organizations in Southern states. It was uncomfortable for his organization, Huang said, in part because they had never been a funder themselves and their size and relative budget could create a power imbalance between them and their beneficiaries.
They partnered with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to administer the grants and say their partner organizations have already made more than 100 million attempts to contact voters through a range of strategies over the phone, in person and online.
“A relatively modest investment in community organizations across the South is showing that there may be a different way forward,” Huang said. “And we hope this type of work can demonstrate to others who care about democracy and civic participation that investing in the South is worth it and is paying off.”
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