Civic engagement nonprofits say democracy needs support in between big elections. Do funders agree?

NEW YORK– A nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of Southern voters of color had more on its plate this year than just the 2024 presidential election.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice organizes voter registration and oversees election certification. Staff attorneys help run a legal hotline for voting irregularities. Teams challenge electoral maps and restrictive laws deemed unfair. It’s valuable, year-round work that senior adviser Mitchell Brown considers critical to participatory democracy — but it’s also work that gets less attention outside of high-profile campaign cycles.

“A lot of people expend a lot of energy during the presidential year and that tapers off over the next three to four years,” Brown said. “That can’t happen. Because there are a lot of changes in the four years between presidential elections.”

“There are no more free years,” he added.

The coalition benefited this spring from a progressive philanthropic network organized around the belief that democracy is an exercise – not a given – that needs constant support. Led by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, petitioners promised to reverse the existing boom-and-bust dynamics where money floods politically engaged nonprofits until late in election years and then dries up. Starting with the Everything in April campaign to deliver early funds, efforts continue with the Election Day to Everyday campaign to strengthen next year’s funding.

However, according to interviews with other nonprofit leaders in the left-wing social space, the philanthropic sector as a whole has not heeded this call. For nonprofit leaders struggling with budgets as usual, the expected pattern of funding losses raises the stakes that many leaders thought had already been raised by the charged political climate.

Given reported security threats and workforce burnout, Joe Goldman, chairman of the Democracy Fund, said it is especially inefficient to spend millions on training people, developing skills and creating a knowledge base just to cutting and “throwing away” nonprofit budgets. Despite the Democracy Fund saying there was widespread agreement that democracy is under threat, the organization found that many funders had no plans before September to help grantees prepare for the post-election environment.

“We have to show them that we have their backs,” Goldman said.

Grassroots nonprofits – both “501(c)3” groups, named after the section of the tax code under which they were organized, which are completely excluded from partisan politics, and “501(c)4” organizations, which have limited party political activities – believe their bottom-up approach positions them well to engage their communities in local politics.

That could take the form of in-depth research. Unlike political prospects who knock on doors and call numbers to influence votes, deep canvassers have longer conversations with strangers about their concerns and desires. The idea is to make connections that ultimately change hearts and minds on divisive topics. Or it may appear that residents are being mobilized around individual issues in their backyard.

Groups that did such work in 2020 felt exhausted afterward, said Leena Barakat, president of the Women Donors Network, whose group signed the Election Day to Every Day petition. The elections had a high turnout. But money and energy were exhausted, she said, and there was little capacity to sustain political engagement in democratic processes. By the time 2024 rolled around, many civic-minded nonprofits were still catching up on their workforces. Any financial windfall this year would not have been enough to organize effectively in just six months.

“They don’t just show up on election day. They are there to truly understand and meet the needs of their community all year round,” said Leena Barakat, president of the Women Donors Network, whose group signed the Election Day to Every Day petition. “To just fund them around the election is incredibly transactional and less effective in the work we’re trying to do. Change happens at the speed of trust.”

The initiative’s proponents suggest that financial support to create those ties is limited in part because the work remains unseen by the funders. Philanthropists prefer projects that can be measured easily and quickly, noted Katherine Ponce, Senior Research Manager at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. But Ponce said the work of relationship development and building trust is difficult to quantify and happens slowly.

Explicit election work understandably gets a lot of resources during election years, according to Alice Evans of the Southeast Immigrant Rights Network. Focusing on efforts like get-out-the-vote events makes sense, she said, but it also makes it harder for SIRN to support what she called “very democracy-related work.” The nonprofit coalition of more than fifty immigrant- and refugee-led groups provides leadership training for the heads of immigration-focused organizations and Know Your Rights toolkits for their communities.

Evans, who oversees fundraising, said she is bracing for organizing conditions that will become “more hostile” under the new Trump administration; SIRN is preparing a “rapid response fund” ahead of the immigration crackdown.

“For a democracy to function and be healthy, we need people to understand their rights,” Evans said. “Understanding and including their role in co-creating democracy. And instead, I think nowadays it often feels like we often understand democracy as this transactional thing that we kind of receive.

DoSomething is a nonprofit organization that encourages youth participation by providing opportunities to volunteer and organize. But DoSomething CEO DeNora Getachew said backers told her that youth is not a strategic investment, despite 41 million Gen Z members being eligible to vote this year.

Money flowed through the philanthropic sector in the first half of the year, said DoSomething Vice President of Development Katie Tynes, but the overall scope appeared to narrow in the second half. Tynes said she also saw funding shift from 501(c)3s to 501(c)4s. While there is room for both types of tax-exempt organizations, she said, it was troubling because the former tend to do more people-oriented work on the ground, while the latter have more political agendas.

Anecdotally speaking, Getachew said she saw a decline this year in funding for nonprofits like hers that focus on evergreen community engagement.

“This very cyclical, very transactional rush to register young people to vote, get them to vote, and then bid them farewell in the intervening years – if we don’t develop young people’s civic sense early and then If they exercise that muscle consistently, I think we will have a major challenge with the long-term viability of our democracy,” she said.

Still, the ‘All by April’ campaign claimed some success. The Democracy Fund reported generating $79 million in new 501(c)3 grants for election-related work and disbursing $61 million in funds ahead of schedule. Brown said the Southern Coalition for Social Justice was able to hire three new attorneys thanks to the influx of donations, fueled by the spring push to provide funding earlier in the election cycle.

But two of them are fellows, he said, and SCSJ has an extensive list of redistricting cases to maintain.

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