A small portion of the billions spent around the November election will go to nonprofits working to increase voter participation and access to voting across the country. And usually, those funds flow into counties and cities right before Election Day.
This year, a coalition of funders tried to change that dynamic by giving organizations that knock on doors, run election hotlines or challenge voting restrictions in court some time to plan and hire several months in advance. The nonprofit Democracy Fund, founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, launched the All by April campaign earlier this year. And by the end of the month on Tuesday, about 170 foundations, advisors and individual donors had registered.
“We wanted to change the culture of philanthropy,” said Joe Goldman, president of the Democracy Fund. “To create some kind of underlying assumption that being an effective and responsible philanthropist means not waiting to make grants in an election year.”
The campaign asked funders to make every effort to award the grants by the end of April or to take other steps, such as moving up disbursement dates and providing blanket support to beneficiaries in lieu of funding for a specific project or set of activities.
“We know that our own timelines and grantmaking practices are at the heart of the challenge. That’s why we’re doing something about it this year. We promise that we will make commitments sooner and transfer money sooner,” the commitment letter said.
The nonprofit Tides Foundation — which funds organizations like Florida Rising, a member-supported nonprofit that aims to build political power in historically marginalized communities — signed the pledge. Florida Rising is tackling local issues, such as campaigning to extend the time it takes for a person facing eviction to find new housing, said Andrea Cristina Mercado, executive director.
“One of the big challenges that we’ve had here in Florida and that other states are experiencing as well is boom-and-bust financing, where people invest in these sandcastles that are built specifically around an election,” and then immediately are washed away after the elections. The polls are closed, Mercado said.
She said philanthropic backers have withdrawn support in the third-largest state because they believe Florida’s policies and politicians are less competitive in national or statewide races.
“With Florida gone from the map, the infrastructure we have all worked very hard to build is at risk,” Mercado said.
Tides, a public charity, has created a fund to consistently support grassroots organizations trying to increase voter participation, combating the flood of funding in election years and the drought in other years. They recently received a $10 million gift from MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and author, to the Health Democracy Fund. They will hold back at least some of those dollars to distribute after this year’s election, said Peter Martin, executive director of Tides.
Tides also has a strong need to allocate funding to nonprofits that can do more direct political work, such as around voting measures. That 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 the complexity and we really try to think about how our C3 money can have the biggest impact in a way that is fully allowable,” Martin said. In general, tax-exempt nonprofits, also referred to as 501(c)(3) organizations in reference to their tax code status, cannot support the specific political campaigns of any party or candidate.
Tides’ work will focus in 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.
The Democracy Fund’s Goldman said he hopes this year’s campaign will prompt funders to support these community groups more consistently after the election.
“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 the Southern Poverty Law Center came to a similar conclusion. As the country expanded its lawsuits around democracy and voting rights, Margaret Huang, president and CEO, said they realized community organizations were working to build political constituencies around those same issues.
“It’s not just a legal battle, but it’s actually a political battle involving communities and weighing in on what’s really important to them,” she said.
The SPLC board decided to allocate $100 million over ten years to build the capacity of these organizations in the southern states. It was uncomfortable for her organization, Huang said, in part because they had never been funders themselves and their relative size and budget could create a power imbalance between them and their grantees.
They worked with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to administer the grants and say their partner organizations have now 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 shows that there can be another path forward,” Huang said. “And it is our hope that this kind of work can show others who care about democracy and who care about citizen participation that investing in the South is worth it and that it will pay off.”
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