Grant makers and others step up registration efforts
With memories of the razor-thin 2000 presidential election still fresh in their minds, many grant makers
and other donors are supporting efforts to bring more Americans to the polls in November — and to re-energize civic participation in the nation’s democratic processes.
A new wave of philanthropic players are supporting and organizing voter-related projects. Many say they were motivated to take action after only 51 percent of the electorate voted in 2000 and young Americans and the poor voted at even lower rates, although many voter-registration campaigns had focused on getting such people to the polls.
The activities reflect a marked shift from the mid-1990s, when many foundations lost interest in voter-mobilization drives, after 1993 federal legislation known as “motor voter” made it easier to register to vote at vehicle-registration offices and other government agencies.
“This time, there are easily 10 times the number of groups doing the work related to mobilizing voters than there were in 2000,” says Mark Ritchie, national coordinator for National Voice, a coalition of roughly 1,000 environmental, religious, peace, and other activist groups that promote voting.
Some of the participants in National Voice had never mobilized to register voters, but are doing so now because they realized that their own supporters have been among those not going to the polls. More than a dozen foundations and individual donors have pledged roughly $28-million to finance nonpartisan, election-related activities conducted by organizations in the National Voice coalition.
Not Always Nonpartisan
The increase in philanthropic money and activities, however, has touched off concerns about how to keep voter-mobilization efforts from running afoul of federal law. While the law requires all election-related efforts by charities to be nonpartisan, some officials at voter-registration organizations say a small proportion of the available grants seems to come with a political agenda.
Conservative foundations do not appear to be as active in voter-registration campaigns this year, although a number of church-related organizations have undertaken their own projects. For example, Priests for Life, the Christian Coalition, and the National Pro-Life Religious Council named three days — May 2, July 4, and September 5 — as “National Christian Voter-Registration Sundays.”
As more money and more groups are devoted to voter mobilization, donors and charities are focusing on measurable results, something that has received little more than lip service in past election years.
New research has documented the costs and related benefits of different approaches to help organizations spend their money more efficiently. Donors are also requiring organizations to set measurable goals for what they hope to accomplish.
Pew Charitable Trusts, for example, has given nearly $9-million to the New Voters Project, which has set an ambitious goal of registering more than 265,000 young people in six states — Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin — and raising turnout in that age group by at least 5 percentage points this fall.
“It’s the largest grass-roots effort ever targeted at young voters,” says Tobi Walker, a Pew program officer. In addition to work on college campuses, two-thirds of the New Voters Project is aimed at people who are not in college, with the help of organizations like Rock the Vote and World Wrestling Entertainment, and will involve voter-registration drives in grocery stores, laundromats, movie theaters, bars, and shopping malls.
The New Voters Project is drawing from lessons in 2002, when it ran into problems evaluating its much-narrower goal of raising voter turnout in a dozen cities. Partway into the previous effort, the organization realized that public records at the city level were not complete enough to provide a good comparison of voter turnout in 2002 with 1998, the prior “off-year” election. This time, by switching to statewide goals, the project will be able to use Census Bureau data to make comparisons between the November elections and the last presidential election, in 2000.
Recruiting the Homeless
Many grass-roots organizations, including antipoverty groups and churches, say they are more politically active than they have ever been, in part to give greater voice to the people they work with or issues they support.
In New York, the Partnership for the Homeless is registering voters for the first time this year, and has already signed up 1,300 voters in a campaign focused on drop-in centers, shelters, and soup kitchens. Its goal is to register 5,000 people before the November election.
Says Arnold S. Cohen, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership for the Homeless: “As important as all of our work is, it’s the education, especially with homeless people who are so disenfranchised, that really makes a difference. They need to realize how important it is to have a voice and to be heard.”
Charities have noticed a significant increase in money available for voter-registration efforts. Jerry Jones, director of a voting project for the Center for Community Change, in Washington, says fund raising is proving far easier during this cycle than in 2000, when he headed Project Vote, one of the country’s largest voter-registration organizations.
Mr. Jones’s Community Voting Project has already raised $1.6-million to help community-based groups around the country register the poor and homeless, nearly enough to cover its $2-million budget. It has received six-figure grants from the Open Society Institute, the Arca Foundation, Working Assets, and America’s Families United.
“Foundations are realizing that civic engagement and the participation of disadvantaged people in elections is an important area for them to support, and that every vote does in fact make a big difference,” says Mr. Jones.
First-Time Givers
Among the grant makers supporting voter-registration and civic-engagement efforts for the first time is the HKH Foundation, in New York. Previously the fund limited its grant making to three areas: protecting the environment, defending civil liberties, and stemming the arms race.
But last year, the foundation’s trustees “concluded that the decline in civic participation, not just at the polls but across the whole spectrum of civic engagement, was entirely disadvantageous to advancing the issues the foundation exists to work on,” says Harriet Barlow, who advises the foundation. “Over the long term, the more people are paying attention to the issues, the better the chance our foundation will have to make progress on the issues we’re concerned about, like global warming or nuclear weapons.”
The HKH Foundation has given $1.75-million over the past two years for voter-registration, civic-engagement, and related civil-liberties projects, including $240,000 to National Voice.
A Rallying Cry
National Voice is building a publicity campaign to call attention to November 2 — this year’s Election Day and a date that has become a rallying cry for many groups around the country. By using billboards, T-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, and other items branded with that date, as well as a bus tour, art-gallery shows, and a wide range of other communications tactics, the coalition hopes to focus attention on the importance of voting among the people it is trying to reach.
Mr. Ritchie, who temporarily stepped down from his job directing the nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy to run National Voice, says the coalition has identified more than 1,000 projects around the country in which local groups are seeking to mobilize young people, women, and members of various racial and ethnic minority groups to be more active politically. About 100 of the projects are posted on the coalition’s Web site (http://www.nationalvoice.org) where grant makers can review them.
The NAACP’s National Voter Fund, for example, is focusing on seven to nine states in this election, under the banner “Empowerment 2004.” The fund will provide grants to state and local affiliates, with a goal of registering and getting to the polls some 250,000 new voters. The NAACP’s work is part of a broader effort with six other organizations to spend about $26-million, or $6.50 per household, on a combination of door-to-door and phone contacts, leafleting, and other measures to increase voter participation.
Another voter-registration campaign, Declare Yourself, is using in-your-face ads to try to reach 18- to 29-year-olds, a generation that has been subjected to a relentless barrage of marketing since childhood. The campaign, primarily paid for by Norman Lear, the television producer, began last week with the unveiling of billboards featuring the singers Christina Aguilera and Andre 3000 with their mouths forced shut, next to the slogan, “Only You Can Silence Yourself.” Additional ads will run on radio and television, especially MTV.
“You can’t preach to this generation,” says Howard Benenson, chief executive at Benenson Janson, the Studio City, Calif., advertising agency handling the campaign. “All the research says that if you preach to them, it won’t happen. It’s just about telling the truth, and giving them the power to make their own choice. If they choose to be silent, they can do that. If they choose to have a voice, they can do that.”
From National to Local
Other projects, however, are very narrow in scope. A Brooklyn, N.Y., performance ensemble group called Urban Bush Women, for example, is creating a performance piece titled “Are We Democracy?” that examines voter-education and registration efforts in the context of the civil-rights movement.
Many groups, including the New Voters Project and Rock the Vote, are trying to mobilize young voters via their cellphones, which are used by an estimated 70 percent of the college-age population. Rock the Vote has a mobile portal (http://www.rtvmo.com) that allows people to get news about candidates and issues, vote in polls, and even register to vote over their mobile phones.
Using public records in six states, coupled with the cellphone numbers for newly registered voters, the New Voters Project plans Election Day reminders for young potential voters.
“On Election Day, the script will be, ‘It’s 4 p.m. and you haven’t voted — come on down, you still have three hours left,’” says Ivan Frishberg, outreach and communications coordinator for the New Voters Project.
Concerns About Politics
While nonprofit groups say their voter-registration efforts are all intended to be nonpartisan, some political observers worry that the flow of philanthropic dollars may be financing some partisan activities.
Organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State have complained to the Internal Revenue Service about churches in particular, both liberal and conservative, that it says have strayed into prohibited election efforts, such as endorsing or opposing a candidate during a sermon.
The Bush campaign has also come under recent criticism for its efforts to encourage church volunteers to run voter-registration and voter-education drives.
The desire to steer clear of such criticisms prompted Real Change, a nonprofit “street newspaper” sold by the poor and homeless in Seattle, to decline to pursue possible financing from a few individuals for its work on the Get Out the Vote Coalition, which sends volunteers to shelters and food banks in Seattle to help the homeless and poor register to vote.
Rachael Myers, associate director of Real Change, says the few times the coalition was approached with possible grants, “it didn’t feel very nonpartisan.” She adds: “We lean far to the left, so we have to make extra sure that our voter efforts are not just the letter of the nonpartisan law — that it’s actually the real thing.”
New Networks
That concern notwithstanding, foundations are becoming increasingly organized in their support for groups that want to get voters to the polls.
Grant makers just nine months ago formed the Voter Engagement Donor Network to coordinate their efforts, and already membership has reached 160 foundations and individual donors. The group has occasional forums and monthly conference calls during which grant makers try to line up additional grants for the nonpartisan voter-mobilization organizations that are doing the best work.
Michael Caudell-Feagan, a program director at the Proteus Fund, which houses the network, says that while it is proving helpful now, much of its value will be seen after November 2.
“The real analysis will occur after the election cycle, when we look at what happened with the funding that came in this cycle, and what can be preserved,” he says.
Beyond This Election
But grant makers have already started to talk about how best to ensure that the renewed interest in civic engagement doesn’t fade after the election is over.
Geri Mannion, who runs the Strengthening U.S. Democracy program at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, says of the broader area of civic engagement, “Even if only 25 percent of the new funders continue, that will be a major increase in funding in this area.”
Carnegie’s $11.5-million program supports a range of organizations that seek to make it easier for immigrants and young people, in particular, to vote and otherwise engage in civic life through grants to projects focused on topics as varied as the campaign-finance system, the enfranchisement of former felons, and efforts to register immigrants who have gained their citizenship.
Many broad civic-engagement efforts are aimed at those who aren’t yet old enough to vote. Programs at elementary and secondary schools may be needed more than ever now that budget cuts and standardized exams have squeezed civics classes out of many public-school curricula, notes Ms. Mannion.
“For 30 years people have been running against government,” she observes. “If you don’t have any civics classes, then you don’t hear about all the services government provides. That increases people’s inclination not to participate in elections.”
Concern over the decline in civics education also prompted the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to renew its financial commitment to Kids Voting USA, which encourages civic participation and allows students to vote alongside their parents at the polls (for a special Kids Voting tabulation). Kids Voting has expanded rapidly in recent years, and now reaches 9,000 schools in 38 states. Just over half of the $2-million Knight has committed over the next three years will go to a venture-philanthropy fund, New Profit Inc., to help Kids Voting with strategic planning, evaluation of programs, and new products, including a Web site that allows online voting for students.
Whatever the outcome of November’s election, some of the new collaborative efforts will continue to pay dividends far into the future, their supporters believe.
“The peace movement and the environmental movement have been in silos, isolated from each other and the general public,” says Ms. Barlow of the HKH Foundation. “Now, people are coming out of their silos and talking about the common good and their general philosophy of governance, rather than just about greenhouse gases.”
From now on, Ms. Barlow adds, “there’s going to be a new musculature for working across issues around civic engagement.”
