The Foundation Leaders

At a June event hosted by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the grant maker’s president started by leading the crowd with a chant in support of the Los Angeles residents protesting federal immigration raids and the military presence in their streets: “We’ve got your back!” yelled Carmen Rojas.

The chant was borrowed from Kansas City Tenants, one of the Casey Foundation’s grantees, which had just orchestrated a successful rent strike.

Rojas’s solidarity message has been reverberating among leaders of large foundations, who view threats from the Trump administration to investigate their diversity practices, tax their endowments, and defund their grantees as an assault on philanthropic freedom.

Many have increased their grant-making budgets in response. In April, Marguerite Casey said it would nearly triple its grant budget to $130 million this year. The MacArthur Foundation has increased grant making from 5 percent to 6 percent of assets. The McKnight Foundation anticipates keeping its payout north of 6 percent for the remainder of the decade. Both the California Endowment and the Freedom Together Foundation have doubled their payout to 10 percent, putting hundreds of millions more dollars in the hands of their grantees over the next several years. And in the face of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Robert Wood Johnson increased its investment in a diverse health-care work force by 60 percent.

Tonya Allen, McKnight’s president, along with the MacArthur’s John Palfrey and Freedom Together’s Deepak Bhargava, decided that additional funds weren’t enough. Seeing leaders in media, higher education, business, and law buckle under demands from the Trump administration, the three foundation presidents decided a message — similar to Rojas’s “We’ve got your back” — was needed. Their April statement, which nearly 700 foundation leaders had signed as of mid-June, reads like Article 5 of the NATO charter, which declares that an attack on a single member of the alliance would be defended by the group’s entire membership.

The statement reads in part: “As charitable giving institutions, we are united behind our First Amendment right to give as an expression of our own distinct values.”

If philanthropy failed to take a stand and defend charitable practices as a group, foundation leaders would be “contributing to the erosion and backsliding of our democracy,” Allen says, adding, “People shouldn’t be afraid, and they shouldn’t be alone trying to wrestle with these issues. If we are attacked, we are supported and backed by our colleagues.”

The chorus is missing, perhaps, one voice. For more than a decade, the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker has been seen by many as the most prominent foundation leader in the country, often serving as progressive philanthropy’s public face.

The Ford Foundation has signed the statement, but Walker, who has announced plans to step down from Ford by the end of the year, has not taken his usual prominent spot in defense of nonprofits. But he’s confident that philanthropy isn’t suffering from a leadership void.

“I’ve never been more excited about the next generation of leadership in philanthropy,” Walker says. “We have a remarkable group of leaders emerging who are prepared for the headwinds we’re currently facing.”

Allen is also confident foundation leaders are up to the task.

“Philanthropy,” she says, “is ‘leaderful.’”