Hewlett Commits $22 Million a Year to Strengthen Democracy

Last month, Congress did something it had not done in years: It acted swiftly, working across party lines, to pass sweeping legislation of enormous importance.

The $2 trillion stimulus package, enacted in response to the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus, is an example of what Congress was established to do, used to do with some regularity, and should be able to do more often, says Daniel Stid, who leads a grant-making program at the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation that seeks to strengthen democratic institutions, in particular Congress.

Today, Hewlett gave that work a vote of confidence, announcing that what had been an eight-year, time-limited, $150 million effort known as the Madison Initiative will become a long-term program, alongside Hewlett’s programs on education, the environment and global development. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)

“Whether we are working on climate change or global development or education, all of our work presumes that we will have a more or less functional democracy,” Stid says, in an interview with the Chronicle.

Fixing Congress is a centerpiece of the program, Stid says. Congress delivered Social Security in the 1930s, Medicare in the 1960s, environmental and consumer protection laws in the 1970s, tax reform in the 1980s and welfare reform in the 1990s — all with the broad support of Democrats and Republicans — but the legislative body has done nothing of comparable import since then.

With Congress gridlocked, issues like immigration and climate change are left to the White House. “Presidents are running circles around the institution,” says Stid, who has a doctorate in government from Harvard and began his career teaching political science.

Bipartisan Focus

Since the launch of the Madison Initiative in 2012, Hewlett has awarded about $130 million in grants. Three nonprofits in Washington have been the biggest recipients — the Bipartisan Policy Center ($6.1 million), a think tank that attempts to bring people together to attack big problems; the governance and economic studies program at the Brookings Institution ($5.7 million), which provides policy makers of both parties with analysis and expertise; and the Project on Government Oversight ($4.6 million), which, among other things, seeks to bolster Congress’s role as an effective overseer of the federal government.

The program has been decidedly bipartisan, with funding flowing to liberal groups like the Center for American Progress, and conservatives including the Federalist Society. It has backed nonprofits trying to limit the impact of money in politics and raised awareness of ranked-choice voting, which permits voters to rank their candidates in order of preference rather than to choose just one.

A Different Approach

Its Washington-centric grant making contrasts with the approach of some progressive philanthropies like the Ford and Open Society foundations, which have chosen to support grassroots organizations or movement building, designed to get more people involved in politics. (See more about the explosion of interest in democracy grant making in this Chronicle special report.)

Hewlett expects to spend about $22 million annually on the new U.S. democracy program, about what it spent last year on the Madison Initiative. It works in collaboration with others, notably the Democracy Fund, which was started by entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar. Candid, which collects data on grant making, said foundation support for programs to strengthen democracy topped $500 million in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available.

Hewlett has commissioned and published evaluations of its democracy programs. One study found that grantees funded by Hewlett had successfully brought more than 70 percent of congressional offices to bipartisan events, designed to foster relationships across political divides. Another reported that a well-publicized effort to study disinformation on Facebook was wound down because technical and legal complexities hindered access to the data that researchers had hoped to study.