Social Justice Nonprofits Rethink Media Strategy During Trump 2.0

Common Future, a nonprofit that steers funds to underserved communities and works to close the racial wealth gap, had for years leaned on its “brand and storytelling” staff to help it land features in big media outlets including the Atlantic, MSNBC, and the Washington Post. 

Now, as the Trump administration threatens to revoke tax-exempt status from nonprofits that support racial justice efforts, Common Future is more wary about spreading the word.

“We no longer do PR,” said Jessica Yupanqui Feingold, one of the organization’s three co-CEOs. “We’re not staffing for it, we’re not seeking it, we are not engaging firms for it. We move differently in this environment.”

Common Future will still answer calls from journalists. But before doing so, the nonprofit’s three CEOs discuss whether a chat with a reporter will truly advance their cause or simply make it a ripe target for litigation and investigation.

“The press didn’t build our power,” Feingold said. “We are not doing PR because the risk/reward is no longer in our favor.”

The risk comes as a result of an uninterrupted stream of attacks from the Trump White House on race-based grant making, programs tailored to support LGBTQ people, and efforts to support immigrants. Through a series of executive orders, the White House has deemed such activity verboten. It has used a variety of strategies to enforce its orders, including pulling federal grants and threats to revoke tax-exempt status or file lawsuits.

Those threats have placed progressive grant makers and the nonprofits they support in a bind. Shaping public viewpoints on social issues by using the power of narrative is a pillar of social justice strategy. Those stories can be brimming with possibility, detailing the achievements of neighborhood groups or individuals, or they can shed light on systemic failures.

Evaluating Risk

For many nonprofits, what was once an important tool that presented only benefits is now rife with risks and potentially little upside. Even if racial justice leaders want to shout to the rafters that their work is specifically focused on helping Black people, and vital in the current moment, many of their peers may not be as willing to make such proclamations as publicly, said Susan Taylor Batten, president of ABFE, a network of Black foundation leaders.

“Black nonprofits that are explicit about their work are in an unfortunate predicament given the continued pressure to rewrite ourselves out of our own story,” Taylor Batten said.

Taylor Batten has seen that pressure in her own work. Over the past year, ABFE has lost funding from five grant makers, something she attributes to the group’s focus on race. ABFE’s support of the Racial Equity Advancement and Defense Initiative has been especially worrisome to some grant makers, particularly corporate foundations. The effort, coordinated with other philanthropy affinity groups representing Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, aims to fund and coordinate legal representation for nonprofits that are targeted because of their work.

Despite the risk of increased exposure, Taylor Batten said it is her job to promote the effort more widely. But she said she’d heard from Black-led nonprofits and grant makers that are being more selective in sharing information with the media.

Taylor Batten and other nonprofit leaders say the instinct to shy away from attention is understandable given the potential harm that it can bring. But progressive nonprofits are “seriously compromised when we just start defaulting to not disclosing information,” said Lori Villarosa, executive director of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.

Last fall Villarosa prepared to release findings from a review of racial justice grant making that found that the share of philanthropy steered to communities of color shrank from 2019 to 2023. As the publication date neared, she and her staff wrestled with whether to name the grant makers and nonprofits that were most active in the field.

It was important to Villarosa and her staff that the report get widely released and read. It wouldn’t be “earth-shattering news” that some nonprofits, like the Equal Justice Initiative, a prominent civil rights organization, were included, Villarosa said. But mentioning some smaller, under-the-radar nonprofits might invite unwanted scrutiny. Before publishing, Villarosa and her staff mulled over what purpose naming individual groups served and whether there were other ways to convey the information.

In the end, she decided that instead of naming individual recipients of philanthropy, she would detail grants to racial justice groups and to groups working in communities of color by category, including HCBUs, scholarship funds, and civil rights advocacy groups.

Foundations, she decided, could handle the exposure. “Unlike some grantees, these funders are either already equipped to manage right-wing pressure or are already facing it,” the group wrote in the report.

Ditching Media Operations Entirely

Nonprofits on the ideological left may have ditched their media operations because they distrust many national, corporate-owned news outlets, said Shanelle Matthews, a distinguished lecturer in anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at the City College of New York.

Tabia Lisenbee-Parker

But it would be a mistake to turtle up altogether, said Matthews, who founded the Radical Communications Network, a group of about 5,000 social justice communicators, a decade ago and was formerly the director of communications for the Movement for Black Lives.

Nonprofits that work to advance racial justice, protect immigrants, support LGBTQ people, or engage in any other effort targeted by Trump’s executive orders need to line up their public-facing responses to their individual set of principles and values, she said. But they still need to constantly monitor how messages are ricocheting across the media.

“They need to be assessing the narrative landscape, identifying the pitfalls, how ideas are being weaponized, how we’re telling powerful materially grounded stories that are future looking and not just reactionary,” she said.

Sean Gibbons, president of the Communications Network, a group of social sector communications professionals, agreed. In an essay he posted on LinkedIn, Gibbons said public and media relations professionals are “no longer just storytellers. We are stewards of the truth.”

As such, Gibbons writes that the communications professionals at nonprofits are responsible for tracking narrative environments and preparing leaders for how and when to speak out. “Knowing when to respond, when to add context, and when restraint serves the truth better than noise,” he says.

But for racial justice nonprofits with a clear mission, determining when restraint is needed can be tricky.

Coordinate With Partners

For Ade Oguntoye, founder of the Imperative Fund, an Atlanta grant maker, restraint is sometimes necessary out of respect for peers who may not want to be as public about their work.  

Some partners, he says, have historically co-funded programs with the Imperative Fund that focus on increasing employment opportunities for Black people. But now they have told Oguntoye they prefer to couch their program descriptions differently by emphasizing “skill based training” without reference to race.

The Imperative Fund hasn’t changed how it describes its work, Oguntoye said, but the new media environment has forced him to coordinate with co-funders and grantees who may have a different plan. That’s a big change from a typical grant making PR strategy that spotlights the nonprofits it supports.“We don’t want to be so forthright in our mission that we undermine it,” he said. “We are conscious of making sure that our voice doesn’t hurt other people.We always want to lift up our partners and our grantees. We don’t want to put a target on their back”