High-Touch: How a Progressive Intermediary is Evolving With the Times

When the Proteus Fund came into being in 1994, the world of funding intermediaries was far less crowded than it is today. Sure, donors have collaborated through community foundations, giving circles and the like for decades. But with founding president Meg Gage at the helm, Proteus helped pioneer the brand of collaborative giving that has grown so vital to today’s resurgent grassroots left.

The Proteus Fund has awarded over $200 million in grants to further its mission: advancing democracy, human rights and peace. These concerns have become ever more pressing since Donald Trump’s election, and so even as other philanthropic intermediaries have proliferated, Proteus has grown. “We’ve gone from giving $11 million or $12 million to $20 million a year,” said Paul Di Donato, President and CEO. “Almost doubling our grantmaking in size has been an important evolution, tied to what we’re facing in the current period.”

In many ways, the post-2016 surge in progressive giving has played to Proteus’ strengths, including a “high-touch” approach that prizes donor education. Proteus and its peers fill a knowledge gap, helping left-leaning individual donors and small foundations fund movement groups they might otherwise struggle to connect with. Proteus’ different collaborative funds can pool resources in a way that achieves more than scattered gifts, creating a sense of shared purpose among the givers.

Proteus wants to evolve with the times. “We’re trying to broaden our work to cover as many social justice areas as possible without getting so big that we lose our high-touch approach,” Di Donato said. While Proteus has always offered something more comprehensive than your average pass-through entity, it has grown more strategic in its recent efforts to elevate the field of progressive grantmaking.

Building the Progressive Field

At the core of the Proteus Fund are three donor collaboratives: the Piper Fund, the RISE Together Fund and the Rights, Faith and Democracy Collaborative. Each has its own staff and grantmaking strategy. They’re all fairly established, playing important roles in their respective issue areas. Prior to 2016, a fourth, the Civil Marriage Collaborative, backed the movement to achieve marriage equality. Di Donato headed that effort before taking the reins of Proteus as a whole.

The Piper Fund is a stalwart backer of democracy reform. For a long time, Piper focused its funding around issues like electoral ethics, judicial independence and money in politics. Although those priorities remain in place, Piper’s recent work has taken a turn toward racial equity, embracing the idea of a diverse new American majority in need of greater enfranchisement.

Piper’s premise is that a robust movement for democracy requires sustained engagement from diverse communities—and that threats to democracy manifest first as threats to communities of color. New on Piper’s agenda is an initiative to protect the right to protest. That work includes a rapid response fund to counter state-level legislation designed to stymie protest (particularly in the wake of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Native American pipeline protests), as well as a Protest Dissent Network to connect groups tackling the issue.

While Piper has evolved toward racial justice, the RISE Together Fund was there from the start. Proteus founded RISE Together a decade ago as the Security & Rights Collaborative. In the wake of 9/11, early funders like OSF and Atlantic Philanthropies wanted to directly empower leaders from Muslim, Arab and South Asian (MASA) communities to advocate for social change. That was a somewhat novel idea back then.

At the time, the fight against Islamophobia was closely linked to national security debates. That aspect of the collaborative’s work has receded as it shifts toward building MASA communities on the ground. “We realized that we could do better on the race front if RISE Together connected better with other racial justice funders, and we’ve started doing that,” Di Donato said. RISE Together recently debuted a new funding strategy to spur voter engagement in MASA communities after a good showing from MASA candidates in 2018.

The Rights, Faith and Democracy Collaborative is smaller in scale than the first two—it has awarded a total of around $1 million in grants compared to Piper’s $30 million and RISE Together’s $13 million. Rights, Faith and Democracy seeks narrative and policy change around the idea of religious freedom, which conservatives have used to erode the separation of church and state by restricting LGBTQ and reproductive rights.

The Proteus Fund’s high-touch model extends beyond its donor collaboratives to other aspects of its work. Fiscal sponsorship, for instance, has become an increasingly important part of how the organization sees its value add. Proteus’ current fiscal sponsorship roster includes 12 projects, and Di Donato doesn’t see that number exceeding 20.

Field-building is one clear goal of Proteus’ fiscal sponsorship work. The resurrection of the Third Wave Fund is a striking case. This progressive movement funder nearly folded during the Great Recession, only surviving as a fiscally sponsored project at Proteus. From a budgetary low point, Third Wave has remade itself into an energetic movement builder with a staff of nine, dedicated to bringing unheard voices into the philanthropic fold. Proteus also fiscally sponsors two funder affinity groups, the Human Rights Funders Network and Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights.

In addition to fiscal sponsorship, Proteus hosts donor-advised funds and offers management services to family foundations. It also administers grantmaking from the Colombe Peace Foundation, aimed at curtailing American militarism. Finally, Proteus is ramping up 501(c)(4) advocacy spending adjacent to almost all of its c(3) work, disbursing that funding through the Proteus Action League.

Areas of Opportunity

Proteus is focused on the big picture as it embarks on an update of its strategic plan, set to roll out around the middle of next year. Di Donato and the board want to determine which new strategies the organization can take on without sacrificing competency. Reproductive justice is one area where Proteus wants to ramp up. So are racial justice and LGBTQ rights, lenses Proteus wants to apply to all ongoing work.

Toward that intersectional end, Proteus has already heavily embraced narrative change. It maintains a close relationship with ReThink Media, a hybrid advocacy organization and public relations firm that Di Donato described as an offshoot from Proteus and one of its largest grantees. “Often as donors, we can have inaccurate opinions about how much a single grantee can do with a smaller grant,” Di Donato said. “Instead of hoping that individual grantees will do good comms work, ReThink does the messaging and comms work for the issue areas [Piper and RISE Together] work in, and becomes available to other Proteus grantees.” Although Proteus doesn’t require grantees to work with ReThink, Di Donato said many of them have expressed a great need for the expertise it provides.

The same goes for c(4) funding. While we may be on the verge of a long-term shift away from c3 predominance, progressive c(4) advocacy groups are still under-resourced next to their conservative opponents. In this environment, “we’re seeing an increasing recognition that building out c(4) amplifies rather than competes with c(3),” said Jason Franklin, who chairs Proteus’ board of directors. “Some funders are hesitant because they don’t understand the c(4) landscape. An intermediary can provide advice about that.”

An intermediary can also directly channel c(4) funding, which Proteus does through the Proteus Action League. Proteus Action manages parallel c(4) funds that work alongside each of Proteus’ three donor collaboratives. The organization is considering the merits of expanding its c(4) work in its new strategic plan.

A Question of Value

The Proteus Fund is one of the older intermediaries in an increasingly crowded field. It has lived through the rise—and occasional fall—of other philanthropic middlemen. The question of Proteus’ value is much on the minds of its board and staff as more intermediaries crop up to service a burgeoning field of wealthy givers. As Franklin put it, “At Proteus, the constant question is: Is the field better because the money is moving through this collaborative?”

As we’ve discussed in the past, the rise of more middlemen prompts some hard questions. How well do these entities actually advise donors about where to give for greatest impact? And do those services merit the resources these intermediaries invest in their own infrastructure?

Proteus has done a fair amount of soul-searching. “Collaboratives can be a powerful force for advancing the field but can also create a new set of gatekeepers,” Franklin said. “Each [Proteus] collaborative is a key funder in the field it’s in, developing strategies with the field and not for the field.” Franklin also pointed to the “healthy dose of humility” intermediaries can cultivate when they’re playing both roles: funder and fundraiser. “You can’t act in a high-handed way and last as a funder collaborative. You’re ultimately a facilitator and supporter, not somebody who can dictate terms,” he said.

With a staff of three that oversees about $3 million in annual grantmaking, the Johnson Family Foundation is one small funder that sees a lot of value in the high-touch, pooled approach of Proteus’ collaboratives. “In a time where social movements are gaining ground at the local level, Proteus empowers us to understand what’s happening in the areas we care about,” said Executive Director Frank Baiocchi. The Johnson Family Foundation currently funds the Piper Fund and the Rights, Faith and Democracy Collaborative, and previously funded the Civil Marriage Collaborative.

Proteus staffers work directly and extensively with funders. That means it supports fewer efforts than other progressive intermediaries like Tides or NEO Philanthropy. The contrast is even larger with sprawling DAF sponsors like Fidelity Charitable. But Proteus still hosts donor-advised funds, and it’s worth gauging its stance on transparency. “Part of what Piper’s about is getting money out of politics, and we’re not going to isolate that value,” Di Donato said. At the same time, he indicated that “we worry about grantee safety in a time when people are weaponizing their positions,” and that if the law allows DAFs to exist without disclosing their grantees, “we’re not going to set a different standard than our peers.”

Passivity Into Action

Those shades of grey are a window into the complexity of Proteus’ work. Philanthropy as an enterprise is getting more sophisticated and multifaceted these days, and that’s one reason why the ranks of intermediaries and advisors are swelling. At the same time, complexity can be a crutch. Even if we set aside the thickets of reportage and endless “best practices” the nonprofit world seems to run on, it can be easy for organizations to fall into “analysis paralysis” when they’re seeking comprehensive change.

Knowledge-building and theories of change are all well and good, but in the end, philanthropy cannot be a purely academic exercise. The folks at Proteus appear to be aware of that. “Intermediaries tend to be passive by nature, waiting for projects and funders. We want to turn that on its head,” Di Donato said. “We’re asking: which issues do we feel are so core to our mission that we should go out and make that work happen?” As the Piper Fund’s new right-to-protest grants attest, part of that is finding and filling gaps in the field, not just gaps in funding.

Baiocchi of the Johnson Family Foundation has been pleased with Proteus’ action-oriented stance, especially following the 2016 election. “The current climate has empowered the staff of Proteus to know we need to keep moving things toward action,” he said. Maintaining that momentum will be crucial as more new donors come into the picture looking for ways to make their money count.

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